Sidingsound

Kid's stuff

First off, it's looking like the covers recording project (from last time) may well end up being for immediate family and friends only (lucky them :-) ). I had an e-mail exchange with a singer-songwriter in the US who has done something similar, and he said that over there, if you record someone else's composition, you have to tell the organisation which collects songwriters' royalties, and cough up a fee for each copy which gets sold, downloaded, whatever. ("Well, duh!", comes the retort from the seasoned artists out there—hey, go easy on me, I'm new to this ;-) )

I imagine there's a similar arrangement here in the UK, and apparently it applies whether you're a million-selling artist or a dilletante bedroom musician, or whether you're offering it for free or charging for it. Methinks this will stay a little private project of mine, then—oh well, the practice will be good for me, and it might even spark a new song or two...

Anyway, I'm still doing some other recording at the moment: you may remember from a few weeks back, that Sidingsound Productions is busy on a set of children's songs for Joy's new programme of children's musical activity sessions. I now have a good number of tracks "in the can" (OK, on the disk) for that, and will probably be working on the others sporadically over the next couple of months. Ultimately, we think we'd like to try selling CDs of the songs, so the arrangements will need to be filled out and tidied up before then.

In the process, though, I must say I'm enjoying working on these tracks—even though these are children's songs, I'm approaching them not that differently from any other song I'd produce. Some songs are receiving a slightly different treatment than you might expect; I've arranged "The Wheels On The Bus" in a kind of Monkees style (sort of country-tinged folk-rock), and even borrowed a friend's wonderful old 60s Hofner Futurama bass guitar (with flatwound strings!) to get that "Last Train To Clarksville" sound.

Other songs are getting makeovers for these sessions, too: "The Ants Go Marching" has shades of Billy Bragg's "The Marching Song Of The Covert Battalions" (which nicks the "Ants" tune anyway :-) ), and "Johnny Works With One Hammer" dovetails two arrangements, inspired by Julia Plaut and The Wiggles' versions of the song.

I shall tantalise you with that glimpse of the future, and leave it at that for now...

Labels: childrenssongs, covers, music

posted by Tim @ 18:26 0 Comments Links to this post

Another (possible) project for the year

And in my continued determination to do more recording (and hopefully songwriting) in 2008, my latest idea to ensure I actually do this...

As far as possible, I am going to try and record at least one 'cover version' a month throughout 2008, partly to get me into the habit of recording, arranging and so on, and maybe to kick-start some new songs of my own.

I have a couple of candidates in mind already. To a great extent, I'm going to try and choose songs I like, but which I don't think are that widely known. If I do end up covering any more familiar numbers, I will try and perform them in a different way to the original(s), unless I really can't think how to do that :-)

Unless there's a copyright issue which makes it a risky prospect, I hope to post the tracks for free download here, along with some notes on why I chose the song, the techie stuff about the recording, etc. I may also limit the time period during which these recordings will be available from this site, partly due to the above issue, but also because I don't have that much Web server space to archive the audio files (and I'm not sure if I can upload material to the Internet Archive which I didn't compose myself).

So, keep an eye open for the first cover, probably within the next few weeks or so, and remember: these tracks may only be available for a short time, so jump in when you see them!

Labels: covers, demos, music, recording

posted by Tim @ 13:02 0 Comments Links to this post