Hello! Hope that you’ve been able to ease yourself in to 2024 ok so far.
First of all, just in case you missed it, we released a remixed + remastered version of the acoustic Shed Session live session we recorded at The White House in Oxford back in March 2023. It was really great to be able to do some stripped back versions of TM songs with special guests Mila Todd, Octavia Freud and Emma Hunter. It will probably on streaming services at some point but for now you can download it for free from the TM bandcamp page by clicking here or clicking on the image below.
Speaking of the Shed Sessions, make sure you subscribe to the Shed Treasures Podcast. Warren and I have some great guests already booked in for this year, showcasing some of the best acts from in and around Oxford.
If you fancy some more TM style acoustic goodness, Dan and I are doing another acoustic gig at Florence Park Community Centre in Oxford on Friday 19th January alongside Paul Lodge and Helen Pearson. Check out the poster below:
We’ve got some brand new tunes coming out soon which we CAN NOT WAIT to share with you so keep your eyes peeled on the TM socials for more info on that soon.
I have to say I bloody love DJing at the Tap Social Taproom! I’ve been lucky enough to play there a few times now and it’s always a fun place to play, with a great team and an open minded audience that are generally happy to listen to me play what I like and boogie along. A big thank you to Brewers’ Night Off team (aka DJ Bobby Demons and Brewer Bolger) for letting me join in again and to the Shut The Door Kru for showing me how it’s done! My mix was a little rough around the edges but still a fun set to do. Tracklisting below:
The Chemical Brothers – Loops of Fury
Adamski Feat. Seal – Killer
Felix da Housecat – Silver Screen Shower Scene [Emperor Norton]
Orbital – Satan (30 Something Years Later Mix)
TM – Missy vs Elastica (TM Edit)
Spanky Wilson – Sunshine of My Love (XS 2020 edit)
The Prodigy – The Way It Is [Sony]
Vincent Price – Voice-Over Session from Thriller
Aphex Twin – Run Jeremy’s Window Licker (X-Rated Lick)
L-R: Asher Dust, Helena Markou, Me, Half Decent, David Griffiths, Luke Allmond, Dan Clear
As many of you know, I like to collaborate with many different people. I am eternally grateful to all of these people for giving up their time and their energy to help me with my TM tracks and they are pretty much all music makers in their own right (music which I had almost NOTHING to do with!) so as it’s Bandcamp Friday, I thought it would be a good time to get share some links to their music as well.
I will say in advance that I will almost inevitably miss someone out so if I do, apologies in advance!
When I started on this project in December 2021, I had absolutely zero expectations about what it would raise or achieve. If you want the long version of how the whole thing came about, you can read about it on the Orion / Sandman Bandcamp page and listen back to the interview I did with the folks at BBC Introducing in Oxfordshire but the short version is that it was a fairly stupid thing I put together with some amazing people in remembrance of a friend.
Orion / Sandman came out on Friday 2nd December and to date has raised £220 for Katharine House Hospice in Banbury via donations on the bandcamp page and I know some people have donated directly to the hospice which is totally fair enough (and you can also do here). I know there’s a lot going in the world right now but I just want to say how much I appreciate all of the support it has received so far from everyone that has donated, downloaded, commented, retweeted, and featured the project in any way. I also want to say a particular thank you to Gabby and the rest of Dan’s family for all of their support as well.
This project would not have been what it is without the support of all of the musicians that helped out. Please do yourself a favour and check them out via the links below:
As of today, Orion / Sandman is 100% free to download – no email or donation required, just go here to download. I do still ask though that if you can, please continue to donate directly to Katharine House Hospice.
A good shed is a wondrous thing. That’s what I’m told anyway.
A little while back Warren (who’s part of the amazing Cinema Under the Stairs crew) asked if TM would like to have a chat and do a little acoustic session as part of his Podcast “What’s in Your Shed”. As I’ve said many times before I am a guitarist at heart and I’ve played many an open mic in the past but it’s been quite some time since I’ve asked to do an actual Tiger Mendoza acoustic set so I immediately said yes. It would have been wrong to do it solo so I got Dan Clear involved as well (with his fancy jazz guitar no less!) and it was a great excuse to the acoustic session with Mila Todd we’ve been talking about for ages so we got her involved as well.
We had a good rambling chat about all sorts of stuff and did acoustic versions of Prometheus Unbound, Unravel, Oppressor (with Mila on vocals) and a cheeky cover of Sebadoh’s On Fire. Warren’s shed really was an Aladin’s cave of cool stuff from action figures to records to a smoke machine! It really was a lovely evening.
You can listen to the podcast below or your favourite podcast app here. A big than you to Warren, Steve on audio and Alex for taking the pictures.
I posted my little tribute to Vangelis on the blog the other day and someone asked if I could share the Arminator 2 patches I used for the synths. I thought I could do slightly better than that so here’s some info on how I put the track together and the fx and vsts I used.
Recording and Mixing
The goal was to record and mix the whole track very quickly between other things so the track was recorded in about an hour and then mixed in a couple of hours the same night. Normally I’d spend much longer on both but to quote Kenny Beats “Don’t Over Think Shit“.
Everything was recorded and mixed in Ableton Live 11. The drums, pads and bass were programmed using my Arturia MiniLab Mk II and midi for the leads was recorded using a Fishman Tripleplay Connect midi pick up fitted to my Epiphone SG. I then used my Ableton Push to trigger the bass, drum and pad clips live while I recorded the lead synths over the top, pretty much in 1 take.
If you just want to know what my Arminator 2 patches were, here you go (8k zip file)
Although most of Vangelis’ tracks have rhythmic elements they don’t really have drums but in the interest of artistic license and creativity I thought I would add some to my track. I used Ableton’s 808 Core soundpack for the actual drum samples which is my default for most projects and seemed to fit the vibe of the track.
808 Drum Pattern
Processing on the drums was done on in 2 stages. Here’s the EQ and compressor settings I used. Again, nothing crazy.
Drum FX 1
To add a bit more grit and slap back to the drums I used Waves Kramer Master Tape on the main drum bus. Here’s the settings I used.
Kramer Bus settings
Bass
I’ve never really used Armintor 2 for bass before but after doing this little track, I think I will again. It has a great synthy grit to it. I used one of the arpeggiated presets that came with the plugin as the basis but I didn’t like the pattern the plugin’s built in arpeggiator created and the built in echo didn’t work for me either so I got rid them and used an external arpeggiator Max 4 Live midi plugin called Probability Arp from a Cm chord.
Arminator 2 – Arpeggiated Bass
And here are the midi fx settings
Midi FX
As you can see I used Ableton’s utility plugin to reduce the width and reduce the stereo spread of the synth and then fed the lot in to my bass bass which is just a bit more EQ and a bit of side chain compression to duck the bass when the kick hits
Bass Bus Fx
Pads
In a way the Pads were the most straightforward bit. They were created using more Arminator 2 goodness with a bit of EQ. I think I tweaked the attack a bit so that they didn’t fade in quite as slowly but apart from that I played in a Cm chord on my midi controller then duplicated it and moved the bass note to a B for a bit of variation.
Arminator 2 PadsArminator 2 pads fx
As you can see I used Ableton’s built in EQ in L/R mode with slightly different profiles on the left and right to add a bit of stereo separation and width. The channel EQ just had a slight bump in the mids to give them a small boost.
Lead
The lead line was Arminator 2 in mono synth mode with midi coming from my guitar via the midi pickup.
Arminator 2 – lead
Again a bit of EQ add but nothing to shout about really. I sometimes add a bit of saturation to lead lines to help them cut through a mix but as this wasn’t really a dense mix I didn’t need to here.
Noise / FX
In a nod to the pulsing crashing wave noise in Chariots of Fire I add my own pulsing white noise bed under the track. I have no idea how Vangelis did it when he recorded Chariots of Fire but I used Ableton’s Analog Synth with the noise on and the oscillators off to generate the noise. I then used auto EQ and auto pan to create the pulsing effect (which I believe was created by someone manually moving the volume fader up and down in the original). I then added some stock Ableton reverb at the end for a bit more space and bumped up the width a bit in the utilty.
As you can see the mix was set to 100% and I adjusted the sends on the bus channel until I got the vibe I wanted.
On the master channel I added another tape based effect called Tape Cassette 2 from Caelum Audio which adds nice bit of grit and warble to the whole mix in a tape-y way and ups the retro-ness.
Normally I would stop there, check the levels on the master and try to make sure the track peaks at less than 3db then bounce the whole lot down to master separately but in the spirit of seeing what I could do quickly, I just added a copy of Waves’ Infected Mushroom Pusher to the end of the master channel and used the Gentle Giant preset to do a quick and dirty master.
Infected Mushroom Pusher on Master
Wrap up
That’s it. I hope you found it useful. I have never claimed to be an expert in any of this stuff but I hope it inspires some of you do see what you can do. If there are any questions or comments, leave a comment below or feel free to message me on twitter or instagram.
