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20/06/07

Oh yes this is the worst updated BLOG on the whole interweb info-superhighway thingamyjig (old scots word). We have been busy though. The insturmental stuff with Alejo is coming on a treat. Craig, Alejo & Alastair (midgieraker fiddler) got a nice wee 30 minute set together to play at an art show. Chas & Alejo have been working on a new song and Ramsay has been doing some new doumbek parts on the windnight tracks. AND......at short notice we got another shot at the West End Festival. Another great day for us, playing our favourite stage and venue. Interestingly, on Monday it was exactly 4 years since Stone Autumn first met Alejo. All are agreed that we have made pretty good progress since then. Alejo is off to Spain for the whole of July which leaves us with the challenge of playing the Loch Lomond gig as a 3 piece. Fortunately, Alastair has said that he would be up for playing fiddle with us so that might be interesting.

10/05/07

OMG is it that long since I wrote something here? Shame on me. Fortunately a lot has happened and my lack of posting does not reflect a lack of activity on our part. Once Alejo got back for Argentina we worked on 3 of the 4 new songs that were jammed out in his absence. This was followed by a few trips to the practice pad studios for a bit more rehearsal and recording. The rehearsals were for the Lemon Tree gig (two weeks ago) which was fantastic and the recordings were part of a new instrumental project (Windnight).

27/02/07

I cant remember if I posted the good news about Alejo having his visa renewed for a further 2 years. This is great news for the band (and Kelly of course :-). Right now Alejo is back in Argentina but he has left us with plenty of homework to do. Myself, Chas and Ramsay are still practicing during this wee break in gigging and have come up with a few new songs to add to the two mentioned below. At the end of January we played in MacSorleys Music bar. A fairly noisy but enjoyable affair and a nice send off for Alejo who left a few days later.

I am happy to report that we have another gig at the Aberdeen Lemon Tree on the 27th of April (our 3rd appearance). So, as soon as Alejo gets back we will play a few warm up gigs and start rehearsing a 60 minute set.

22/01/07

It was a quiet new year for us, only Alejo was man enough to brave the cold on Hogmanay. The folk at the Culb Noir (Cathouse) were treated to some of his piping for the bells. We have two new songs in the pipeline 'Fallen Angel' and 'Europa'. This year we plan to do a lot more home recording, so that should result in lots more music samples appearing on these pages. Also, there may be a slighlty new direction for this year.

18/12/06

Well, we finally finished that album. It took much longer than expected. Mixing and editing was, lets say 'interesting'. So now we need to think about getting it pressed - more money! Great news though, Alejo has been granted a 2 year extension to his Visa and so we have another 2 years of Stone Autumn to look forward to. Already we have some new material coming through and I (Craig) am very excited about what we will be doing next year. We are currently thinking about making the new album available for download and purchase via our MySpace page. More on that later. For now though, Stone Autumn would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

27/09/06

Last night we played a rather quiet gig at Bar Buddha in Glasgow (St Vincent St.). We really enjoyed it, nice laid back mood (apart from the heelan pipes!) and a great sound (Thanks Dougal). This was part of the Practice Pad Band night. Last Tuesday of each month so try and get along if you can. Next week we are back at the pad for 4 recording sessions. So watch this space for more updates as we complete our first album.

12/09/06

On Saturday we played at the Kigsway Festival. It was a beautiful day and a really nice atmosphere. many thanks to Frank McMaster for organising the event and to George who did a good job with our sound - always difficult outside with a small PA. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and the Kingsway flats were a carnival of colour. Some photos of the event are on our images page and we will probably post a video or two on the MySpace page. Next up Bar Buddha and then the recording. We have a rehearsal organised for Monday where we will be working on some new material.

08/09/06

At last Ramsay is back from illness and we can now concentrate on finishing our first album. Recording is booked for Oct 2nd-6th and then probably another few sessions the following week. So hopefully by mid-October we will be ready to launch our as yet untitled 1st album. We are all very excited by this. In the meantime we have two gigs to look forward to. Tomorrow we are playing at the Kingsway festival in Glasgow (Yoker - on stage at about 4pm) and then on Sept 26th we are at bar Buddha. A busy month. And, we have an event planned for St Andrews Night. An open stage featuring Stone Autumn & The Midgierakers. Should be fun (Nov 30th at Glasgow University Research Club - the venue of our first ever gig).

17/08/06

Although we hope to concentrate on recording our album towards the end of September (or early October), It looks like we have gig to look forward to. Hugh from Practice Pad is organising band nights at Bar Budda in Glasgow and we are scheduled to play on Sept. 26th. More details to follow.

31/07/06

Not much happend this month as Craig and Alejo were both on holiday and Ramsay has been ill. We got the beginnings of some recording done but these cant be completed until Ramsay is back on his feet.

28/06/06

We had great fun at last night's rehearsal. Ramsay spent the whole evening behind the drum kit so that added another dimension to our sound. However, quite where that chilli pepper-style jam came from I will never know!!

26/06/06

Our web service provider had serious problems last week but hopefully these are sorted now. It was very frustrating to have the site down just as we had some good news to report. Good News? Yup, we got played on a Spanish radio station (Canal Extremadura Radio) on Friday. DJ, Rakel Jimenez Galan, played 'Paddy's leather breeches' and 'Samantha' on the "Mestizo Mundo" show. Thank you very much Rakel!! Who knows what might come of it. Tomorrow we are all back in the studio to prepare for the next recording session. Should be fun!

19/06/06

Last week we got played on the 'Pure Brilliant Podcast' (#15). Thanks to Hugh for playing Revolution Song. We are still on the hunt for a good gig in July so if anyone out there wants us, drop me a line. Recording booked for early July so we will have some more stuff for you to listen to and these new songs should help to get us some better gigs.

12/06/06

What a great day we had yesterday. Finally, we got to play on our home patch (Byres Rd) at the Street Party. The newspapers estimate ~70,000 people over the course of the day. We played well to a happy smiling crowd. I think our music works well on summer days. I wish we could do it all again next week. Nothing else in the pipeline so I should get my skates on and try and find some gigs for July. Watch this space. Craig.

08/06/06

Last night we played at the Cumbernauld Theatre. It was a good warm up ahead of Sunday's gig at the WEF. It was a night of firsts. First time the 4 of us have played live together. We all played together in different version of Stone Autumn but this was our first as Craig, Alejo, Chas & Ramsay. It felt good. Also, it was the first time we have played 'In The Morning' and 'Come to Me Now' live. Both went down really well. It was a nice friendly audience and we hope to go back in a couple of months. Thanks to Ian Page for inviting us.

02/06/06

Our West End Festival gig is now confirmed. We will be on the 'Gong' stage at 4pm (Vinicombe Street) on Sunday the 11th of June. This is part of the Street Festival which always draws a big crowd. Last year there were 5 stages, 22 bands & around 50,000 people. Should be a good day out. I see we are listed as a 'Scottish Ceilidh Dance Band! - Flippin Heck, I'm gonna get that changed right away. Think it's a mistake! Oh, and we will play a warm-up gig at Cumbernauld theatre on the 7th June (9pm). Also, we might be playing the Whisky Live 2006 in George Square (September) - details to follows. That's all folks.

30/05/06

Another rehearsal on Sunday night helped us finalise the 30 minute set for the West End Festival gig on June 11th. Still no definite stage time from the organiser but we hope to find out this week. We are planning a warm up gig at Cumbernauld Theatre on Wed 7th June (tbc).

22/05/06

It's been an interesting few weeks since I last added to this Blog. Two weeks ago Kenny decided that he needed to take a break from Stone Autumn to make space for his other musical projects. We are very sorry to see him leave but we wish him all the very best and thank him for the year that he spent with us. What followed was an interesting rehearsal at Practice Pad with Chas back behind a full drum kit. It makes such a difference to hear the pipe sets with a full kit! This is something we will certainly incorporate when the time is right. Then on Friday last week we received an email asking if we were up for playing the West End Festival Street Party on June 11th. This is one we have been desperate to play for years. Of course we accepted - but without a drummer. However, I am delighted that Ramsay has offered to play the gig with us and do some recordings after the gig. We had our first rehearsal with Ramsay last night and it went great. It also felt great having our Stone Autumn co-founder back playing with us. We all hope that Ramsay will stick around after the agreed period and complete our band once again. Craig.

03/05/06

From today you can now download all of our 'Adverse Camber' Album from 'Scotloads'. After giving away over 2000 full versions of our tunes as free downloads we felt it was time to try and recover some of our costs. This is not a decision that we have taken lightly. However, whilst it may decrease the number of downloads we are hopeful that there are enough of you out there that will be willing to pay 79p per track or £6.40 for the whole album. I estimate that with rehearsals and recording sessions we have probably spent in the region of £1000 making the album. You can link to Scotloads via our music page.

Also, we now have a 'MySpace' account where you can listen to 4 of our tracks in full.

26/04/06

Well, following up on the CMM feature, I am pleased to say that we were featured on a podcast for the first time last night. Many thanks to Grant at 'Three from Leith' who plays three podsafe tracks each week, generally from unsigned Scottish bands (Good luck with the Camel podcast though Grant). This seems to be the way forward. Listen, if the Arctic Monkeys can go from nowhere last year to sharing a stage at T-in-the-Park with the Who (all on the strength of downloads) then I want some of that. Best of luck to them. Pioneers I reckon.

20/04/06

What a month for downloads! We were featured in Celtic (MP3s) Music Magazine which gave a link to our site. This resulted in a huge increase in traffic (1.8Gb in the last week). I hope the service provider doesn't shut us down :-(. Anyway, we had a good rehearsal on Sunday night which gave us the first chance to hear 'In the morning' with the big pipes. Sounds fantastic. Another new song emerged from that session 'Come to me now'. Hopefully, we will be recording again within the next few weeks.

27/03/06

We all spent last weekend in a cottage at Lochgoilhead. 3 days of playing music was just what we needed as a welcome back for Alejo who has just returned from Argentina. We recorded about 3 hours worth of new jams and doodles. We also completed two new pieces; A song called 'In the morning' and a new pipe set using 'The battle' & 'The old maid of the mill dust'.

14/02/06

St Valentines Day! Well, finally I got all the bugs fixed following the upload to the new server. Last night me and Chas got together to work on a new jam that came out of our last full rehearsal. I like it, sounds a wee bit like Camel (one of my favourite proggy type bands). It's gonnae sound braw wi the big pipes!! Craig.

10/02/06

The site has now been uploaded to the new server. The site was down for only one day. Normal (enhanced!) service has been resumed. Thanks to Cathy, Kerry, Carrn, Melanie and Natalie [from GB.net] for the photos of the Burns night. They will appear sometime over the weekend.

08/02/06

Today I upgraded the website to accomodate the increased number of downloads. Now we have more bandwidth we can offer full downloads of some of the songs. I have now added full versions of 'Revolution Song' and 'Samantha' to the download list. These are sampled at 128bit but should be high enough quality. let me know if there are any problems. Craig.

03/02/06

Last night I added Samantha and Airwaves to the music downloads. Alejo has gone back to Argentina to refresh his fading suntan. However, he has left us some homework to do. We will spend this month preparing some new material and hopefully get back to playing live sometime in March.

30/01/06

Well, what a week that was. Recording on Monday, Rehearsal on Tuesday, Oran Mor (Burns Night) on Wednesday, Midgieraker gig (for Craig & Kenny) on Thursday, mixing and another Burns night at Oran Mor on Friday. Sadly, even though Celtic Connections were one band short for the Danny Kyle stage on Thursday, and all of Stone Autumn were there (with instruments), we didnt get to play. We are pleased with the two new tracks (recorded by Colin at Practic Pad) and will spend next month working on new material and hopefully return to playing live in mid-march.

The highlight of the week was, without doubt, our second set on the Wednesday Burns Night. The crowd were well up for it and really carried us along, banging on the tables and really getting into it. Thanks people. It makes it all worthwhile for us.

24/01/06

This is a busy week for us. Last night we recorded two new tracks at the Practice Pad, 'Samantha' and 'Airwaves'. We will finish the mixing on Friday. On Wednesday and Friday we will be playing at the Oran Mor Burns Nights. A busy week indeed.

06/01/06

Last night we got together to work on two new tracks which we will record on Jan the 23rd. These will be 'Airwaves' and 'Samantha'. The latter is a really lovely pipe tune for which we have written a slow ballad. It looks like we will be playing the Oran Mor Burns Night again. We are still waiting to see if we will be getting another Celtic Connection Open Stage slot. Fingers crossed.

20/12/05

The gig last night went well. It had a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere - felt like a first ever gig in a church hall in front of friends and relatives. The service users seemed to enjoy it (particularly the bagpipes). Thanks to Brenda for looking after us.

19/12/05

We got together last night to rehearse for a gig in Torrance tonight. This will probably be our last performance of 2005. We hope to record another two songs at the beginning of January.

All that's left is to wish all our friends a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year.

20/11/05

Copies of the 11 track CD 'Adverse Camber' are now available. If you would like one then just send us an email

3/11/05

Last night we completed the mixing of 'Good Times' and 'Revolution Song'. The samples are available on our music page. Now we will be compiling an 8-10 track CD which you can have if you email us with a contact address. Back to work next week rehearsing and writing new tunes.

25/10/05

Great News: Alejo passed his exam and is now a Pipe Major. Contratulations Alejo !!

28/09/05

We are currently rehearsing for our next studio recording session; a unique mix of pipes and vocals. We are really looking forward to it.

27/09/05

New Web site comes online

16/09/05

The band travelled to Aberdeen to play the Lemon Tree. A lunchtime gig sponsored by Oil giants Shell. This is the second year in a row that Stone Autumn have performed.

15/09/05

A last minute call for help from Oran Mor. We are delighted to play the first McEwans Session in the ground floor bar.

13/09/05

Rehearsals for Aberdeen going well. Our first practice at the Berkley Annex and we were very impressed.