Sidingsound

I’ve been promising a little Christmas surprise for readers of my Twitter feed, and here it is…

Since the late summer (!), my wife Joy (a great pianist) and I have been working on recording some of our own arrangements of Christmas pieces. Our idea is to do some more work on the project for Christmas 2010, but in the meantime we are giving CDs of the tracks recorded so far, as “stocking fillers” for our immediate family.

However, because we’re so nice ( ), we’ve decided that you can hear five of the seven tracks from the CD—if you like, this is a Christmas gift for you from Tim and Joy Walker…

Joy to the world (1:59)

Joy’s on piano for this song, with me playing electric dulcimer, all the guitars (five stacked electric guitars for the finale!) and the MIDI strings/tympani arrangement. You can tell I had fun with this one…

See amid the winter snow (4:01)

Joy takes the lead on this one, both on piano and synth (the flute-like parts), whilst I handle the guitars and guitar synth (mostly ‘pad’ chords, but also the “clarinet”-like solo part in the middle).

It came upon the midnight clear (2:21)

I play two electric dulcimer parts throughout, and also overdubbed electric guitars, bass and MIDI guitar “organ”, whilst Joy contributed the jazzy piano in the second half.

O come o come Emmanuel/Carol of the bells (6:30)

This one’s all me: 6- and 12-string acoustic guitars, multiple electrics (including one EBowed part), bass, electric dulcimers and a few guitar synths. The solo synth parts were all done with the AM Pro SoloVST software synth (a clone of the ARP Pro Soloist, used by Genesis, Anthony Phillips and others).

Away in a manger (1:57)

Joy played the piano and celesta, and we both arranged the violin and cello parts. (Whisper it quietly: they’re sampled strings, but not too bad for all that…)

(We’ve left out two tracks from the CD we’re giving to family, mostly due to copyright issues (e.g. the song is still within copyright), but we hope you don’t mind this time around.)

These tracks are free to download, and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. We hope you enjoy them, and ask for only one thing in return: if you download these and enjoy them, please visit the contact form on this site and let me know, as we’re thinking of expanding and improving on these recordings to produce a “proper” Christmas CD for sale next year. (Alternatively, if you downloaded these tracks and they weren’t to your satisfaction, please let us know as well (preferably constructively!), so we know where we might be able to improve.

In the meantime, have a very happy Christmas, and best wishes for a peaceful and successful New Year 2010 (if I don’t manage to come back here before then)!

…amid the winter snow… by Tim and Joy Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at www.sidingsound.co.uk.

A quick note before I really start getting ready for work (what, it’s the 19th August? where is this year going?), to mention that I’ve been recording some new parts this week for one of the tracks for the prospective Christmas CD that Joy and I are working on when we have time.

The track in question (It Came Upon The Midnight Clear) was begun last month, with two electric dulcimer parts from me, and this week I’ve added two electric guitars and bass guitar, as well as two MIDI guitar parts in Logic (“Hammond organ” and “upright bass”).

It’s quite listenable at this stage, though I haven’t decided whether to keep the MIDI upright bass or the electric bass yet, and I’d like to find time for Joy to play piano on the track, so there’s a bit further to go yet. Still, that’s progress of a sort, eh?

It’s an overcast Monday lunchtime (with the sun making heroic, and occasionally successful, attempts to pierce the gloom), and I might actually pluck up the courage in a few minutes to take a constitutional round the block.

Until then, I’m sat in a corner of the canteen with my N95 and Apple keyboard, to bring you a couple of updates and thoughts (which I’ll try and keep brief):

• Yesterday evening, I recorded the very first parts for the Christmas CD project I referred to a few days ago (and this is the last time I’ll say this: yes, I know it’s late July, but if I don’t start now, we’ll never get this done for December!). It wasn’t much in the end: just some basic electric dulcimer parts for “Joy To The World” and ” It Came Upon The Midnight Clear”, but enough to build upon over the coming weeks.
  The CD is likely to be a “mini-album”, with six or possibly seven tracks, but some of the tracks themselves may well run to well over 3-4 minutes, so the runtime may not be that far short of some “full” albums out there. Watch my Twitter feed (as well as this blog) for further details as they come.
• Just in passing: I am trying hard to give Stephen Moffatt and the new Doctor Who team the benefit of the doubt. Stephen is responsible for some of the finest moments of the regenerated (!) series, and I know he and his team realise how high the bar has been raised, and has to stay. I can just about trust the casting of 26-year-old Matt Smith, and again am willing to give him a chance as the Doctor.
  But whose idea was it to give Matt a costume as the Doctor, which makes him look like Bertie Wooster??!?!?!! I thought the outfit in his initial publicity photo looked rather more like what a 900-year-old Gallifreyan should be sporting, but isn’t he going to look a bit daft in slicked-back hair and a 1920s suit and bow tie when he next pays a visit to a 52nd-century space station?

Just a quick rant, and perhaps this is all a big wind-up by Moffatt and co, where we’ll find out that this was merely Matt’s Doctor attending a 1920s fancy-dress party in the first episode, whereupon he will soon revert to something which doesn’t leave me wishing nostalgically for Colin Baker’s mid-80s get-up.

Now for that constitutional…

Posted by Wordmobi

Over the past few days, I’ve been reaching for my electric mountain dulcimer a bit more than I have in recent weeks, and the reason may surprise you: I’m starting to plan out a Christmas CD for Joy and I to record together.

Now, I am perfectly aware that it is the middle of July – not that you’d really be able to guess from the somewhat autumnal conditions outside – but I know from last year’s experience that if I don’t start laying the groundwork for a Christmas CD project now, it won’t happen (just like… well, last year). We’re both busy people – Joy in particular, with her piano-teaching – and if we can do the lion’s share of the arranging and recording by the end of August, then Naomi can start school and we’ll just have some “tidying-up” to do on the CD.

Surprisingly, after seven years of marriage, it would be the first time Joy and I have really done any “serious” recording together. It’s not through lack of will; we’ve wanted to do so much more, but it’s so hard to fit in recording activities for us both, even more so since Naomi was born. As a result, I’m thinking that the CD should be relatively short – more of a “mini-album” than a full-length one, perhaps with six or maybe seven tracks, although some of the tracks themselves might not be that brief.

I’m realising as I mull over some pieces we could play, that I’ve got so used to doing all the arranging and playing myself when I record, that I might find it a bit of a challenge to collaborate more equally with Joy on this (even though that’s what I really want). We’ve talked a bit already about what to do, and these are a few ideas we’ve thrown about:

• I’d really like to open the CD with “Joy To The World”, and have an idea or two of how we might arrange it. This would start quite simply (maybe with the dulcimer), and build to something much bigger (an orchestra from Logic! Massed guitars! Church organ!), though it’ll depend on what we can call upon from the home studio…
• We think Joy should have at least one solo piano piece, where she might improvise on a seasonal favourite, but which one isn’t clear yet.
• I would probably “get” a solo piece to myself, which I currently think would be a medley of two Christmas pieces I really like, with a multitracked arrangement of guitars, dulcimer and the like, and (where possible) no synths or other MIDI instrumentation.
• The rest would hopefully be duets between Joy and myself, perhaps with some overdubs if they would suit the material.
• Part of me thinks we should close the sequence with “Silent Night”, but that seems to be what everyone does when they make a Christmas album, so that may require a rethink.

Instrumentation-wise, of course Joy will be playing piano, and perhaps some other keyboards as well, and I’ll be bringing electric and acoustic guitars, electric dulcimer, percussion, guitar synth and who knows what else, as well as recording and producing it all.

My original thinking was that this would be a CD for our families and friends, to include in the (metaphorical) Christmas stockings, though if the results end up good enough and we can find the appropriate “vehicle”, we might make the CD more widely available somehow. I have been “roughing out” a CD cover, and if all goes well, this year we’ll have something more than good intentions to show for our efforts.

One way or another, you’ll hear it (or about it) here first…

This is the sort of situation where things get complicated due to posting to too many online services…

Basically, I’ve made my first YouTube video with my electric mountain dulcimer, and have posted the link to it on my Twitter feed, but also on my “tumblelog”. So, just to be complete, I’m posting it here too

Here’s the embedded version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj9OpygSlxE]

It’s a first go, but I hope to make another demo video one day… once I’ve practiced a bit more!

Enjoy…

Scott Andrew drew my attention to an interesting artistic project the other day:

“DIY hand made folktronica” (it says here) artist State Shirt, is inviting folk on the Net to send him snippets of audio, which he then intends to remix into an original album project. I’m seriously thinking of bunging down a couple of electric dulcimer loops and chucking them his way, to see what he makes of them.

(Oh, and I’m glad to say my dulcimer noter—a short length of hardwood dowelling, used by traditional mountain dulcimer players to fret notes—was lost, but as of the other evening, is now found. I didn’t fancy my chances of getting another one easily…)

Odd thing happened this evening: I was idly playing around on the electric dulcimer, trying different settings on the amp, and suddenly I dialled in a nice tremelo effect (very Americana). About the same time, I found myself spontaneously arranging one of my favourite Christmas carols (a month late, I know!), "It Came Upon The Midnight Clear", for the dulcimer, and it all just 'clicked': this was sounding nice… sort of dusty and ambient, like a track off one of my favourite albums, "Belladonna" by Daniel Lanois. I'm going to record this ASAP…

(After-note: I posted this via e-mail from my mobile phone, as it was the only device I had to hand at the time. Imagine entering the above with T9 predictive text!)

As 2009 approaches the one-twelfth-through mark, I thought it was long past time that I dropped by here and updated you on a few happenings (and not-happenings, for that matter) in Sidingsoundworld.

Actually, I’m typing this through a bit of a fatigue-haze: we all arrived back home at about 1.30 this morning, having spent the previous five days at Disneyland Paris (which, if you’ve ever been there, involves a lot of walking, late nights and early mornings). There’s a whole blog post or two right there, but more likely I’ll just upload a brace of pics to our Flickr photoset and link to it from here in due course. Let’s just say that the collapse of the pound against the euro is A Very Bad Thing, Naomi (4) had the time of her life, and we’ll probably be holidaying close to home this summer (if at all)…

But what of other things?

OK, the concept album. I’m coming to the conclusion that life is not going to let me complete it in the form I envisaged, so I am seriously considering just tying up the remaining loose ends and making available what I did manage to complete. More to the point, I’m thinking of treating the recordings as demos for a ‘proper’ album I may or may not make, and just uploading the lot to the Internet Archive, for the listening pleasure or otherwise of the Webbing public.

From there, I’m not sure what direction I’ll take next, musically speaking. I feel it’s time I made another instrumental album—possibly, a multitracked solo collection with lots of guitars, basses, dulcimers and stuff (and no synths, maybe), or perhaps a collection which showcases my new electric mountain dulcimer (like those old instrumental albums from the 60s, with titles like “The Hot Blue And Purple Guitar Of Chet Flinger”). And no, I’m not making that a formal resolution for 2009: I made that mistake already last year!

I’m still Twitter-ing regularly—far more than I do here, I’m afraid—and that’s probably the most up-to-date way of keeping up with me. I’m thinking this may be the year that I finally get on Facebook (having avoided it like the plague all this time), but only because it’s one of the few Web services that lots of people I know use.

What else? Well, I’m hoping to get to sleep before too long, and I’ve run out of ideas here Hope you’re all keeping well, and see you soon.

It is a truth universally acknowledged—or near enough—that guitarists tend to have one or more instruments in mind which they would love to own (and maybe play), if money and availability were no object. (With my “guitar hat” on, my dream instrument would be a Steve Klein electric guitar, as played by the likes of Bill Frisell and Lou Reed; however, they are monstrously expensive and depending on whom you believe on the Web, they haven’t been made for a few years, so a dream it will remain )

Moreover, it seems this instinct isn’t restricted to guitarists, as proven on the blog of Hawaiian mountain dulcimer virtuoso Bing Futch. As I write, he is about to take delivery of a new dulcimer from Folkcraft: a double-neck one, the sight of which leads me to wonder whether I’ve been playing the ‘wrong’ instrument all this time…

This time last year, I made something of a bold resolution:

2008 is the year that I will record and produce at least one album (if not — gasp — more than one).

I also made a rather rash comment, that if you couldn’t find any evidence of such a project here, that you were permitted to “do a Nelson Muntz” (“Ha-ha!”). I think my ears will be ringing soon…

OK, I admit it: I didn’t finish the album project. I did record about 80-85% of it, so the project could be said to have “slipped into” 2009, à la Guns’n'Roses.

Excuses? Plenty—mainly the obvious (family and other commitments, day job, you know), coupled with the delay in receiving an intact electric mountain dulcimer, which I wanted to use on a couple of songs. Aside from the dulcimer tracks, there are (I think) three more songs to be recorded, though none of these are particularly complicated ones so I should be able to get those onto disk without much hassle (yeah, right).

So, I’m now hoping to complete the recordings early(-ish) in 2009, when I will then have the puzzle of what exactly to do with them. However, that’s a concern for another day—in the meantime, I don’t think I’ll make a similar resolution for this new year…