Griff’s Solo Project : Abumbral

Griff has released his first solo project for a few decades, and for the first time under his own name. It’s a dark-ambient electronic album, inspired by the novels “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, which inspired the movie Blade Runner, and Samuel R Delany’s cult novel “Dhalgren”.

Adumbral is released via all major streaming services, and you can find direct links on his website : http://richardgriffiths.uk/

Goodbye Blogger – Hello WordPress!

Blogger blocked all their faithful customers who have been using FTP
Blogger blocked all their faithful customers who have been using FTP

Following Google’s recent decision to block all Blogger sites using FTP, it hasn’t been possible to update the Reborn blog for some time.  It seems Google/Blogger would much rather force all of their faithful users to move to a blogspot.com sub domain, ruining their pagerank.   We’ve now finished moving the blog from Blogger to a new host – iPage, and also migrated from the Blogger format to a WordPress site.

WordPress is a much better system than Blogger and we’re very happy to finally be using it.

I’ve been bowled away with the support that iPage have given for such a small amount of cash, they’re well worth a look if you’re considering moving web hosts.

There’s going to be serveral albums and gigs coming up, and still the ever looming Reborn albums so keep an eye on the blog for updates.

Gary Numan – Live – O2 – 2009

Gary Numan Live Leeds 2009Went to see him at Leeds O2 Academy last night. In preparation, I bought his latest 3 albums as I only really know his more famous tracks.

I was somewhat disappointed, the production on Exile is terrible, Pure is better, but get;s a bit repetetive. The new album Jagged has excellent production and there’s some good tracks, but again begins to feel a bit repetetive. (sorry to any die hard fans, just my opinion)

So all in all, I was actually a little aprehensive about seeing him live, I was worried it might be dull/repetetive or just generally disappointing.

How wrong was I? It was a GREAT show, massive energy considering it’s mostly downtempo stuff. They kicked off with the synth classics, then 3/4 of the way through, Gary and his front man ditched their synths and strapped on some Gibson Les Pauls to play along to the tracks from his last two albums.

They did all the classic essentials, Cars, Down In The Park and Are Friends Electric, they were all spine-tinglingly good, especially Friends.

If you have the chance to see him on this tour, then I’d say SNAP IT UP! You won’t regret it!

MSSIAH Cubase Device Panel – No Presets

Here is a version of the MSSIAH Cubase Device Panel with the MIDI Presets option removed.

MSSIAH-Monosynth-Panel-V2.0.3.no-presets.xml

I’ve done this because the presets were more of an annoyance than anything else. As previously documented : the speed of the snapshots being transmitted was too fast, meaning that whenever a preset is applied it’s never quite the same twice. What made this unusable is the fact that Cubase resends the preset information whenever you hit “Play” or “Record”. Damn annoying!

I’ve posted up on the Cubase.com forum, but so far not even a reply! I guess no one wants to help. I think I’ll get a proper VSTi builder so I can build in a delay for the CC information.

Watch this space! 🙂