A few weeks ago, in a pocket of India remembered only by scuba-diving tourists, Boa Sr spoke her last words. With her passing, the Great Andamanese of India’s far-flung Andaman islands lost more than a member of their tribe. They lost – we lost – the last living speaker of Bo, their native tongue and – what should have been for the rest of us – a national treasure.

Besides a few stray newspaper articles, little was said about this unspeakable loss. Maybe no words remain to describe it. Had it been Sanskrit that died, it would have been felicitated with a mausoleum of eulogies.

There are some that do not mourn the death of languages; instead they choose to celebrate such demises claiming that they serve to unite the world. And there are some who are at seemingly endless war over languages – over the right to speak them and the right to prevent them from being spoken.

India has 26 official languages among a total of 452 listed by The Ethnologue, along with thousands of dialects. Our northern states were not divided on the basis of language but in southern India, language was the factor that drew the tenuous borders between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, and set Tamil Nadu apart from Kerala, and Orissa from Andhra. While all of these states have a good mix of speakers of all languages and immigrant communities that have lived there and integrated into the society and economy far longer and far deeper than some of the locals, the officialdom associated with language draws a sharp wedge between people. As we read this, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra are bowing to these divisive forces.

In Bangalore, for instance, Tamil-speaking labourers have consistently been targeted while the largest population of non-Kannada speakers – those who speak Telugu – carry on un-maligned. With the recent migration of people from the north Indian states into Karnataka, auto-rickshaw drivers have started to speak Hindi even before they utter a phrase in Kannada. Yet, their resentment of them is unmasked. On the other hand, pro-Kannada groups are pressing demands for reservation and fuelling anti-English agitations.

Our languages, considered by the awestruck outside world as a testimonial to our diversity, are today the fault-lines along which our society is being divided. Who are the real instigators of this divide – the passive people or the hyperactive political mafia?

In the trained tongues of scholars, language becomes a sharp tool for enlightenment and social integration. In the loose tongues of knaves, it degenerates into a blunt weapon.

At the One Small Love concert on February 14, Saswati Chakravarty, former senior editor of The Economic Times and an ardent Bangalorean, examined the question of language as a tool of cultural assimilation.

Saswati arrived 25 years ago in Bangalore from Kolkata (then Calcutta). Though she did not feel like an outsider in the city that “accepted differences”, she learned Kannada and explored theatre, film and music in the native language of her adopted city.

But did her learning Kannada make her an insider? Does knowing to speak Kannada give her a feeling of empowerment? Through this process of assimilation, what happened to the Bengali in her? Can the notions of language and culture be used interchangeably as they often are today?

Where do we draw the line? And who will draw it?

Watch the video for an enlightening perspective from this acclimated Bangalorean.

Discuss the issue of language here.

The post Free Speech is music to our ears – Saswati draws the line appeared first on Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ).

This is a poem about love.

Just listen to me – a poem, she says. Bravely.

But today’s Valentine’s Day, right? Oh, go ahead, buy your lover a furry toy monkey, listen to the Carpenters, for god’s sake, without blushing. “It’s the love that I’ve found ever since you’ve been around…” Listen to James Blunt without cringing. “You’re beautiful…”

But seriously, what is this notion, this emotion called love? This passion, this obsession, this confusion called love? This attraction? Creation? Collaboration? Communication? You know, people, you can take almost any noun with a shin sound and make it an aspect of love.

Naan yaav bhashe nalli mathaaadbeku antha, yaaaru nan-hattara hel beda, hel baaradu. Samaj mein aaya? Purinjitha? Manasilaayo, maashey? And if I could learn to speak all 22 scheduled languages and all its glorious hundreds of dialects I would speak them all, I would sing them all to you.

My culture is made up of many colours, many faces, many tongues. It has no room for hate of the “other”.

to love.

C K Meena, well known to Bangaloreans for her tart, witty columns on life in their ever-changing cityscape, has written two books of fiction — the semi-autobiographical Black Lentil Doughnuts and the crime thriller Dreams for the Dying.

The post One Small Love – C K Meena on Love appeared first on Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ).

For some people it was a lonely Valentine’s Day. And this goes out especially to them.

When we played in Pune last year we decided we weren’t going back without cake and cookies from the famous German Bakery. Enjoying them in Bangalore the next day, we didn’t foresee having to reflect on that simple pleasure like this.

Terror could have struck then as it did on the night of February 13, 2010. But we lived to write this. And we shall make the most of the life and joy granted to us.

It is somewhat edifying that we were able to reach out to Pune on February 14. Opus Pune webcast the One Small Love concert live to its patrons.

Thank you for turning up (and turning down your other Valentine’s Day engagements) and for your support and encouragement right through this initiative.

Foremost, our thanks go to the fabulous folks at Trumpit and Opus – Carlton, Shonali, Priyanka, Venkat, Adrian and all the staff whose names fail us but whose smiling faces fill our minds when we recollect that lovely evening. Thank you for event support, your gracious hospitality and for making our artists and guests feel at home at Opus in the Creek, such a tranquil setting with its giant Buddha and tippling fish.

Thank you Konarak Reddy, Gerard Machado, Ravichandra Kulur, Alwyn Fernandes, Gaurav Vaz and Karan Joseph for your soul-stirring performances. A special thanks to Vasu, Varun, Jishnu, Montry, Pavan and Sanjeev, the awesome musicians of Swarathma, for playing a pulse-quickening show. In a market where live performances can hardly pay the bills, these wonderful people unquestioningly played for love.

For making the One Small Love concert a resounding success we thank Niranjan, the man at the soundboard whose admirable patience with the tantrums of rock stars is legend.

Thanks to Saswati Chakravarty, C K Meena, Prakash Belawadi and Harish Bijoor for articulating their special messages to our audience because rock stars (with the notable exception of Gaurav Vaz) are so pathetic at making speeches.

For his time-saving and completely impromptu comic interlude, a whopper of a thank-you goes out to our friendly neighbourhood Bollywood star-in-the-making Rajeev Ravindranathan.

Thanks to Merwyn Rodrigues of JumpMedia, Dubai, who accepted a brief that few designers would, and delivered a poster and profile image for our Facebook page in just a few hours.

We thank Smita and the very talented and even-tempered folks at Kieon for online support and web design.

Thanks to Kartik Iyer, Praveen Das and the beautiful minds at Happy Creative Services for dreaming up the original One Small Love music video. Special thanks also to Ashvin Naidu of Avakkai Films.

Thank you, PG Santhosh and his colleagues at MIPL-GraphicsAllAround, for the One Small Love giveaway stickers and for the big yellow smiley that graced the stage throughout the show.

Thank you, Gaurav Manchanda, for being Ayrton Senna to our guests when the cab guys ditched us at the eleventh hour.

We thank Dean Umesh PN, professors Srijayanth and Ananth and research fellow Bindu of the TAAQ Roadie Institute of Technology (RIT) for running the show like a smoothie, and especially for committing themselves to the odious task of filming people drawing smileys under hot lights.

We are immensely grateful to Facebook and WordPress for their fabulous (and free) online products, which make social messaging and online publishing look ridiculously easy. Ten years ago, we would have struggled to drum up opt-in support for an event like this. This year, we didn’t phone a single journalist.

In the same breath, we thank Facebook evangelists such as Martin D’Souza for spreading the message of One Small Love to their networks. Thanks also to the 1,300+ fans of the One Small Love page for your endorsement of this movement. You have a lot to look forward to.

We have had many managers and we love and respect all of them. But no one merits a bigger ovation than Divya Joseph, who deserves a lifetime royalty from Adidas for living the slogan ‘Impossible is Nothing’. The list of things she deserves to be thanked for cannot be accommodated here, so let just it be said that she was the smile on the face of One Small Love.

Thanks to Velu Shankar, a long-time friend, philosopher and guide of Thermal And A Quarter, for his advice and encouragement.

One Small Love begins at home. Our families deserve our utmost love and gratitude for their support and suffering in the face of our absences, late nights and many missed dinners. Since this suffering, and our solicitations for support, are not about to stop in the near future, we thank you in advance.

The show must go on, no matter what threats loom up to stop us. And we will do everything in our power as musicians and artists to fight violence and hate with messages of love, tolerance and freedom. To paraphrase Harry Belafonte: “You can cage the singer but not the song.”

The concert is only the beginning. In the future that is about to unfold, One Small Love will reach out to the world in many ways and touch many lives.

Let’s draw the line each day.

The post One Big Thankyou appeared first on Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ).

Background
I’ve been using guitar processors from 1998. I had a bunch of analog pedals before that – Boss/Digitech (remember those DOD pedals?)/Ibanez and so on. I think I made the switch because

a) I liked to use a lot of different tones and tweaking pedals in the middle of a gig, and stepping on multiple pedals with two left feet was a challenge;

b) pedalboards were something only the lucky few with rich uncles in the right countries had – the rest of us had to make do with locally-made dodgy adaptors and messy setups; and

c) the people I looked up to in the local scene all seemed to be using them.

Processors have gone a long way since my first Zoom 1010 (a terrible piece of junk which I sold off very quickly). I stuck with BOSS for a while, working my way through the ME-8, ME-10 and the great GT-5. Still, getting a good tone at every gig, with widely different amps at each venue (Kustom Sound, Stranger, Peavey, and the very occasional Marshall) took time, and for a while I actually lugged my Stranger Nightingale Series 100 W solid-state Calcutta beast around.  Used the Line 6 POD 2.0 for the first time while recording our second album Jupiter Café, and was totally intrigued with amp modeling and everything it offered. Soon had the PODxt, then the PODxt Live, which you’ll hear on third and fourth albums Plan B and This Is It. Live, these modelers allowed me to travel light, and with a decent engineer FOH, nearly always get a decent tone. At least, that’s what people told me – many of them would come backstage after a gig asking about my clearly ‘analog’ setup and go away quite surprised (and perhaps disgruntled!) at the sight of the POD.

So, modelers have worked for me – for a good many years now. I’ve used them in front of plenty of amps, in the FX returns, going direct to the board etc., live and in the studio. With each generation, they seem to get better, more ‘interactive’, more detailed, and easier to use. For purists, of course, (and purists who can afford a whole stable of boutique beauties) there’s nothing that can replace the real thing, and this review may not change that!

The Eleven Rack
I’d used the Eleven plug-in to re-amp some tones on the last album, and found its single-minded focus on amp-modeling (no crazy collection of vintage pedals etc) very heartening. The amps always sounded crisp and clear, with much of the response that great tube amps give you – ease off on your attack/volume and things clean up, dig in and wail, shout and whisper – all of that. There were, of course, the plug-in limitations of latency, ‘feel’ and so on, but it did a great job of getting guitars to sit in a mix, or stick out nicely when they had to.

First Listen
I first listened to the Eleven Rack on a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones, playing my Erisa Custom Strat (hand made in Auroville) with Lindy Fralin single-coils. The Fralins are pretty low-output pickups with outstanding clarity. Used first a Planet Waves circuit-breaker and then a Monster Rock cable.

Having used a Guru Plexi tube head (also hand-made in Auroville) for a while, I naturally gravitated to the Marshall Plexi models first, and was immediately surprised by the Eleven Rack’s single-focus approach: the controls on this model are exactly the same as on the original amp – with no Master Volume, which is the sound of a Plexi. On any POD, for example, you’ll have a generic set of drive/bass/mid/treb/presence/vol controls that work on ALL models – NOT the way the original amps are. On the Eleven Rack, if the original amp has just a ‘drive’ ‘cut’ and ‘bass’ control, that’s exactly what you get on the model. This, I found, made it much easier to get a good sound from an amp model, fast. Dial up a twin reverb, say, and you find just the familiar knobs on the real thing; some minor tweaking, a tad of spring reverb and you’re in surf heaven…

The higher-gain amp models also sounded as gnarly and in-your-face as expected. Crank up one of these metal monsters and you may actually feel your bell-bottoms flapping when you hit a low E. Some of the presets were a bit too ‘driven’ and harsh for my taste – and my Strat isn’t the greatest fan of gain at 11! She likes the ‘give’ of a mildly overdriven amp best…

What I liked best about it is what they call ‘dynamic feel’; which I think is the result of what the Eleven Rack calls a ‘True Z’ input. What this means is that the unit adjusts the input impedance in accordance with the ‘load’ on the signal chain imposed on it by the various modeled stomp boxes and effects, used both pre and post amp model, just like if you were using an array of these things in the real world. While some of the physics here can be challenging, the results are plain to hear – the Eleven Rack comes frighteningly close to recreating the actual ‘feel’ of running your guitar through a pedal board and amp.

Diggin’ Deeper – The Hardware Interface and Editing
Just as a test of how intuitive the interface is, I refused to look at the manual and tried doing some deep tweaking straight out of the box. This is where I believe the unit could use some work; some buttons and controls are just not where you expect them to be, and there are some edits that force you to move back and forth between pages. However, none of these are more than mildly irritating, and one gets used to the unit’s logic pretty quickly.

With much of the editing being done by the nicely illuminated black knobs in front, you also quickly realize that the lights on the knobs change to let you know what your previous settings were before you started re-tweaking, which is pretty cool.

You can also place your stomp boxes and effects (not a very large collection, but what’s there sounds GOOD) anywhere you want in the chain, something I haven’t seen since the BOSS GT-5. Great for all us knob-twiddling control freaks.

Like the newer PODs, another cool thing is being able to add and remove stomp boxes and effects from the same preset or ‘patch’ as I still like to call it. This allows you to get a pretty amazing range of sounds from a single patch, simply by adding removing distortion, modulation, delay, reverb, EQ, etc. The Eleven Rack, being, well, a rack, all this of course needs to be handled by your MIDI foot controller, most guitarists lacking prehensile toes, third arms and suchlike. Incidentally, I used a MIDI cable to connect my PODX3 Live to the Eleven Rack and was afforded instant access to patch changes, FX on/off, Wah, volume – pretty much everything I needed. Nice! And for some time now I’ve believed that interoperability was a myth – especially when you have two units from different manufacturers and so on.

Recording and Re-amping
This is where the Eleven Rack may, once again, prove to be ahead of its rivals: it comes bundled with Pro Tools LE, ready for installation on to your PC or Mac. And this version of Pro Tools features the Eleven Rack Window, allowing you instant access to all the unit’s settings. Easier to work with if you’re simply re-amping (more on that later) or recording, because tweaking stuff on the computer while playing and recording very quickly becomes a pain. Just the mouse-pick-mouse thing I guess. But there is one really cool thing here – Pro Tools can now embed your Eleven Rack settings into the audio files, so if you have to work on tracks much after you’ve put them down, you save yourself a lot of head-scratching and trying to remember settings which you may not have saved as a patch.

Fire up one of the Pro-Tools-for-Dummies ‘templates’ and you’ve straightaway got everything you need to record some guitar – and the Eleven Rack allows you to put down one ‘direct’ track, with no processing on, one ‘wet’ track with all the fruits of your tweak-mania, and one ‘re-amp’ track just in case you suddenly hate that fruit basket and want to start over without actually playing the guitar part again.

Once you get into this, you’ll figure that your guitar track can be assigned to the Eleven Rack, processed, and then re-routed to another track fairly easily; you and send it out again through the ‘output to amp’ jacks, from where it can be plugged into an amp just like a guitar. Then, you can actually plug the mid you use on the speaker cabinet back into the mic input on the Eleven Rack!

Using it Live
While my X3 Live may suffice for now, I’d much rather use a proper full-featured MIDI foot controller to use this orange beast live. Digidesign haven’t got one out yet, but I’ve heard that there are various controllers in the market that will work, including something from Behringer that’s supposed to be really good value for money. Need to do some checking on that.

When I plugged the main XLR outs on the unit I got for this review into our mixer and PA, there was a very audible (actually very loud) hiss that wouldn’t go away. Perhaps it was this particular unit, because I don’t see this being a ‘feature’!

The Eleven Rack allows a direct balanced signal to be sent to the PA, and an independent stereo signal to be sent to any stage amps you want to use, where you can remove the cab/mic simulations.

Last Word
At a street price of $899 in the US, the Eleven Rack isn’t cheap, but it does offer some outstanding amp models, and a dedication to high-quality guitar tone that isn’t seen on many of the inexpensive modelers out there, for obvious reasons. Clearly, the high levels of detail on the amp, cab, mic and FX models will be heard best only by more experienced ears, but that’s more a result of just how quickly technology has been able to digitally re-create all the myriad variables that go into making a great guitar sound.

Will it knock things like the POD out of the water? Dunno – the PODs do a great job of giving you a LOT of amp models, and a LOT of effects and a LOT of in/out options that still aren’t available on the Eleven Rack. It seems to me thus, that this is a product that will very quickly be snapped up by studio/session cats that have their own recording setups. With the addition of a recommended foot controller, even gigging guitar players with big ‘analog’ ears should be happy with this unit. Hopefully Digidesign will soon release ‘model pack’ and other updates that will add more bells and whistles for those that want them.

For now, the Eleven Rack is as specialist as the plug-in – and does the job a whole lot better, methinks!

Guitar Doctor Bruce Lee Mani will demonstrate the Digidesign Eleven Rack at a free workshop on guitar technique and technology at Blue Frog, Mumbai on Digidesign’s Eleven Guitar Day – November 11, 2009. Special guests include Amit Heri, Amyt Dutta and Tony Das. More details on our Facebook  page. Limited seats. Pre-register now: elevenrack@ansata.net

The post Guitar Doctor reviews the Digidesign Eleven Rack appeared first on Thermal and a Quarter (TAAQ).