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.

In an idle moment recently (I do occasionally have these), I had a go at compiling a list of my top ten favourite guitar players—those whom I just like listening to, who I feel have had an influence on my own playing, or even both.

It was a tough call with a few players who just missed out on being included, but here is the list I came up with—in no particular order, along with (and we’ll come to why in a moment) their birth years:

• Mike Oldfield (1953)
• Robert Fripp (1946)
• Anthony Phillips (1951)
• Phil Keaggy (1951)
• Brian May (1947)
• Steve Howe (1947)
• Graham Coxon (1969)
• David Gilmour (1946)
• Bill Frisell (1951)
• Roger McGuinn (1942)

I don’t think I’d realised how far my tastes incline towards what some would term the “prog-rock” end of the scale (and in case Robert Fripp is reading this: yes, I know you loathe King Crimson being labelled that way, please don’t write about me), but this list would seem to confirm it.

Even more interestingly, perhaps: note that despite half a century-plus of rock music history, with two exceptions (Coxon and McGuinn), all the players on the list above were born between 1946 and 1953. You may draw from that whatever conclusions you will…

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

If there’s one sounds in the musical instrument world which just seems to take my heart and do a 100m dash with it, it’s a properly-tuned 12-string guitar. Acoustic or electric, there’s just something magical about those unison octaves, the slight ‘phasing’ sound of two strings ever so slightly out of tune with each other… or maybe it’s a “Marmite thing”, in that you either love it or you don’t.

Well, I do, and even more so at the moment than usual, probably because I’ve been listening a lot to The Geese and the Ghost, the 1977 début solo album by Anthony Phillips, Steve Hackett’s predecessor in Genesis. The presence of layered 12-string guitars on the prog giant’s early LPs was in no small part Ant’s influence, even after he left the band in 1970, and he remains a very fine 12-string guitarist to this day (check out this video on YouTube of one of my favourite compositions of his, “Lights On The Hill”).

My Roland VG-8EX can pull off passable impersonations of electric and electro-acoustic 12-strings, but in the end there’s really no substitute for the genuine article. Unfortunately, until now, if you wanted a 12-string acoustic which didn’t have a horrid unplayable action (the distance between the strings and the fretboard), you would have to shell out a fair amount of money; however, I’ve noticed lately how good budget guitars have been getting, so I’ve started looking out for whether my theory applied to 12-strings.

Well, so far, so good. At lunchtime today, I dropped into one of my local music shops, and asked in there whether they were aware of any sub-£200 (about US$330 at current exchange rates—in other words, pretty cheap) 12-string acoustics. “See what you think of this one”, the assistant replied, lifting down a Vintage guitar (which I’m now fairly sure was a V800-12 (Correction (03/06/2009 – 20:50): it’s actually the V400-12)). I looked at the price label—£179—and instantly thought I was about to try an “egg-slicer’.

I stand corrected. I have to say that if I’d tried the Vintage blindfolded, I would’ve guessed the price was £250-300 at least. The action was a tiny bit on the high side, but certainly far better than I was expecting at the price, and the assistant said it would not be at all difficult to lower it without risking “fret buzz”. Moreover, it didn’t matter that this guitar had no pickup; if I were to buy a 12-string acoustic, it would be overwhelmingly for recording with, and I would never use the direct output for that purpose (I’d go for a condenser mike).

Money’s not exactly plentiful at the moment, so I think I’ll be saving up for this for a bit, but I was definitely surprised by the quality of this particular budget 12-string. I wonder if there are any other contenders?

Spotted a rather covetable piece of music gear in the latest issue of Sound On Sound: the Moog Guitar, which upon first hearing the name, I thought would be a guitar stuffed with oscillators and filters and the like. No such luck It’s basically a guitar made by Moog Music, with special pickups which feed back the energy in the strings to give infinite sustain (to which I thought of the Fernandes Sustainer and my EBow). Wonder if Robert Fripp wants one of these?

If this needed to be demonstrated more impressively, there’s a YouTube video of the Moog Guitar being processed through a Moog Etherwave Plus theremin acting as a filter… oh, just take it that I wouldn’t mind a setup like this

Mind you, at over $5000 for one of these babies, I think I’d settle for one of those Moog T-shirts…

Just time—in-between daughter-entertaining, studying-and-writing for next OU course assignment and hoping that all this penicillin will kill off the horrid throat infection I’ve been enduring since the weekend—to mark something of a milestone: on this day, exactly twenty-one years ago, I planted myself beside my bedroom record-player (for that it was—dates me a bit, I know) with my mum’s Spanish guitar and her Mick Abrahams tutor record, and let Mick’s voice guide me through my very first guitar chords. Even then, I wondered how long I’d keep at it.

Suffice it to say, over two decades later, I’m still strummin’ and pickin’, and have even added the odd other instrument to the roster (though if they’ve got strings and frets too, that helps). I count learning the guitar as one of the better decisions I’ve made, not least because it’s often been a kind of escape for me—probably less so now than in the past, as I feel generally more content and comfortable with myself these days than has sometimes been the case. But there’s a whole other post there; just not this time…

So, will I reach for the guitar tonight and, for old-time’s sake, try and imagine how I strained to finger those first G and C chords? It’s hard to say, what with all the other calls on my time, but… well, you know, I just might do that.

“One, two, three: dum-ching, dum-ching, dum-ching…”

Fear not—I’m still here! I’ve been submerged in my latest OU course assignment (which I’ll be getting back to in a few moments), and have barely done any recording since the last post here nearly two weeks ago, so there’s not a great deal to report.

OK, I have laid down a couple of tracks for Joy’s children’s musical activity sessions—for one, I added some electric guitar and bass guitar to one of Joy and Charlotte’s keyboard-and-vocal tracks (“I’m A Little Teapot”, if you must know ) about a week ago. During this session, I plugged in a wonderful early-60s Hofner Futurama bass, which I’ve borrowed from a friend to play on a few tracks. It has real flatwound strings (instead of the roundwound ones you get on almost all guitars and basses nowadays) and a single neck pickup, and it is a joy to play, compared to “The Beast” (my Squier Precision Special 5-string). I should also add that my Christmas present is turning out very useful for my bass tracks!

Best of all, and partly because of the strings and pickup, the Hofner has this woolly, thuddy, slightly honky sound which you normally associate with mid-60s beat groups and Paul McCartney’s basslines with the Beatles—-exactly why I wanted to borrow this bass for these particular tracks I’ve had in mind. It was perfect for my version of “The Wheels On The Bus” for Joy (as I mentioned last time, I was going for a Monkees-kind of “Last Train To Clarksville” approach), and I’m hoping to use it on a few more tracks before I have to give it back

Right, and now I really do have to get back to the study. See you next time…

I got a rare chance to play on someone else’s recording session last night (as opposed to one of my own), thanks indirectly to an acquaintance of ours who is over in India for some months. Basically, she will be spending Christmas there this year, and a bunch of folk from our church decided to send her a little something to see her through the festive season: a CD with some specially-recorded renditions of Christmas songs (presumably ones that she likes).

When I got wind of this scheme, I volunteered my services (instrumental, recording, etc.), and shortly afterwards my friend Ben, who is producing the recordings, invited me in to lay down some guitar tracks. To this end, yesterday evening I took my acoustic and electric, plus my Roland VG-8 and EBow, round to Ben’s home studio, to see what we could get down in three hours.

As it turned out, the answer to that is, “quite a bit, considering”. With the VG-8, I didn’t have to spend much time messing with mike placement and so on, so I was more or less able to ‘plug in and go’, which saved us some valuable time. I played on three songs (“In The Bleak Midwinter”, “Shine Jesus Shine” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (yes, the Band Aid one, and specifically the 2004 version)); another friend, Luke, had already recorded piano tracks for the three songs, which we would be building on.

With the first two songs, I recorded a number of short guitar parts (e.g. verse/chorus, or single verses) in different styles, sounds, etc., so that Ben could splice the bits together into complete tracks later. Before now, I personally wouldn’t have thought of trying this approach (especially for a recording I wanted to sell), but now I’ve tried it for myself, I think it would work well for demos, or where I was recording another musician and time was particularly limited (as was the case here).

It was great fun playing lots of different guitar styles and sounds—everything from ’straight’ acoustic rhythm guitar, through jangly 12-string electric (courtesy of the VG-8) and some solo and ‘textural’ parts with the EBow, all the way to dual harmony lead guitar on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (the latter replicating Justin and Dan Hawkins‘ parts on the 2004 recording, which we’re modelling our version on). It’s almost like being a kind of musical Rory Bremner: how quickly can I switch between different “voices”?

Working the session last night, reminded me how much I enjoy this kind of thing: I just wish I had more time than I have, to play and record music both for myself and for others. To be honest, if we’d had more time, I would’ve had a couple more tries at improving some of my performances, following the advice of another recording musician I know (basically, when recording, don’t settle for any “second-best” attempts if you can help it, as you’ll hear your mistakes every time you play the track!). However, we had the time that we had, and I think in the end, the results should sound pretty good (especially if Ben can cut-and-paste the better bits together, and maybe play some extra guitar himself, which he’s well able to do).

From here, I understand Ben’s going to record the bass and drums with various other church people we know, as well as assorted solo and choir vocals. I’m really looking forward to hearing how this turns out, and hope that the results will help our friend in India feel like she has a part of us with her for Christmas.