Stormcellar Band Home Page

Top o' the morning to you, Dear Reader.

We drove up through a lovely clear skied autumn day for a gig at the Kent last night. As predicted, the St Patricks Day revelers were out in force, green shirts, green hats, green ties, you name it.

I had a few moments of bother getting acquainted with the mixing desk last night, but that's to be expected. Still digging the Mix Wizard but I forgot to select groupings for the aux sends or something like that. Anyway, that made me a tad frantic before we started up. Breathe in, breathe out. I am working on reducing my scotch-farmer-with-a-broken-tractor approach to dealing with technology, which occasionally involves some rather choice expletives about plugs,nobs, and last week, my entire computer.  I am aiming to become someone who solves problems with a calm, clear, rational mind, as opposed to Fawlty Towers -esque shaking my fist at the heavens whilst jumping up and down and yelling 'oh thank you so bloody much'

My inability to find the correct button does not actually represent a conspiracy by all electric things to irritate me. Or does it? In fact, my modem is eyeing me very suspiciously right now...

Ah yes, after a quick jaunt into techno paranoia, shout outs to Louise, Ian, Steve and our visitors who last saw us at The Albert in Tamworth.  We had a very enthusiastic crowd of dancers last night. I was checking through my pics and found one videoclip that kind of summed it up. I started filming this just before the break down in Parchment farm.

Another good night at the Kent, cheers to Double Bill for all his help and we look forward to being back at the Kent soon.

And yea verily did he trudge through a field in Agnes Banks, and Lo his socks did filleth with water, and yea did he squelch.

And did Rosie and Mr Wizard say 'Dude, wtf are you doing'  and did MJEB reply "Stand Still' and also 'Start playing something @%&#*'

And did MJEB swear, for his was the slow rendering machine and the many reboots, and did ASUS grant him an improvement when he swapped chipsets, for he that has a wonky processor shall not stray from the path of 32 bits, and let him with a H264 codec transcode before he edits, so sayeth the PC.

A-choo.

An update on our Chart position!  Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory has been on the Australian Blues Roots Charts for 4 months.

Nov #1 - Dec #1 - Jan #5 -Feb #5

Everything's coming in pairs

This months chart: Chart # 38

1//1//RUSSELL MORRIS//Sharkmouth//FanFare Records 

2//3//SUGARCANE COLLINS//Downunder The Blues//Independent // Across The Rhythm Records 

3//2//JACK DERWIN//Covered All In Blue//Independent 

4//13//HAT FITZ & CARA ROBINSON//Wiley Ways//Independent 

5//5//STORMCELLAR//Hired Guns & Borrowed Glory//Independent 

6//6//VARIOUS ARTISTS//Boogie - Australian Blues, R&B & Heavy Rock from the '70's//Festival(Warner Music Australia) 

7//-//MAMA KIN//The Magician's Daughter//MGM Distribution 

8//-//KEITH HALL & PAT DOW WITH SPECTACULAR FEETS//This Kind Of Blue//Independent // Rainbow Recording 

9//7//LUKE ESCOMBE & THE CORPORATION//Mantown//Dri-Clean Only Records 

10//10//ANDREA MARR//Sass & Brass//Independent

Some good company.

ARGH!!! I'm in video clip hell. We're trying to crank out a clip for Texas Rosie and I pushed my PC so hard that it spat the dummy.

Yep, you know you're not messing around  when you have to replace the mobo, CPU and Ram just so you can squeeze a few extra ergs of Computer Juice

Goodbye faithful Gigabyte motherboard, hello Asus MB and an i5 chipset.

The great shame in these delays is that the clip is looking pretty Speccy...

All will be revealed as soon as I can get this editing system to play ball. I think I am dealing with my frustrations rather well.

!*(&(#)&_)*!#_*)@$)&($#@(*)&(@!#_(*#+_($+(+!#!#!!!

Howdy Folks.

Mr Wizard and I spent some time at the Real Men Sing course this week. Those barbershop guys are as serious as Opera folks when it comes to getting their vocals in the right spot, with the right tone at the right time. Barbershop is NOT for wusses

One of the topics that came up this week was the way that our accents and pronunciation affect our singing.

La Proffessore Vicky explained that Australians pronounce words such as 'THE' as 'eh', as in 'egg' and that makes it  harder to sing, as there's no Vowel sound to carry the note.

Ah, I see I gotta explain it a bit more. When we sing, the noise you hear is mostly from the vowel sounds.

You cant get much tone on 'ssssssss' (try it!), but on an EEE, OO, A (AYY), III etc, you can move some air and make the nice noises we call singing.

When we say 'A' (hard  AY not 'ah') there's an EEE sound in there - AAAAyeeee (Tarzan come, elecution lesson start).

What fascinated me about this was the use of 'A', in particular. The Australian accent is a tough beast to master, just ask any of the actors around the world trying to get it right. Smirks ensue when locals hear'em, with a few rare (and impressive) exceptions.

Part of that is because of the Hybridised English/Irish/European/You-name-it and yes, even American influences in our spoken English.

We retain a lot of British quirks in our writing and speech (the use of 'our' endings, colour, favour) and in particular, we retain the Soft 'AH', which renders such words as 'Can't' intor 'Kah-arnt' as opposed to the American style 'Kant'.

Ok, what's so interesting about all this? Well, if you've heard us Aussies sing, you'll notice the shift to hard A sounds, almost Americanised accents, especially in Country and Blues style music. I'm guilty of that myself and it makes me wonder whether we are simply unconsciously imitating our influences (in part) or  whether it's because the Harder Vowel sounds (Cant/KANNT) actually hold the note more favourably than our soft Ah's.

So, to put it in a nutshell, do we sing like Americans because of their Hard A's and our Soft Ahs?

:-)

Cultural cringe be damned, it's all about the vowels!