citizenpaul's blog

I asked Ian at @Makeitinmusic what his top Twitter tips were for bands a few weeks ago, and was pleasantly surprised (to say the least!) when he decided to use this as an excuse to write a 12,000 word magnum opus in response! Well worth checking out if you're a musician, his 5-part article can be found over at: http://www.makeitinmusic.com/twitter-for-musicians-the-basics. Since I raise Twitter, our ACAS tweets can be found at @acitizenabove.
 

The Manics will be on Strictly Come Dancing on Sunday... not sure what I think about that. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/dec/01/manics-strictly-come-dancing

This little documentary about "Everything Must Go" actually had a few new insights in it - worth checking out: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/vw721/

A one-liner in case you haven’t seen this freebie – Trent Reznor has composed the score to the new David Fincher movie, which is out next week. You can download a 5-track sampler in exchange for your email address here. It’s well worth a listen. OK, that was four lines...

We’ve been a little quiet of late as there have been a few big changes in the ACAS camp over the summer months. The biggest being that, after 5 solid years of service, our drummer Grant decided to move on to pastures new in June. 

Rather than search for someone else to fill the drum stool (I’m not sure we’d be able to find someone who would be as good a fit for our style…), we’ve been trying out a new computer-aided, three-piece line-up. 

Having less people to coordinate has also meant that we’ve been rehearsing more frequently than ever before. 

Some quick news we think you might like – we've made the entire* Citizen back catalogue available online to download for FREE until 30 April 2010 (includes the album, plus all EPs and standalone tracks). You can stream all the music and download the files in the format of your choosing (ranging from mp3 up to CD quality files) at the newly overhauled music section of our site: http://music.acitizenabovesuspicion.co.uk.

As it’s a new section of the site and you won’t have visited before, the system will ask you for your email address in exchange for accessing the downloads – but don’t worry, we won’t add you to the mailing list again if you've previously signed up. Read more »

A quick little note that our recent woes with the bad weather made it into local mag the Brighton Source. The full (although it's pretty short) story is available here: http://www.brightonsource.co.uk/news/1-latest-news/690-news-february-2010, and is hopefully in the print edition too (let us know if you've seen it yet).

We did of course eventually manage to shoot the video for Big Ideas, which you can see here: http://www.acitizenabovesuspicion.co.uk/video/big-ideas.

The new issue's just landed and this month's Inside Track features Mark 'Spike' Stent explaining the mix for Muse's "Uprising" - some interesting insights and a few little tips to integrate into the workflow.
 
Speaking of which, this week we've been finishing off the tracking for the next new song – currently only has a working title so can't give the name yet. Ross did some excellent vocals at the weekend, so we're down to finalising keyboards/synths before moving on to the mix. It's good that we seem to be hitting some kind of stride at last in terms of cranking out the new material at a decent rate!
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You may be wondering why we've not yet posted a video for the latest song, Big Ideas. Well, our big idea to shoot said video has been scuppered by the snow - twice. First, we were due to shoot in the week prior to Xmas but the weather meant postponing until tomorrow... but the big white bastard has struck again. As I can't even get the car out of our street I'm thinking we're going to be very lucky indeed at this rate. Fingers crossed. Fuck you snow, I've had enough now!