New recording project - Fonz Fonzarelly

Starting as I mean to go on, I went to Melody Line today for a meeting with Alfons. I know him through Tamira, and he's been to a few of the Jam Sessions. He's a multitalented guitarist/singer/rapper. He's keen to pull together various music endevours into a mix tape that he can promote both virtually and physically to bring his music to wider audiences and hopefully move up to the next level.

He has some backing tracks, but needs my help to play guitar, rap and sing over them and mix and masters the results, so we agree to meet at Wagging Tail Studios(My living room) the next day to see what we can get recorded.

Pastures new

I'm now officially redundant. It's been a tough year so far, mostly spent sitting in an office where everyone knows that there is a big changing coming up. I decided that the sooner I got on with life the better. This equated to stopping working on the 1st of April. My plans??? I don;t really have any. I'm going to finally get rid of time as an excuse for not doing music. When I get bored or the money runs out I'll think of the next stage. This will be the longest period of my life without working since I was about 16.

Couch Jam

Our neigh ours dog is on holiday. I didn't have to babysit this Friday, so I was able to go to the excellent Talia CouchJam. It was the usual wonderfully relaxed affair, with great food and great music. The highlight for me was a medley of impromptu Pearl Jam songs. I was amazed that so many people there knew all the words.

My Dutch Radio Debut

I really made the most of my day off work this week. Tamira has been asked to appear on the radio - Amsterdam FM. She asked me to come along for a little moral support and to add a second guitar to some of her songs.

We were appearing on the 'literature hour'. This meant that several authors had come along to be interviewed about their music and Tamira and I would play songs in between. We started with Randy - one of Tamira's own songs. They asked Tamira about her album etc.

Between songs we had to quietly sit and listen to the interviews. Tamira was pretty worse for wear from the night before, so I think her lasting memory of the evening will be an hour spent stifling coughs. We also played Crazy Train which we'd been practicing.

I think it went pretty well. The hosts were pretty happy.

Crazy Train(Ozzy Osbourne) - Tamira Herrebrugh & Neil McKenzie

Video from yesterday's practice. I managed to work out how to use iMovie to replace the audio in the video with a mixed recording of the audio and then sync them both together.

Thursday Jam with a sore throat

I have almost no voice at the moment, so I did absolutely no singing at the Jam Session. I felt I had to make up for it by making sure that I put in plenty stage-time as a drummer, a Bassist and a guitarist for the night.

My second technorati article - Google Adsense

I was a little frustrated at losing my Google Adsense account for these blogs. After a litle investigation, I discovered that it's not so easy to make money from Google Ads. I wrote a short article about it for Technorati:

http://technorati.com/business/advertising/article/does-anyone-actually-make-money-from/

I'm hoping to put together a bigger article about how to make a little money on the side for music activities from blogs and advertising on your site, but it would appear that it's not as simple as I first thought.