Sidingsound

While I’m at the keyboard and in WordPress…

Periodically, over the last few months, I’ve made references to a Christmas CD project that Joy and I have been working on (here’s the blog post where I first mentioned the CD), and if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may have wondered how things were progressing on the recording. (Hey, I can dream )

In short: I think we’re about 75% done on the actual recording, partly thanks to an evening of work Joy and I put in the other day (mainly various keyboard parts of hers). Out of the six definite pieces on the “mini-album”—we might add a seventh if time and inspiration allows—five are at various stages of completion (and one, I think, is actually finished). The one “definite” piece we haven’t started yet, is waiting for the middle of next month, when we’re planning to spend some time with a friend in a proper studio with a decent piano, so Joy can record some solo parts.

At the rate we’re going, I reckon we’ll have this wrapped up in time for early December. At this point, I think the CD project will be limited to friends and family “stocking fillers”, but if the results turn out well enough, it’s certainly possible that they will receive a wider airing in due course.

More updates will follow shortly…

So, the August Bank Holiday has come and gone, and as we embark upon the final third of 2009, as if to mark the occasion, the British weather opened up with some pretty hefty showers this afternoon (and thankfully I was inside for most of them). Never mind: at least I got the grass cut yesterday when it was at least fairly quiet on the meteorological front…

Just a couple of items to report for today:

• Yesterday, Joy and I managed to get some work done on the Christmas CD project between us, as I’d hoped. During the day, Joy and Naomi took themselves off for a couple of hours, in which time I recorded some acoustic guitars and bass on “Joy To The World” (joining one existing electric dulcimer track, and accidentally wiping another ), and also played the same instruments to begin work on what I hope will be one of the centrepieces of the album (but don’t mind if I keep that under my proverbial hat a bit longer). Finally, to round off the afternoon, I fired up Logic and began another new track, “Silent Night”—recording some “voice” tracks to use later.
  Then, in the evening, Joy and I carried on working on this track—Joy recording the piano part into Logic, and me using the MIDI guitar to create organ, synth bass and a couple of vocoder parts (that’s why I needed the voice recordings I made earlier). I feel we have plenty more to do on these songs, but at this moment it feels as if we actually stand a chance of finishing this project in time for December… and then we can figure out what we’re going to do with it
• You may have noticed the Lifestream daily digest pages are publishing fine—I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to keep them, or perhaps move to a weekly version, so please feel free to comment on what you’d prefer. I’m also going to experiment with some code created by the Lifestream plugin’s author, which would add to a “single post” page on this blog, some entries from the Lifestream from around the time of the post. Exciting times…
• I am planning to return to last week’s post about the Nokia N900 (mainly, to answer some of the queries I myself posed), but I have to admit I am leaning away from considering the device as a phone upgrade to my venerable Nokia N95.
  It’s not that the N900 doesn’t look impressive—quite the reverse—but I’m mainly concerned that (a) T-Mobile UK is unlikely to stock it; (b) if they do, the cost of an upgrade is likely to be prohibitive and ongoing; (c) the N900 will not be a significant enough improvement for me over the N95 to justify ditching the latter; and (d) there just aren’t—and may never be—enough apps available for the N900 to do everything I’d like it to. Instead, I am thinking of keeping the N95 and looking for an “end-of-line” or refurbished older Linux “netbook” (such as an Asus Eee 701 or earlier Acer Aspire One), which would offer many of the same benefits (and others besides) for significantly less than the outlay for an N900. This all depends on many factors—finding such a machine, available funds, etc.—but for now I think the N900 is off the menu.

And no, I haven’t done any more work on the proposed “Music” page yet, but I 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

I've been trying to get another post up here for the last week or so, but something always interrupted me, so here's a go at a quick e-mail post from my mobile phone.

Basically, we recently invested in an iMac, partly to retire our old PC which is getting rather long in the tooth, but also for producing music and some graphics (the latter mainly for Joy's music activities for children). I bought Logic Express to go with the machine, and have been experimenting with it to add an extra dimension to our music production.

Yesterday evening I finally got to try one of Logic's software synthesisers that I've been dying to have a go on: EVOC, a vocoder synth (which blends the synth signal with an audio input such as a voice). In a nutshell, I was recording some guitar synth parts for "When The Sun Goes Off To Sleep", a song for the "concept album" (which I'm still hoping to finish this year, honest!), and decided to add some 'vocoded' voice to the end. The song has been around for a few years (I wrote it as a lullaby for my daughter), and my original acoustic demo dates from late 2004, but I've wanted to re-record it to give the song a more ambient, dreamy air. In particular, I hoped Joy might sing a bit on it, as I had conceived a female vocal sound for the ending, but she felt a bit shy and backed out, so the idea was shelved until I thought of using Logic's vocoder (which might capture even better the effect I wanted).

So, last night I recorded the voice part for the vocoder to use, set up the MIDI guitar and played the melody on the vocoder. The results were just what I was looking for—an ethereal 'voice' (or 'voices', as I'd played a 'chordal' part into the vocoder), floating behind the lead vocal in the final verse. I also tried my original idea for the song ending: two lines from the Korean nursery rhyme which gave the song its chorus melody. This worked pretty well too, so I think you can expect to hear all this on the final version of the song, when I get around to putting out the album.

The moral of this story: vocoders are fun

(or “here’s a post while I wait for something worthwhile to happen that I can post about”)!

Well, I sent in the OU assignment a few days ago (one more to go, and if all goes well, I’ll have gained the qualification I’m working towards ), so I allow myself a brief breather before heading back to the books. Well, to be truthful, a more sedentary period was forced on me the last couple of days, by what Robert Fripp in his diary might term a “Devil Bug” (high temperature, coughing up icky stuff, etc.), though I’m pleased to report it seems to have got bored and is probably looking for someone else to move on to.

Perhaps as a result, life feels as if it is taking a pause for breath itself right now—it’s rather on the uneventful side this weekend, but I may as well fill you in on a couple of things while I’m here:

• My ongoing project to produce a set of backing tracks for Joy’s children’s musical educational activity sessions, is… well, ongoing. Joy needed two more songs for this weekend which weren’t among the ones we demoed with my sister-in-law just before Christmas, so when I finished the OU assignment I went to the studio and quickly laid down the tracks. “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” ended up with an apt (albeit somewhat predictable) country-ish vibe, whilst “Cows In The Kitchen” developed a life of its own in the hour or so that I was laying it down—imagine Roger McGuinn jamming with Queen on “‘39″, and you have an idea of the direction it took…
• As you may guess, I have made no progress on any of my own material since writing about my intentions the other week, and it’s probably time I just got the ball rolling. I could make a start by making a demo of the “title” track of the concept album, which has been pretty well complete in the writing sense for some time now (though I may change the final couple of lines to lead into one of my older songs, should I add it to the album sequence—maybe I’ll record both versions and choose the appropriate one at the end). Watch this space.
• Time is also running out to commit to disk the first of my “cover-per-month” project songs, so the first one might need to be a “start of February” song instead of “January”! Unfortunately, for copyright reasons I don’t think I’ll be able to make these recordings generally available, but… well, if you really want to hear them, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”…
  And the first song? It will be “Six String Orchestra”, originally written by Harry Chapin (of “Cat’s In The Cradle” fame), but probably better known for its inclusion in an episode of “The Muppet Show” (sung by Scooter in character as the song’s eager student rock star). The challenge here will be playing the acoustic guitar and singing deliberately poorly (well, the second part should be easier ), as Chapin famously did when he played the song in concert (look on YouTube for video clips of this). Anyway, it’s quite a fun song, and I think I’ll enjoy playing the rest of the “phantom band” in the choruses!

(Bit of a long post, this one—don’t worry, I might not write another for a few days, so this should keep you going…)

Yes, it’s that time of year again—the dreaded “New Year’s resolutions” rear their head for the traditional two weeks or so that most of us actually keep to them And yes, I have a couple of my own, such as the feeling that I should probably start losing weight—I think Christmas tipped the balance, literally—but there’s at least one resolution I’ve made in a rather broad sense:

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

Now, if you’re reading this a year from now and you can’t find any indication of such a completed project, then you have permission to “do a Nelson Muntz” on me (“Ha-ha!”), but as I write this, at least one new album in 2008 is definitely my intention. I can’t promise that all the material will have been written in 2008, mind you, but at the very least I’d like to have a new set of recordings in hand, whatever I might actually do with them when they’re finished.

Actually, that’s one of the big questions in my mind: is there much point in making actual CDs of a recording project, as I’m not a gigging musician as such? My last set in front of an audience of any size was at the wedding of two of my friends in March 2006, and that was just two songs. Furthermore, with OU study, the day job, looking after my daughter and helping out my wife with her various work activities, I think the chances of me making it to any open mike nights in my area could be described charitably as “slight-to-’fuggetaboudit’”, so maybe I have little choice but to embrace the mantle of “bedroom musician and proud of it”.

Having said that, there’s something about having your music on a physical object, which a digital download can’t quite capture—maybe I’m just old-fashioned in that way, but then again I think we’re just replaying the “vinyl-vs-CD” and/or “CDR-vs-cassette” ponderings of years past. At least with outlets like lulu.com, which makes it relatively easy for independent artists to sell both physical CDs and digital downloads, it seems I have a choice as to which format I eventually plump for (or even both).

But of course, I still have to actually produce the music first, and it’s there that I’m pondering what path to take. I’m in (at least) two minds on this question; one idea is I could just write songs and accumulate enough for an album, but I suspect that won’t be structured or goal-orientated enough to help me get going (or keep me going).

The other idea I am more seriously toying with, is a “concept album”, which automatically makes me feel somewhat defensive when talking about it. Now, I’m not considering this approach to hark back to the heyday of the “genre” in the 60s and 70s—it’s more to give me some kind of framework around which to start writing new material, without which I might find it hard to get started again after what’s been a quite lengthy lay-off.

I don’t want to give too much away at this stage, for various reasons (inc. not having much to give away yet, and the possibility I might not actually get far with the idea anyway, though I’ll give it a good try), but here’s the concept: a set of songs with the “arc” theme of one day in a road in an apparently sleepy English village, and a few of the people who live in this road. I envisage a couple of “undercurrents”, such as whether the village really is as sleepy as it seems, a fondness for the English countryside (or at least a “townie”’s image of it), and so on.

At this point, I can imagine someone suggesting that Ray Davies took a similar tack with “The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society”, and that came out before I was even born. But hey, even if my concept was more than superficially similar (and they are different as you press deeper—trust me on this), it’s not a bad record to follow, don’t you think?

In fact, the album I’d more likely cite as an influence on my idea, is one of my “desert island albums”: The Divine Comedy’s second long-player “Promenade” (1994). It has a similar concept in some ways (a “day in the life”, in this case of two lovers), and I really like the album’s quasi-classical “chamber/baroque pop” sound (with lots of string quartet and oboe/cor anglais) which Neil Hannon never returned to once he could afford big orchestras from the mid-1990s onwards.

I actually sketched out the first song (which carries the same title as the projected album, though I won’t reveal the name yet) back in the autumn of 2006—just as Ray Davies wrote the original song “Village Green” in 1966, two years before the rest of the album. I may try and work a couple of other existing songs of mine into the lineup, but others will have to be new compositions. A couple of ideas I’m toying with, both for songs and for characters in the “story”, are:

• The vicar of the parish church, trying to write a sermon; to suggest the books in his study, the “lyrics” would be a long list of names from Church history (basically, a conscious homage to “The Booklovers” from “Promenade”)
• A man who lived the high life in LA for a number of years (not sure yet what his job was, and maybe the detail is not that important), but who now lives quietly in this sleepy English village—song presented as a jangly, mid-tempo, Roger McGuinn/Tom Petty folk-rocker (something like McGuinn’s “King Of The Hill”, if you’ve heard that)
• The old wrought-iron lamp-post (!) in the small square at one end of the road, imagining what it would’ve seen over the decades (if it could see, obviously)

I think you can see roughly where I’m heading with this, although the final sound of the album may not be as heavily “classical” as “Promenade” was, mainly as I’d have to render any classical instruments with MIDI, and would have to write some convincing string/woodwind arrangements too. Not that either of those points would stop me or anything, but they’re making me think about which direction I really want to take the project in.

There’s also a mental image forming of an idea for the cover art: a photo of a typical English parish church, digitally processed to look like an old lithograph or pencil drawing. I picture the rest of the CD inlays as looking like an English parish church newsletter would’ve appeared before the arrival of home PCs and cheap DTP in the 1990s—typewritten text, literally cut-and-pasted and duplicated on a questionable-quality photocopier. I don’t know if this can be “mocked-up” on a computer, or whether it would be necessary to actually produce the artwork that way (cutting/pasting, etc.), but it would be fun finding out…

So, that’s an idea of what I’ve got in mind for the year—I wonder what I’ll be writing in twelve months’ time?

Oh: Happy New Year!

A quick post to reassure you that I’m still here—don’t worry, I’ve just been very busy with assorted pre-Christmas busy-ness. One of the biggest projects of the moment: Joy and I have been working feverishly preparing a CD of her piano students’ performances for their families for the festive season, and it’s due to come back from the duplicators any time now. We’re very pleased with the results, and are hopeful that Joy’s students and their families will feel the same way.

So, I hope all your Christmas preparations are going well, and I promise I’ll be back before the festive season!

Just to reassure you all, dear readers, that I am still alive here (!), and to reward you for your patience, a couple of quick updates:

• Managed to squeeze in a bit of vocal recording for the CD project track “When The Sun Goes Off To Sleep” last night; however, I wasn’t pleased with either my performance or the sound quality of the recording (of which more in the next point), so I’m going to give it another go in the next couple of days. After all, if I’m actually going to do anything with these tracks in the end, I’d rather they were the best performances I can manage—one great piece of advice I picked up from a more experienced recording musician I know.
• I have got to figure out the effects section of my 2488mkII, and quickly. At the very least, I need to know how to get the noise suppressor working, to cut out the hiss and extraneous noise when I use the mike and external compressor, as there’s no way I can leave such distractions on record if I’m going for a ‘proper’ CD recording (as opposed to demos which only friends/family will hear). It’s just a shame that compared to my previous multitrack (a Boss BR-8, which admittedly was designed to be utterly idiot-proof), I find the 2488mkII’s effects facilities rather impenetrable, but I’m going to have to get the hang of them pretty rapidly if I want to make progress with the CD project.
• The drum lessons have hit their first snag: I’m having trouble getting my arms and legs to act truly independently. Granted, I have the rudiments down fairly well already, and I think I could, at a pinch, knock out a straight 4/4 pattern. However, my teacher has set me a particular exercise (alternating right/left single-stroke rolls on beats 1-4, with bass drum on beat 1 and hi-hat pedal on 3), and suddenly I turn into one of those clockwork robot toys that kids used to get for Christmas in the 1960s, except without the precision. I’m trying to practice this in the evenings (and I’m increasingly realising I’m just not used to practicing at musical things, so it’s not easy), but overall I suspect I’m going to have to work quite hard at this before I get it right. And I’m starting another OU course module next week…
• Drum-related note (sorry): I’m quietly hoping to have amassed sufficient moolah by Christmas, to be able to add a Roland HD1 electronic kit to the Sidingsound studio for Christmas. Fitting it into the room may require some shuffling-around of the current furniture (even though it’s probably the most compact electronic kit out there that you’d want to own), but at least I have a bit of time to figure that out.
• And just to round all this off, I’m thinking of posting a quick ‘tour’ of the studio soon, though at about 10′x6′, a single article should be enough…