Transit of Venus

Egnater Renegade 212 65W 2×12 Tube Combo Amp

Nov 292010

Jansens recently asked me to pick an amp from their store to review. Having an acoustic show or two coming up I thought I’d go for something I could use for acoustic as well as electric. I picked out the Egnater Renegade from the website initially because I thought it had a cool sounding name. Renegade. I’d play through an amp called ‘Renegade’. It’d be badass.

The Egnater Renegade 212 is a 65 watt combo with two different 12” Celestion speakers in the cab (a vintage 30 and a custom voiced Elite-80), two independent channels, 6 12AX7s in the pre-amp, 2 6L6 and 2 EL34 tubes in the power amp. It’s a smooth and sexy hunk of amp in cream and charcoal, with the many controls hidden away on top rather than spoiling the front panel.

I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised with the Renegades versatility. I could see myself covering a lot of bases with this amp, especially thanks to the dial that allows you to blend and choose between cool 6L6’s and warm creamy EL34 tubes on each of the two channels.

I also especially liked the ability to switch between 65 watts and 15 watts, allowing you to get a good sound out of it in the bedroom/lounge as well as on stage.

The clean sound was clear enough to run my acoustic through (which I did at a gig and had no problems), and both channels sounded amazing back home with a Tele and pretty darn nice with my old Ibanez Roadster. The reverb is really natural sounding. Overall my impressions were of a warm sweet beautiful sounding amp that was probably a bit out of my price range. Turns out I was wrong, at $3000* it’s ridiculously affordable considering how good it sounds.

So here I am singing the praises of the Renegade, you may be wondering what’s in it for me? Not a free amp sadly. So here are the things I didn’t like about the amp:

The first I should probably be a little embarrassed to confess. I wasn’t able to bring it to my one of my gigs because I couldn’t get it down the stairs of my flat on my own. It was just too darn heavy.** (Admittedly if I actually owned the amp I would have bumped and slid it down without worrying about a few knocks…)

The second thing, the noisy cooling fan got on my nerves a little.

The third thing, the colour. I would have preferred it in pink. Bogans might prefer it in black, but they might want something a bit more ‘metal’ in the first place. It’s hard to imagine someone playing Metallica through this, though I did try it and it sounded legit.

I give the Egnater Renegade 212 four and a half cookies out of five cookies. It’s sound quality, versatility and affordability are fantastic. It has a cool name. Someone should buy me one for my birthday.

*Apparently on special for $2500 at the moment…

** I have since been informed it comes with wheels!

Thats a lovely story – Mile High Winter Tour

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Sep 052010

Last week I had a bit of spare time on my hands so decided to gate-crash the last leg of Mile High’s winter tour. My BFF Michelle was also going, as Rock Factory soundie as well as Gods of Nothing bass player. So all together we had team Rock Factory who are 2/3rds of the G.O.N. + David Bane on drums, + the Mile High boys + me as roadie/guitar-tech/backing-vocals/anything-but-a-groupie.

In the interests of “what goes on tour stays on tour” I wont describe the smell of boy-farts experienced in the van on the trip home. Or what was drawn on the van windows in the frost. Or who drooled on themselves when they fell asleep in the van.

DAY 1

We took down two vans, Michelle and I and Mile High (minus Kitty and Q-slop) in one, and John and Mark in the other. We left on tuesday morning, the first show being in Turoa Lodge Tuesday night. We stopped on the way to view the magnificent feat of engineering that is the thing where a train does some kind of loopty loop. There is a model of this shown below. Which is all I could really see of this world famous feat of spectacular railway engineering.

Much more interesting was the giant driftwood sculpture of a t-rex. All the more impressive for being so far from the beach! That’s Ditty standing next to it btw. He is Mile Highs singer.

There were also some horses in a paddock. We lured them close to the fence with handfuls of grass and patted them. I like horses. This is Michelle feeding a horse!

It was a pretty long trip. Kevin entertained us by making fart noises on his iPhone over the van speakers. Ditty entertained us with lollies. I got really excited about seeing cows and sheep and trees and things. Ooooh and baby lambies! Michelle had a little nap.

Eventually we got to our destination, Turoa Lodge. I don’t know which to mention first. The roaring fire, the mysterious dance floor stripper pole, the several deers heads and what could have possibly been a mooses head over the door… Crazy yet awesome.

The Gods of Nothing kicked off the first set. They gig pretty rarely so if you ever get the opportunity to see them play make sure you do. Great songs and a kick-ass live show. Husband and wife front-team Mark and Michelle are adorable and entertaining on stage together. I wouldn’t change a thing about this band!

Mile High played next. By this time my camera was dying so I used Sloppy-Q’s one which worked much better than my dying one. Mile Highs show was good fun, everyone was like, dancing and stuff and apparently a fight broke out thanks to someone dancing too hard with their elbow and someone was thrown out and it was all very rock n roll and I didn’t see anything because I may or may not have been singing backing vocals at the time or perhaps was in the bathroom.

DAY 2

The next day we went… TO THE SNOW!!!

Most of ‘the boys’ went and almost repeatedly killed themselves with skiing and snowboarding activities. There are some videos on facebook. It doesn’t look like nearly as much fun as SNOW BALL FIGHTS and SNOW SCULPTING! Which is what Michelle and Ditty and I did and it was totally the best day ever! Actually Michelle tried to ski a bit (traitor).

Later we retired to a spa and dinner and an early night. Oh and rolling up beer soaked microphone leads that were so sticky broken glass had stuck to them in places. Epic.

DAY 3

Mile High were supposed to play up Whakapapa but thanks to the weather going all icky it was cancelled just as one van arrived, and while van 2 awaited chains at the bottom of the mountain. While we were up there I took this picture and drank a mochachino.

Oh yeah, and I’m not actually sure which day this happened, but I was astounded to see these milkshake cups (as modelled by John) still exist!

Also I had a ‘traditional New Zealand breakfast’ of Fish and Eggs. It didn’t taste nearly as bad as it looks haha. I’m sorry, I should save my breakfast stories for twitter, but what the hell. It’s my blog so I can put in it whatever I like so nyer nyer nyer!

Mile High and the G.O.N. played a gig later that night at the National Park Hotel. It went off something wicked. What a night. Must use pictures stolen from facebook to describe. (I took these on Quintos camera so I don’t feel bad about stealing them)

Kevin joins the table dancers guitar and all

I may have got a bit carried away with the slow-shutter-speed thing hehe so much PINK!

There were even more backing vocalists later, but I didn’t get pics because I was up there singing too!

It was Kitty’s last gig with the band for six months so naturally he was forced to don a pink dress partway through the gig. OK maybe this pic is from the other gig. But if you’re leaving the band there is no limit to the amount of times you must wear pink.

We headed back to Aucklandtown the next morning, some of us more hungover than others. It was a great trip, thanks heaps Mile High and The Rock Factory and the Gods of Nothing for letting me come along, I hope I was more help than hinderance. And thanks Turoa Lodge and National Park Hotel and Fallout Festival!

LINKS:

MILE HIGH: www.milehighband.com

THE ROCK FACTORY: www.therockfactory.net

FALLOUT FESTIVAL: www.falloutfestival.co.nz

There and back again

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Aug 292010

Maybe my height without heels is a little hobbitish, but I don’t have giant hairy feet. Nevertheless I recently embarked on a grand adventure like the ones famously traveled by Bilbo and more recently Frodo.

At the end of last year, as many of you know, I went to Malaysia. Malaysia is very different from New Zealand. You can buy Milo in a can and it’s bloody good! It’s very very hot all the time, there are mosquitos that can allegedly kill you. It rains every afternoon at 4:30pm. Anyway I had a series of fabulous adventures and am now back safe and sound in New Zealand, sitting about the fire telling tales of The Land where Winter Never Comes.

On my journey to there and back again, I met lovely people and made friends I will never forget. I played a gig or two or three. I read a lot of books, spent a lot of time on the train, ate a lot of new foods, wrote a lot of new songs. I threw a magic ring into a volcano and defeated a dark lord.

THE VELVET ACES

I met Moe through Twitter when I’d been in Malaysia a little while.

He was looking for a guitarist and I was looking for a band, so after texts and tweets we organised an In Real Life meeting at Starbucks. Soon there were jams and auditions and hanging-outs and shisha and The Velvet Aces began to take shape.

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And like all bands, the band involved not just the people who happened to play the musical instruments in it but a group of friends and supporters and hangers on who all made up the musical family that had formed around Moe the nucleolus.

TRANSIT OF VENUS

And through playing in the Velvet Aces I became friends with Riz the other guitarist…

And he and I ended up jamming on some of the Transit of Venus music together with other friends Henry and Ash.

Unfortunately I had to leave before we got to play any gigs together, apart from that one time Riz and I hit an open mic night, which doesn’t really count does it? haha

But I just remembered ‘that one time’ I played some Transit of Venus songs with Ziam and crew at No Black Tie That was when I first got to Malaysia.

BINTANG

And then there was the time Moe and Sashi got me to play session guitar on their song Bintang, which was then nominated for an AVIMA award for the acoustic version. That was pretty cool I thought!

NEW ZEALAND

I arrived back home on Tuesday, started looking for jobs and flats and all those things one needs to survive. I’m really glad to be back, though I’m going to miss a lot of things about Malaysia. Even though I spent half my time in Malaysia missing so many things about New Zealand! Mostly people are the things I miss, and I’m just so thankful that the internet exists and makes it easy to keep in touch with everyone!

(For those of you who want to know the gossip first-hand, long story short I moved to Malaysia for my boyfriends job and now I am back in New Zealand because our relationship hit some difficulties. But I’m ok, he’s ok, we’re still friends and all that so no need at all to look all worried and pat me on the head when you see me!)

Looking forward to getting back into the music thing here in New Zealand, got a couple of projects I’m working on, and a concept album I’m planning for release in conjunction with the june 2012 astronomical event – the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun.

Well, that’s about all I can be bothered writing right now. If I don’t update regularly enough feel free to nag me about it

Hope this finds you well,

<3 K xxx

p.s. check out The Velvet Aces http://www.myspace.com/thevelvetacesonline

Le Gentil

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Jul 012010

As you may or may not know, a Transit of Venus is one of the rarest predictable astronomical phenomena. It is when the planet Venus passes directly inline between the earth and the sun, and can be seen silhouetted against the sun as it passes in front of it. This doesn’t happen often, it happened in 2004 and will again in 2012 for the last time during our foreseeable lifetimes. Transits of Venus previous to these were in 1882 and 1874, 1769 and 1761 etc.

The transits that occurred in the 1700′s were of great scientific interest at the time, as it had been proposed that by measuring these transits from different points on the earth and throwing a bunch of trigonometry at the parallax, the distance from the earth to the sun could be calculated accurately.

Guillaume Le Gentil was a french astronomer, one of many adventurers who set off around the world to observe the transit of Venus and take the necessary measurements. He began his journey heading towards a french colony in India, but on his way war broke out between England and France, eventuating in the English occupation of the colony he was headed for and the boat he was on doing a u-turn. He was at sea when the transit occurred and the rocking of the boat made it impossible for him to take the measurements with any degree of accuracy.

So Le Gentil decided since he had already come so far (I think he was somewhere in the southwest indian ocean) he may as well stay and observe the next Transit eight years later. He kept himself busy mapping the coast of Madagascar and decided he would go to the Philippines to for the next transit. However when he got to the Philippines he had trouble with the Spanish, so decided to return to the colony he had originally planned on watching the first transit from in India, Pondicherry. Which by this time was again occupied by the french. Arriving more than a year in advance he built himself an observatory in preparation for the big day.

On the eagerly anticipated day of the second transit, the day he’d been waiting for eight years for… the sky was overcast. Le Gentil couldn’t see a thing. He had failed.

But his bad luck didn’t end there, between dysentery and his ship being driven off course in a massive storm it took him two years to get home to paris. And when he did get home after an absence of eleven years in total, it was only to discover he’d been declared LEGALLY DEAD, his estate divided between his relatives, his wife married to someone else.

It’s a sad story, a play has been written about it, and an opera. And the other day I wrote lyrics about it from the perspective of his poor wife. Can you imagine what it must have been like for her? Husband decides not to stay out a few hours after work for drinks without saying anything, but to stay out 8 or so years after work without a word! Maybe he’d tried to write, I can’t imagine it being easy to get letters across the world in those days. But a letter than doesn’t reach you is as good as no letter at all.

I will give you some news about the band soon! I do actually have news, I’m just… waiting.

Talk soon <3 K xxx

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Jun 022010

It has come to my attention, (when I received the automated mailing list message compiled from my RSS feeds (which I thought I had correctly cancelled but I had in fact failed to do so)) that I only blogged ONCE last month. Which was May NZ Music Month and I didn’t even mention any New Zealand Music in that blog. Shame on me!

I am currently sitting outside starbucks at Sentral Stesen (which I think is Malaysian for Central Station ). Starbucks isn’t open yet, but their wi-fi is on so yay! I’m waiting for my sister to arrive from the airport, she is visiting Kuala Lumpur from Melbourne and doing some traveling round Asia. Lucky her!

Had a bit of a quiet month with music. Pretty much now have a band to play some Transit of Venus music. Riz on guitar, Henry on bass and Ash on drums. Had a couple of practices, looking forward to hopefully playing some gigs soon! Starting to get frustrated with not having played live in so long.

Alright, starbucks is now open, time to go get me an ORANGE-MOCHA-FRAPPECINO!

AIM awards

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May 032010

Well, sometime on the weekend I found out I had a couple of tickets to the AIM awards. This is apparently the Malaysian equivalent of the Grammy’s in America, though not having ever been to the Grammy’s I really can’t confirm if this is true or not.

But on the day of the awards (Sunday) Matt (my boyfriend/fiance) had come down with a cold or flu. “Go on without me” he said as he lay dying on the couch. I didn’t want to go by myself. I tried to get a last minute arm-candy replacement, but to no avail.

I knew there would be a few people there that I knew so eventually I decided to woman up and go on my own. Matt being a nice boy offered to drop me at the awards, on the condition he didn’t have to change out of his pyjamas. I agreed, and then we spent an hour driving round lost, me flattening my phone battery looking up maps, at one stage we accidentally ended up on a motorway that took us right back where we started from. Scary. The distance from our place to PWTC where the awards were held was 6.5kms. If I wasn’t wearing high heels I could have walked there within that amount of time! Though as you will see, I am quite capable of also being lost on foot. Dropped off outside PWTC I looked for the hotel next door where I was to meet my friends. Cue the frantic phone calls… “I don’t know where I am!” I cried. Lost in a giant building, I tried asking some people for directions. Just my luck I couldn’t seem to find anyone who spoke english. De mana ka hotel?” I said, hoping that meant where is the hotel. The reply I didn’t understand, I picked out one word ‘kiri’, which means left. “Kiri?” I asked pointing, the reply included nodding and further instructions which I didn’t understand. Needless to say, with much exasperated traipsing about in high heels and confusing conversations, I never did find the hotel but eventually arranged to meet my friends at the start of the red carpet.

I was very relieved when Julian and Moe spotted me. A group of us did the red carpet walk of shame together, I was quite proud of myself for not falling over, though I did have the giggles and felt a little silly. I’m no good with cameras at the best of times, and there were a lot of cameras going off in everyones faces. I spotted a couple more friends just ahead of us so was happy to think I wasn’t going to be here all along.

But alas, the allocated seating! I was to sit on my own after all. But thats ok, these things happen. And so… the awards ceremony!

It began with something said in Malay, possibly regarding the turning of cellphones onto silent, and only going to the toilet during the commercial breaks. Then they had the audience clap several times, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was just practice. Finally something interesting began to happen, and two people came and sang a hilarious operatic song. I could tell it was hilarious by the use of ‘humorous eyebrows’ which naturally transcend all language barriers.

There were a lot of performances performed, and a lot of awards awarded. I understood half of what was going on, but I didn’t get any of the jokes told by the hosts, which some people said were the best part of the show. However I enjoyed the music a lot, I even enjoyed the synchronised dancing hehe

My favourite performance of the night was the song Selamat Malam, it not only had guitars in it (in comparison to all the backing track stuff I was very excited about actual Live Instruments) but it also had a violin solo and was generally a pretty rockin yet sad sounding passionate song. Liked it a lot, it was very moving. Not speaking malay it’s cool to realise how music transcends the language barriers (yes just like humorous eyebrows) and you can get an idea of the emotions of the songs without understanding a word.

I also liked Yunas performance, I don’t know the name of the song sorry. And there was a girl with a Ukulele who sang this cool upbeat song with snatches of english throughout. Sorry I can’t remember the name of that song either. I would do some research if I wasn’t writing this offline because my INTERNET IS NOT WORKINGING!!!

Oh I feel like a moron now, I just remembered I have a program from the night lying around so I can look it up without even using the internet at all…

Well, went and found the program but it’s pretty much all in Malay and I think it’s more about the awards than the performances so I’m just as much in the dark as I was 5 minutes ago.

I think it’s terrible that I can tell you more about getting lost on the way to the awards than I can about the awards themselves, but I guess thats what you get when you’re a dumb blonde trying to follow something in a language she doesn’t understand.

Anyway I’ve spent today chopping up Nosferatu into songs to send out to ye olde mailing list. Took a while to decide if I was going to just send out the bits with the least mistakes, or send out the whole thing. Eventually decided to send the whole lot warts and all. It’s a live performance, theres supposed to be mistakes in it. They add character and um… make it more REAL.

And when I’ve fixed my internet, and sent it out, I’m going to upload this little blog, and then NEVER SPEAK OF NOSFERATU AGAIN!

Thank you and goodnight.

Terima kasih dan selamat malam.

<3 K xxx

p.s. Here are some pictures that I like, totally stole off Julians facebook because I forgot my camera and my phone was practically dead.

Left to Right: Julian Lee, Me, Moe Nasrul and Iz.

Rock is dead. And we are rock n roll zombie corpses!

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Apr 302010

I was rambling on something last night about Rock being dead (you should have heard the array of mindnumbing soulless nothings being played on every radio station during the drive home). And so Rock being dead, us Rockers must be some kind of zombies or reanimated corpses. The undead. And then today I remembered this picture EJ Tapnio had drawn last year. Now I get it! Hehehe

RSS feed moved – testing one two…

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Apr 262010

Heya, ignore this message… Have moved the rss feed for the blog to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TransitOfVenus so just testing to see it all still works and still automatically updates the facebook page and that kinda thing.

<3 K xxx

Really short update!

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Apr 182010

Had a ToV jam on friday. Short a bass player, I played that impossible instrument, and got little electric shocks whenever my lips brushed the microphone. Don’t want to say too much in these early days, I’ll just say things are looking to go well and I’m dying to play some gigs soon! Will keep you posted.

In the mean time… I’d love you to check out this music video, it’s a song called Hard by my friend Plum Green. Go see her and her band play if you’re in NZ. She’s based in Auckland but seems to gig in Welly a bit too.

(If you can’t see the video below, click through to www.transitofvenusproject.com/554)

Vidblog 8

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Apr 082010

Helloooo

Here’s another little video blog with another song. Take special note of the water splash bit between the two parts… I’ve been playing with iMovie *cheesy grin*

Sorry to Mr Anthony that I haven’t yet figured out how to flip the image from mirrored to normal so it doesn’t look like I’m left handed. I’m recording in photobooth from built in webcam, if anyone can tell me how to flip it to record the normal way round, please send me blonde-proof step-by-step instructions. Cheers. I’m still new to this whole macbook thing! It’s funny, when I had a desktop pc I refrained from acquiring any kind of wireless keyboard or mouse because I knew it’d frustrate me whenever I misplaced it. Now with a laptop, I just misplace my whole computer! (And lets not mention phones, keys, keycards, handbags, shoes, ukuleles or anything else that is small enough to be overlooked)

Apart from losing stuff and frantically running around looking for it I’ve been up to a few things. Had some overseas friends come and stay with us so it was a good opportunity to do a few touristy bits and pieces. Drove up to Langkawi for a few days, was nice to get out of the city. Had some classic road trip moments, saw some beautiful scenery, accidentally drove over the bridge to Penang, got a flat tyre, had the best thosai ever in Ipoh (which I always want to spell iPoh), completely forgot where the town was we had dropped the tyre off to get fixed at, and then had a right fun time trying to guess when we went to pick it up on the way back haha!

Langkawi was nice. Touristy but fun. I saw ‘Malaysias Largest Replica Guitar’, I saw a wild otter, I saw the scariest cable car ride I’d ever been on. The cable car takes you up a very steep rise to the top of a hill (can I say mountain? Is it a mountain?) mountain and there are platforms with amazing views of the island and there is a tree top forest walk and of course a tree bottom forest walk (this is where you walk on the ground!). We went on a mangrove boatride which I really enjoyed. Now where I grew up (Tauranga New Zealand) the mangroves don’t grow much past knee high. Maybe waist high if you’ve sunk knee deep in the mud next to them. So I was pretty much blown away by the size of the mangroves, and it was cool to see wild eagles because I’ve never seen eagles before. There was a fish farm on this trip but I’m not going to talk about fish.

We caught the ferry from Langkawi to Satun which is in Thailand just across the border from Malaysia (I am in Malaysia just in case you haven’t been keeping up to date…). Oh and Langkawi is an island off the west side of the northern bit of the Malaysia peninsula. We had hilarious times ordering food in Satun. I know enough Malay to order food but I know absolutely no Thai, I don’t even know the Thai word for rice. The place we ate they didn’t speak english or malay, except the english words ‘chicken’ and ‘cow’. I don’t eat chickens or cows so I was trying to order plain rice and making a complete idiot of myself. That’s the last time I cross the border without taking the appropriate phrase book or iPhone app hehe I’m such a dumbass sometimes

I got a text a couple of days ago from Moe saying that the song ‘Bintang’ that Moe and Loco had recorded together has been nominated for an AVIMA award. (I played session guitar for the track so as well as being excited and proud on Moe and Locos behalf, I also thought it was a sign that I didn’t do a bad job of playing the guitar parts Moe wrote). You can hear the song here…

Well, it’s late, the vidblog is taking forever to upload and I’m being eaten alive by mosquitos so I’m gonna call it a night.

We’ll talk more soon! (And I’ll have some ToV news…)

<3 Kristie xxx

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Transit of Venus

Egnater Renegade 212 65W 2×12 Tube Combo Amp

I give the Egnater Renegade 212 four and a half cookies out of five cookies. It’s sound quality, versatility and affordability are fantastic. It has a cool name. Someone should buy me one for my birthday.

Thats a lovely story – Mile High Winter Tour

There and back again

Le Gentil

AIM awards

Rock is dead. And we are rock n roll zombie corpses!

RSS feed moved – testing one two…

Really short update!

Vidblog 8

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