We’ve been long time fans of local festival Bingley Music Live in August and we are super excited to announce that we are hosting the third stage there with Jam On Top.  Jam on Top provide great local rehearsal space and recording studios for bands and are an asset to the Bradford music scene.

This stage will give local bands a chance to play the festival, give everyone a chance to network, get new gigs and find out what there is to offer for musicians in the Bradford area.  It’s also an opportunity for us to all show how good our local bands are and hopefully encourage people near and far to go see more bands in the area throughout the year.

We’re all big local gig attenders at Musicians Centre and some gigs are as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable than going to see a big touring “signed” band.  We’re confident our stage will be entertaining for all and are looking foward to helping introduce some of the amazing talent we have in Bradford to a wider audience.

We’ll be on the right hand side of the stage as you look at it, check us on the Bingley Music Live map.  If you’re interested in playing get signed up on our website - musicianscentre.com/bml

Not much time to say more, but check out all the events booked on the Exchange Arts website including the opening day of April 7th where we have a ton of exciting things going on.  In the mean time, here’s some new photos of our progress.

Acoustic section done

Everyone at Musicians Centre has been grafting hard on the Big Move. All the walls in the shop showroom area have been pulled down, false ceiling pulled down, ceiling holes filled sanded and painted and work is just about finished on the wood acoustic guitar wall.

Upstairs there has been lots of wall paper stripping, lesson rooms built and some re-plastering work done. On top of this we have removed about 30 cast iron radiators somehow while keeping our backs uninjured (14 stone radiators are not easy to move down stairs).

In the Exchange Arts Centre venue the stage and dressing rooms structure is now built, bar area prepped and some undercoating done. The electrician has been booked, lighting prepped and the small demo stage in the shop showroom is nearly finished.

The acoustic guitar wall is made up from 1958 bailey bridge wood and each piece had to be sanded and then stapled and glued to struts across the acoustic guitar wall section 12 times. A long arduous task but we are chuffed with the end result. There are sections still to be treated with a Hollywood technique of wire wool and white vinegar solution to give them a bit more of an aged look. The room we have made will give people a quieter area to try our our acoustic guitars and gives us much more wall space to hang guitars.

We have now set the date of opening on April the 7th with a big open launch day. You are all very welcome to come along, have a chat and a latte (or tea). We have exciting things in store for the opening!

We have been visited by local newspaper Keighley News who we’re excited about what we have planned and there’s talk of a film club being set up in the Exchange Arts Centre venue. The Exchange Arts Centre website is now up too and acts are getting booked in thick and fast.

We are on schedule for the April opening and are looking forward to getting the Corner House building used again by Keighley’s musical community.

How did you spend your Christmas?  We mostly spent ours ripping down walls and false ceilings and preparing our new premises for the Keighley music store on Russell Street.   We have bought the Old Labour Exchange in Keighley because, as anyone who has visited our Keighley shop in the past year will know, we have vastly out grown the current premises and we needed more room for all our ideas.

What can you expect?  Well, we will have a huge show room four times bigger than what we currently have, new bigger lesson rooms for our music tuition and on the same premises is the new Exchange Arts Centre, a venue which will host music and arts events not just by ourselves but for local and national bands, theatre groups, workshops and much more.

We’re very excited about what we have in store for you and can’t wait to show all our pupils, customers and teachers the new building which should be completed at the end of March.  In the mean time here are a few photos of ongoing works which may give you a rough idea of what is coming and how much work we have left to do!

Stadivarius Copy

We found an article recently about building a new copy of a Stradivarius violin using a CAT scanner and replicating the densities on 3D CAD software and then replicating the build into a brand new violin.

While this is an amazing use of technology and impressive in concept, it threw up a few questions to us in the wider area of musical instrument manufacturing.  While throughout the years we have certainly seen high points (and low points) in terms of classic design and workmanship, this direction gives the impression that the best instruments have already been made.

We can’t get over the fact that this outlook is pessimistic at best and anti-innovative at worst.  Why do we have to keep going back and trying to replicate the past when it comes to instruments?  Why not itterate and innovate so that people in 100 years will be looking back at us and saying, “Wow, they made amazing progress in the early 2000s when it came to amazing instruments.”

Some companies are better at this than others.  Yamaha guitars for example constantly itterate and improve their designs.  Listening to people who give them feedback and keeping an eye on returns and where the weak points in their products are and fixing them in the next version.  They should be applauded for this, Yamaha are one of the few companies that do improve dramatically model on model.  Tanglewood Guitars are another company that we have found listen to us and while the process of improving a musical instrument product is not a quick one it is going in the correct direction.

While it is a slow process in physical goods, if you look towards the software technology  sector where software is updated sometimes daily, you can see how companies compete at such a rate that consumers are getting an often amazing and constantly improving product.

Always innovating and improving, Yamaha fit a System 54 pickup on the 700 series which used a transducer circle underneath the bridge part of the guitar instead of a normal piezo under saddle pickup.  The result is a clear and realistic plugged in tone you only hear from the Yamaha APX and CPX range.

The APX500 II, CPX500 II and APX700 II are available on-line and at Musicians Centre Keighley.

The six newly formed bands each choose a classic rock tune they wanted to perform such as ‘Highway To Hell’, ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’ after only five hours of intensive training the children learnt essential skills needed to be in a band such as working as a team, performance, song structure and most importantly how to keep it together when things go wrong.

Seeing the children come from starting with their head low, a bit unsure, apprehensive and nervous about meeting new people to rocking out on stage, singing and performing was great to see.

Seeing them leave with new friends and in some cases newly formed bands really makes all the hard work worthwhile. I don’t think anybody left the concert in any doubt that there will be some new rockstars coming out of Keighley!

The singing group idea has been turned into a regular weekly group starting at the end of September.  Find out details of how to try it for free in our music lessons section.  Plans are afoot for another Rockband Camp too in the near future.  In the mean time we wish all our band members and performers well and hope they all keep playing.

Photography © 2011 Tim Rickaby (www.timrickaby.com)

This is the first year of the London Acoustic Guitar Show and we have to say it was definitely a big success.  All the big hitters of the acoustic world were there, Tanglewood, Freshman, Yamaha, Martin & Co. as well as a few smaller distributors with some outstanding new products.  We caught up with Michael Sanden along the way and had a great chat comparing his designed Tanglewood MasterDesign guitars compared to his own Sanden Acoustic guitars.

We made an intro video with a quick overview of what we saw, click on the links within the video for a more indepth video of each thing we saw.

Here’s the rest of the videos if you want to get straight stuck into each individual one.

Martin & Co. D-28 Elvis Presley

Tanglewood Roadster Acoustics

Martin & Co. Westside Custom 16 Series

Tanglewood TVC-KOA-C and Tanglewood T-6 Acoustic Amplifier

Freshman FA600 Acoustic Guitar Review

Freshman Apollo 4 Review

Michael Sanden Interview About Tanglewood MasterDesign

Guitar Mini Valet Service

Lovely phone call from a gentleman who recently had a “Mini Valet” done on his guitar.  That is, we took his guitar, ‘fed’ and cleaned the fretboard with lemon oil, polished the frets to a shine, restrung it, tweaked the neck and adjusted the pickup heights.  In this case the guitar is probably playing the best it ever has in it’s entire life.

He’s amazed at how different it is to play and is now learning in leaps and bounds compared to what he was managing to learn when the neck was bent and string height far far too high.  Convinced he’d got a different guitar back the gentleman had progressed more in a week from getting back his valeted guitar than he had six months from buying it new.

It’s something that concerns us this, either finding a guitar in a skip or buying one at what seems like an absolute bargain online from disreputable suppliers who don’t check and set up guitars before they send them out and then hoping to learn the basics before upgrading.  Guitars acquired like this usually have a curved neck which needs a truss rod adjustment, often has a badly cut nut and you can forget about any intonation accuracy.

The ‘Mini Valet’ service we offer can be seen as one down from a full setup.  If we think you’re guitar would benefit from a full setup we will say so but the aim of the mini valet is to get your guitar playable and in general good shape.  All for £10 and the cost of the strings.

Contact Musicians Centre Bradford on 01274 739754 or Musicians Centre Keighley on 01274 739754 to ask more questions or just bring your guitar in to get it ship shape and playable again.

Rock Band Camp Survivors - 'GTG'

We’re half way through our Rock Band Camp summer school project and we have two newly formed bands in the bag now, ‘Phantoms of Rock’ and ‘GTG’.  The intensive courses which run every weekday morning for one week are a superb opportunity for those taking part to understand the difference between being able to play an instrument well and being able to play with other musicians well.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing at home only for one’s pleasure and development, but our music teachers have consistently said many of their pupils would benefit hugely from playing in a band environment with other like minded musicians.

The actual development and change we’ve seen in Rock Band Camp attendees so far has been dramatic.  Most start with head low, a bit unsure, apprehensive and nervous about meeting new people and playing their instrument.  At the end of the week though, the boost in confidence is notable and a real change from being good players to really good performers!  In some cases strong personalities that could perhaps in some situations lead to conflict are focused on the goal in hand and the instant reward achieved by channeling all that energy into working with other people for a greater goal really makes a difference.

Rock Band Camp Survivors - 'Phantoms of Rock'

Our aim of the Rock Band Camps is to give young musicians a structure on how to form a band, how to learn songs and how to create a performance.  We genuinely think playing music with others is a therapeutic and helpful mechanism to realise goals can be achieved and even if it doesn’t become a full time career for everyone, the benefits working with peers towards a common goal are an important life lesson.

The Rock Band Camp and Glee Club Showcase will be at Keighley’s New Variety Club on the 4th of September, tickets are available at Musicians Centre Keighley for £3 or are available on the door at no extra cost.

They do state festivals are still ‘performing strongly’ whilst arenas and mid sized venues (like Leeds O2 Academy) ‘held up’. They stated “It feels as though the economic downturn has caught up with the live music industry, and promoters and bands alike have responded accordingly.”

We here at the Musicians Centre exclusively  spoke to Ben Patashnik Rock Sound‘s Editor who stated when asked if he felt that gig attendances had declined over the last year responding ‘no, not really to be honest’. This feeling however is not entirely shared with Kate Welham who writes for NME.com said ‘ I think probably because people are too skint to just go to a random gig these days.. I mean, I’ve had fewer people saying ‘come to this gig with me on Tuesday’. Though after further discussion we agreed the popular name and nostaglia bands are holding up where as the up and coming new acts are suffering due to the economic conditions  if you know you like the band already
you’ll go but you won’t pay £3 in and buy a few drinks just because you’re bored’.

With local music festivals such as Beatherder and Aire Do doing well considering the current conditions, it seems that even in this time people still want to hear great guitar music.. Its good to know the little stars we’ve been working with at our Rock Band Camps will still have crowds to play to when the are ready to step into the outside world.