Dav Waldron's Blog

Some of you are aware of a place I call the Bat Cave.  Some of you have even visited!  It’s where J-Cloth practices, or should I say practised…

The lads who own the place are closing the doors.   They’ve apparently been hit with a big rates bill that they just can’t afford and so have decided to wind the company down.  We’re all completely gutted.  The BatCave was a second home to most of us.  The studio bit we spent a long weekend (not to mention a fair whack of money) soundproofing and you could hear nothing outside the building because of that.  We often worked out there will 3 or 4 am and it bothered nobody.

Just last week we had got all our recording setup figured out after several long weeks of tweaking this and that and re-wiring both the sound desk and the ProTools PC attached to the DigiDesign desk.   I will now have to spend Wednesday (when I get back from the States) clearing my gear out of the Cave and trying to squeeze as much as possible into my tiny flat. I have my big amp, my effects board + pedals, 3 guitars, a computer, various books and DVDs (we have an extensive library built up over the last year).   We also have to find place for our PA, 2 bass-bins, 2 speakers, all the cabling that goes with that, 4 MASSIVE stage curtains that are used for sound proofing on the walls, various bits of furniture (tables, desks, couches), a TV, some computer monitors, another 2 PCs, all sorts of stage equipment odds and ends, etc, etc – the list goes on and on…

Miserable doesn’t even begin to come close to describing how I feel about this whole thing, but I’m trying not to let it ruin my holiday.

So if anyone knows of a warehouse/big room somewhere in the Dublin area that we could rent, please let me know.  As it stands, we have 24/7 access to this place which suits us well, so that’d be ideal, but not completely essential.  It has to be somewhere that’ll just be us though.  A shared studio is too expensive and restrictive.

I hate when shit like this happens

Last week, I went with the members of J-Cloth (and a couple of other friends) to see Electric Wizard at Whelans. It’s not the first time I’ve seen the Wizard (5th actually), but it was their first Irish gig and I was damned if I was gonna miss it given it was on around the corner from where I live!

So got to the venue, met the rest of the gang, handed out tickets and got money and all was well. I was expecting a big crowd in the venue, so I said to everyone that we may as well chill in the main bar and catch up with one another as there’d been some time from when some of us had last seen one another. It was particularly great to see Ty cause he lives in Bettystown and doesn’t get into civilisation as often as we or he’d like. I had also heard that the support band, Blood Ceremony weren’t great. This turns out to be not true – we caught the tail end of their set when we wandered in and it was pretty good. Unusual in that the singer was also a flautist and it worked rather well over the very 70′s style heavy rock (Sabbath / Jethro Tull inspired). I’ve been listening to some of their stuff on their MySpace and it’s still decent, but lacks the punch that a live performance delivers.

Blood Ceremony

So after some chat and wandering around (and happily bumping into my mate Alan who’s now playing bass with Natty Wailer he tells me) and asking the J-Cloths what they’d thought of the opening act, Wizard took to the stage. It was a familiar set for anyone who’s seen them recently – they’re a bit lazy in that regards in that they’ve never really changed the set list since they started touring the Witchcult Today album:

• Witchcult Today (Witchcult Today)
• Dunwich (Witchcult Today)
• We Hate You (Dopethrone)
• Satanic Rites of Drugula (Witchcult Today)
• Return Trip (Come My Fanatics)
• The Chosen Few (Witchcult Today)
• Funeralopolis (Dopethrone)

(Album name in brackets)

Electric Wizard begin...

A couple of points about the surroundings and venue: its not very big and it wasn’t as loud as one might have expected from the Wizard. It wasn’t detrimental to the evening as a whole, but I really missed the feeling of the music pulsing through me that I’ve experienced at previous Wizard gigs. The crowd were well up for it and there was just about enough space for everyone (where as Gojira who I saw there earlier this year had about 30 or 40 people too many). Now that the negatives are out of the way, onto the band!

They played very well, tighter I thought than the last time I saw them (at Hellfest in France earlier this year). Jus rarely opened his eyes only to turn around and take a swig from his can of Bavaria. Liz looked like she always does – astonishingly beautiful and happy on a stage playing her SG. Tas who’s a more recent addition on Bass (replacing Rob Al-Issa) was well into his bit and played well and Shaun on drums beat out a beat to keep the head rolling. I occasionally looked around to check on my friends – it was their first time seeing (and hearing in some cases) Wizard and everyone seemed to be getting into it. Johnny po0k in particular really got into the vibe of it all.

Electric Wizard at the end of their set

And so as good thing things must end, as the last wails of feedback made sure we’d have less hearing than we had at the start of the gig upon the band’s completion of Funeralopolis I turned and saw a very happy gang of campers in the form of J-Cloth and friends. Mission accomplished But that wasn’t to be the end of the evening…

A trip was made to the BatCave and an after party was had Turns out the BatCave’s an awesome party venue too, but we suspected that was the case all along. Was nice to have guests out (some of my friends from Mayo who were up for the gig and the afore mentioned po0k) and I even got to horrify some of them with the vocal stylings of the Doom tune that Neal, The Dragon and I wrote!

I’m in a band called J-Cloth, may or may not have mentioned that somewhere along the line

Last week we got delivery of a few important items and so we got them set up this week.  I’m really chuffed at how it’s all worked out.  Behold, a picture of the Bat Mixing Desk, the Bat Recording Desk, the Bat Recording Computer and the Bat Speakers.

Musics are processed and messed about with here.

Naturally, this being my blog, I should put a pic of my own gear up, so here it is:

Axes, Amp, FX and Mic.

From Left to right: Harvey Benton 7-String (standard BEADGbe) tuning, Godin SD (standard tuning), Wireless vocals mic, Boss ME 30 Guitar Effects, Marshall Valvestate 265 J-Cloth Edition + foot switch, Ibanez IC-200 “Iceman” (open A tuning).  There’s also a mic on top of the amp for running it into the sound desk and a heap of plectrums, my ear plugs and a big mug of tea

Until last night, I had a 4 X 12 Marshall speaker cab too for a full-on Marshall Stack, which was awesome.  However, our drummer and engineer spoke about having a monitor for the drummer to hear it all come together and so we took the cab (since I didn’t really need it for power) and have put that over in his corner.  Pics to follow on that, he wasn’t there when we did it and re-arranged his kit after I put the camera away.

The only real ramaining step is to get the recording desk (smaller on on the front right of the table above) hooked into the desk and a quick introduction to Pro-Tools and the rest from Mick and we’ll be laughing!  I have some solo stuff I wanna get recorded as well as proper band stuff too.

Fun times…