Synoiz Music Blog

Posted 22nd April 2009

Ooh look it's a blog.
I haven't done one of these in a while as I dangerously moved into the world of VBlogging. It hurt.
If you didn't get a chance to see my VBlog on YouTube, you can watch it below.



If you can please vote for it and comment, I must say it was quite weird but is probably more interesting than this outdated text nonsense!

"On The Nightwaves" Music Video
In other news (I've been told off by Lee because apparently I don't mention them enough) one of the side projects I'm in "On The Nightwaves" (Click here for our MySpace) have been shooting a music video for one of our tracks called "Take Me Away".

The shoot was done in a day and is currently off being edited or whatnot, so we should see something from that pretty soon. It's our job to get a "final" mix of the song sorted to use on the video but we're struggling with finding a nice guitar sound, I think we're gonna try swapping the electric for an acoustic.

Ambients Mastering
Finally (For now) I must admit I'm quite excited, on the 5th of May I'm going up to Edinburgh to spend two days mastering the "Ambients" album with my brother Ghostsmut. It'll be quite mad to be fair, finally finishing it all off. And then after that it'll get put on iTunes and stuff. How exciting!
I haven't done this before so I'm expecting it to be quite a tough slog sitting down and changing songs that I'm already so used to. Obviously we'll want to make the tracks as good as they can possibly be, I'll just have to not be so precious about it all!
Currently I'm (slowly) remaking the track "Moonlit Streets" as I just wasn't happy with the quality of the original recording.

Anyway, there's another VBlog coming soon! Stay tuned and keep the messages coming :D

Posted 15th March 2009

Finally, another blog! And yeah I know I said I'd do one on Thursday night the day after the video shoot but I failed. I can't believe how hectic things have been this past week, I barely got any music done even though I was working on Synoiz stuff all week. Does that make sense? :D

Well basically Wednesday was the day from hell. I got up at 9am (not too bad) and had to go to town to pick up things like razor blades (to get a good shave for the video), to pay my rent and to get additional costumes from Primark for the extras. Sadly for whatever reason I have a £300 withdrawl limit on my account so had to go to the bank specifically and get them to give me money over the counter without my chequebook!

All that went quite well until I tried to drop it all off at Ian's where we were meeting later and he wouldn't get out of bed! So I had to carry 4 heavy bags literally across the city to go home get bathed and shaved and then dash through to Newcastle for hairdressing appointment.

This is where it got worst cos during the train journey all I got was txts or calls with bad news, being told that we had lost one of the cars and so I had to organise some other way to get the extras to the set on time, then being told that the lighting rig and second camera weren't actually working and that it was impossible to get new parts for them that day. I ended up getting quite angry about it all (I mean, there's been two months to just plug the stuff in and go "oh it doesn't work, I'll order some parts in before we have to do the shoot..." rather than checking it on the day of shooting).

Then I got off in Newcastle to find that my order of prop masks had not actually
come in on time and that we had to make do with the masks we had. Finally got to the hairdressers and after 40 minutes walked out with exactly the same haircut (and problems) as I walked in with albeit slightly shinier.

There's a lot more I could rant about as much more stuff went wrong but essentially I think that gives off just how stressful the day was for me.

However, when we finally got to the shoot and I met up with the extras and nattered on with them everything kinda fell away and I started enjoying myself again. Here's a video I took on the set:



Ian Lawlor (director) and Mark Liddle (co-directing) really took the reigns well and just fell into their roles and did a wonderful job (Also kudos to Mark Junkin and my mum for providing lifts at the last minute and for being wonderful).

Sadly we didn't manage to get all the extras scenes done in the one night as we'd hoped so we explained to the guy who owns the location and he has mercifully said he'll give us another few days with the location. All the extras had fun and are going to return back and hopefully we'll have it in the can.

The next bit of shooting is actually tonight, and ironically the electricity and gas have gone off in my house so I am unable to bathe or work on music or anything so am staying at a mate's house until I can get in touch with the landlord... Grrrr. In fact I'm typing this on Mr Macbook while lying on a mattress in their spare room. God it's a classy life lol. Let's hope it goes well again today and we get things sorted. Once again thank you to everyone involved, especially the extras for being so wonderful and patient!

(I have loads more to say but this blog has been long enough, I might try and d =o a VBlog in the future if these get any longer!)

See you all later! :D

Posted 11th March 2009

Hey again,
I can't sleep, went to bed at like 1:30am and have just woken up at 8 and unable to get back to sleep so thought I'd double check everything again and post a new blog to wake myself up.
Today is a big day for me as we are filming the main scenes for one of my music videos. Essentially these are the "oooh fancy" bits which we only have one shot at (you'll have to wait for the video to find out why - or join the Facebook group...) and it's been chaos to organise. I have been at work fulltime for the last month or so, so yesterday I was at work till 5, then I had a singing lesson until half 7, then I had to meet with the directors and ended up arguing with them for 2 hours cos I want it done exactly how I imagined it and they think it'll work better this other way etc, they're right I know, however the case I was making was "Well we only have one evening to do all this section, so can't we attempt to film my version of this shot as well just incase we decide to use it in editing after all?" I'd rather not walk away with "Oh yeah it would have been nice to have a shot like that..." bits when we can't shoot them again.
Okay, okay, maybe I'm not the easiest person to work with! Mark Liddle (Co-directing) stated it as "You have your artistic vision and we have our directoral vision". I think they're just happy cos when I'm on set tonight I've said I'll keep quiet and just do as they say, after all they're the directors but I just want to be sure that we're both aiming for the same video here.



Anyway it should be fun, but today is me running around all day buying last-minute props for new extras and then getting things like hair sorted and slightly dolled up, just to get mucked up again for the video, weird how these things work eh? So I start running about in 10 minutes and then finish at 11pm tonight only to go to work again tomorrow at 7, huzzah!

Just to keep you entertained though, here are some photos I forgot about from the location hunting for this, as you can see the place is horrible and looks worse than these pictures can show, but it works so well for the song and video:







New Album Update
Oh and if you're waiting for information on the new album "Soundtract" (new name that has recently been kinda decided on... by me and Anguaji) don't worry, it's coming and I'm working my little rear off on it, but there will be a website made for it so that you can actively participate in the finalising of the songs. All very exciting but that's stuff for another blog methinks.

"The Esoteric Order of Dagon" on OurStage (Again)
This has totally taken me by surprise but I thought, after hitting the top ten with my track in Experimental on OurStage, that this month it would just get thrown to the back of the charts, and that's what happened, it dropped right down to like #200-odd, but now I wake up and check and after a lot of lovely fans voting for it, it's back at #4 lol. How amazing is that? It's cheered me up a bit when all I can think of is work right now.

I'll try to post another blog tomorrow if I'm not too knacked,
Wish me luck!