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.
There's an old joke in the UK that some things are like waiting for buses: you wait ages with nothing, and then three come along at the same time. Well, in this case it's more like two, but I've been chewing over ideas for a new song, and today another completely new one overtook it and leapt into existence almost unbidden.
I've probably never said it here before, but my answer to the perennial songwriter's question—which comes first, words or music?—is usually: the music, and the words tend to follow. Having said that, since I embarked on my project for 2008 (for want of a less cringeworthy name, a "concept album"), I've found myself thinking a lot more in terms of lyrics first, probably as I have to try and fit them into the "concept". This new song is the second in succession where the lyrics came first, and the music later, except here it all occurred within 48 hours.
I had a title (which I won't reveal yet, perhaps until I have a rough demo to share), and the lyrics came out in fits and starts over the course of yesterday evening, this lunchtime and this evening. There was a rough idea in my head of the kind of musical style I had in mind. I'll be quite open and admit this song was inspired by two things: the Kinks song "Afternoon Tea" (from their album "Something Else" (1967)), and a bag of green tea I had on my desk at my office (it'll make more sense when you hear the song).
What really surprised me when I sat down with the guitar, was how easily—even naturally—the music came for the words. I rarely write music to words, as I feel the results are more stilted and 'forced' when I do that; here, however, the chords and melody almost wrote themselves, and although I may well need to sand off a rough edge here and there, I think that the final version may not change greatly from what emerged the first time I played it.
For my sixth birthday (1978, if you must know), my main present from my parents was a Stylophone—a tiny monophonic electronic organ played by touching the tip of a stylus on a metal "keyboard". I had a white model, which may have been a bit rarer than the usual black-with-fake-wood-trim ones I've seen elsewhere—I ended up buying one of the latter from a jumble sale some years ago, and it's still around the house somewhere. Sadly, the white one succumbed to battery leakage in the end, but at least I still have the black one (if I can find it).
Around 2000, when I had rather more spare time than I do now, I built a Stylophone SoundFont (sampled sound bank) by sampling and looping every note on my Stylo, both via the built-in line output and by miking up the speaker. I then recreated the Stylo's vibrato in the SoundFont editor, and created a couple of patches with chorus effects. I still have the SoundFont somewhere, and might release it on this site some time if anyone is interested.
I mention this because at the time I made this SoundFont, I really wanted to make another one, this time of the Stylophone 350S. This was the "deluxe" Stylo, with a wider range of voices (organ, clarinet, etc.) and a higher price tag to match; I really wanted this instead of the model I actually got, but of course all these years later, I realise Mum and Dad would have been crazy to have bought such an expensive piece of kit for a six-year-old!
My wish to make a 350S SoundFont was understandably stymied by the difficulty of actually finding one—fully-working models are not common now, and those you do find are quite pricey—and I doubt I would find the time to sample it and produce the SoundFont these days. Just as well, then, that I no longer have to, as Precisionsound now offer a Stylophone 350S sampled "instrument".
Something else for my pocket money to go on sometime :-)
He has a valid perspective on this concept, not least because his current CD was largely funded through fans' pre-orders and a rather well thought-out "incentive" system (i.e. the more one paid in advance, the more "goodies" one received when the CD was finished). I liked Scott's last album (2003's "Where I've Been"), and bought the CD even though he made the tracks available for free download, as I wanted to repay in some way the trust he placed in his listeners (and the music was good too :-) ), so I also ended up pre-ordering "SYFY" as well.
Scott also raised an interesting question: if you don't know as an artist whether you have an audience out there to fund the recording of your new masterpiece (and being a thirtysomething amateur musician/songwriter who has never toured and can number his live performances in the last five years on the fingers of one hand, that includes me), why not release an album as a free Internet download, and see what reaction it gets?
I am giving this idea some thought at present, and here's my concept:
I record and mix the songs for my current project as planned, but deliberately play as much as possible myself to keep the costs down (possibly with some guest keyboards from Joy if she's up for it). I would then post the results online for free download... and it's here where I'm not sure how to take it further. I'd like to rely on an "honour system", and ask downloaders if they would like to let me know what they thought of the album, and whether they might also be interested in an "enhanced" CD version. (Presumably, by "enhanced CD", I could mean either the existing recordings with extra items on a "data" section of the CD—the approach Scott Andrew took with "Where I've Been"—or re-recorded versions of the songs with other musicians, or even a combination of the two.)
Of course, I haven't thought everything through yet. For one thing, I'm well aware that by putting the tracks online for free download, I'm taking the risk that some, or even most, downloaders will just take the tracks and give me no feedback (or even worse, some might try reselling them or passing off the songs and/or recordings as their own, or something). Well, yes, it might happen, but then some listeners might try something similar even if I just tried selling CDs, and as Scott has said more than once, it's a kind of backhanded compliment if you've produced something which someone considers worth stealing...
If I were to try this approach, I would be putting my faith in the honour of anyone interested enough in my recorded work to download it in the first place (and to get it for free), to also take a couple of minutes to let me know (a) that they've downloaded the album; (b) what they honestly think of it; and (c) whether they would be prepared to cough up for a value-added version. Yes, it's entirely possible that I might get little or no feedback, or that the feedback I do receive tells me that the album sucks and I should stick to the day job. At least if the latter happened, I would know where I stand in the arena of public opinion, and that at least I had given it my best shot and hadn't just (artistically speaking) hidden in my bedroom, too nervous of the possibility of criticism to try venturing out and discovering if my music had an audience. (Which come to think of it, pretty well sums up what I did throughout my twenties, when I actually had the time to go out and try gigging that I don't really have now (with a family and other commitments).)
Rejoice, o people—at last, I've managed to dash down a basic demo of the "lamppost song" (the one I've been mentioning over the last week or two). It seems that these days, I can only record stuff for the new album project in-between ongoing tracking for songs for Joy's children's musical activity sessions—I slotted this demo after laying down part of a backing track for "Hop, Skip and Jump".
I say the new demo is "basic", but it's currently vocal, electric guitar, bass and drums, and if Joy can find the time, I'm hoping she can play some "harpsichord" (sampled, naturally). On the other hand, I realised partway through that I'd missed out the 'instrumental break', so I may re-record the song for the album at a later date, and keep this song for reference.
In my view, the demo isn't quite ready for others to hear, mainly because to my ears, the pitching on the vocal is way out (it's a weakness of mine, but I can, and have to, do better than I did this time). However, at some point soon I'll upload the demo to the Internet Archive so you can have your first taste of the direction the album will probably take.
Nope, still haven't committed a demo of the new song to disk, but I'm really going to try hard over the weekend, honest! (I mean, it's just going to be guitar and vocal at first, so how long can it take, anyway...?)
I also had an idea for yet another song, that I started "brainstorming" when I arrived home from work this evening. Sometimes, I use "mind maps" (or a mutated version thereof) to help me organise related thoughts, and I find they can work pretty well for songwriting, at least when you're at the stage of collecting ideas, concepts, phrases and so on for your new creation.
Anyway, I jotted down a few thoughts as a mind map, and will leave them to percolate for a bit, as seems to be my usual habit. I won't mention much about the song yet, except to say it's another element of my "concept album" idea, about two young lovers who like to meet on the old stone bridge over the stream on the edge of the village.
A quick post dashed off from my mobile (in case you were wondering, I didn't enter all this on the phone keypad, as I have a Bluetooth keyboard), because... well, just because I can :-)
Thought I'd update you on the song which I said in the last post that I was writing. I'm hoping to find some time this week to record a first demo of it, which will hopefully show me if/where I need to work on it a bit more. I have an arrangement idea already: I'm going to play Spanish (nylon-strung) guitar on the song, and hope Joy will try playing harpsichord (at least, a sampled one). I'll probably add drums and upright bass (MIDI guitar for the latter), and possibly a "string quartet" arrangement (yup, sampled again), but at the start, I'll keep it to guitar and vocal only.
If I can find the time, I'll try and lay down one or two other demos, such as the "title" track of the "concept" album and maybe even something else I've got queued up. Then again, I have enough other calls on my time to risk not being able to record much this week; come back in a few days to see what (if anything) I managed to fit in.
And just when I wasn't expecting it, I just scribbled down some lyrics the other day. They weren't entirely out of the blue; the song itself is one I've been percolating for a bit, for my aforementioned concept album idea. I will keep the title to myself until I've at least recorded a rough demo, just to string you along a bit...
I'm not completely happy with the lyrics themselves at this point (they feel rather stilted and rhyming dictionary-ish to me, and overall read like I was trying too hard, which perhaps I was), but think they were heading in the right direction, so I'll see if I can buff them up before I let the song out.
This piece is unusual for me, because when I write songs I almost always end up coming up with the music first, whereas this time it's coming the other way round. It might be because I've had so little time lately to go near an instrument for any great length of time. I have a few chord and melody ideas, and am weighing up whether to try composing this song on piano, mainly because I'm not great at the keyboard and it might (paradoxically) make me think more about what music I'm writing, or lead me down a path I might not take were I holding a guitar.
Hope to have a demo of this song to share with you soon, anyway. It looks as if the "concept album" project might have started sooner than I thought.
(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!
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...
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...
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!
(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?
So, we made our way down to Cribbs Causeway (a really rather big shopping mall in Bristol, for anyone outside the UK (or the south of England?)), and amongst other things I bagged two CDs in the Zavvi sale which demonstrate my musical multiple personalities reasonably well: Coldplay's "A Rush Of Blood To The Head" (no, I don't own it yet), and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's 1967 debut "Gorilla". On the latter, it's possible to hear even at the start of their short recording career, the Bonzos pulling in two directions at once, playing both the 1930s novelty songs with which they began, and the warped Beatles pastiches (such as Neil Innes' sublime "Equestrian Statue") which probably bagged them a cameo appearance in Magical Mystery Tour, and may have helped Paul end up producing their biggest hit single, "I'm the Urban Spaceman".
As for the Coldplay CD, you have to bear in mind that I've heard their singles many times, in most cases without ever finding out what they were called. Whilst "Rush Of Blood" has at least two of the ones I wanted, the song that I was really looking for, turned out not to be on the CD I bought, but on the one before it ("Parachutes"). At least I finally found out that the song was called "Trouble", though...
And on that note, I bid a workmanlike farewell to you all in 2007, and look forward to seeing you all again in a couple of days, to see what 2008 might have in store for us.
...I promise I'll be back before the festive season...
Well, I said that in my last post, and would like to keep my word after all :-)
A few moments of peace and quiet have descended on Walker Towers, affording me a brief window of opportunity to check back here before the Christmas festivities kick off in earnest. I hope you're all having a good run-up to the festive season, and that things are generally holding together for you.
The main things to report right now, are that Joy's students' piano CD project went well, and we've now begun our next recording endeavour: a bumper collection of backing tracks of children's songs, for a new activity of Joy's in the New Year. One motivation for doing this ourselves, was that we (OK, mainly I) didn't like the production values of many of the pre-school children's song CDs we've heard, and felt (correctly or otherwise) that we could do better ourselves. Whether or not this turns out to be true, we're going to give it our best shot...
The recording commenced last weekend, with me tracking Joy playing "guide" keyboard parts for around twenty-five songs (mostly nursery rhymes and other children's favourites). We did this so that my sister-in-law Charlotte could come up from her home ninety minutes or so away, and record lead vocals on as many of the songs as we could manage in the time, as we were assuming for various reasons that this would be the only chance we would get.
Ultimately, Charlotte was a real pro, and was able to sing on all but a couple of the tracks (and I even found time to double-track her voice on one song). We now have the basis for the rest of the recording work, and Joy and I plan to build the rest of the instrumentation around Charlotte's vocals, perhaps even replacing Joy's guide keyboards along the way. Joy's going to play piano and other keyboards, whilst I'll be contributing guitars, ukulele, recorders, bass, drums and anything else I can lay my hands on (!), plus probably contributing some extra vocals here and there.
I don't know how much we can get finished before the New Year, but I'm back to work pretty promptly after the 1st, so I'll really need to get my skates on and lay down as many tracks as I can whilst I have the time off. I will try and keep you in the loop as to how it's going, and what we're going to do with the recordings when they're ready.
Anyway, have a very happy Christmas Eve/Day/Boxing Day, and see you back here in the last few days of 2007...
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!
Well, that audio processing is still going on, so while I'm waiting some more...
Have you discovered the Web site Now Play It? The concept is simple: take some well-known pop and rock songs (both old and new), and sell video downloads teaching you how to play them.
So far so good—music tutor videos have been around almost as long as the home video concept itself—but I think what makes Now Play It a bit more special, is that the Internet and modern audio/video production methods make it possible to produce these videos and get them out to the audience much more quickly. In other words, the tutorials can cover songs which have barely dropped out of the charts, whereas tutor DVDs might be months behind the times, if not more.
What's more, NPI have managed to get some of the artists who produced the original tracks, to present the tutorials themselves, and it's here where for me, it gets really interesting. You can have members of Supergrass coaching you through some of their back catalogue; KT Tunstall showing you her guitar chops on "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" and others; Graham Coxon (ex-Blur) doing much the same (on his songs, obviously)...
...and lastly (and most pertinently for me): Sir Paul himself, giving us a full-blown multi-instrumental (guitars, bass, drums) lesson on one of the better songs from "Memory Almost Full", "Ever Present Past".
Quite aside from me seriously considering stumping up the readies for Macca's video tutorial, Now Play It has got me thinking: with YouTube and mobile phone video output getting better and cheaper all the time, why aren't more musicians providing this kind of interaction with their fans? I'd consider doing this for my own works, although I admit I've got to build up a few fans first...
So, if I end up posting a video tutorial for "Sidings and branches" or something, you'll know where the idea came from. You read it here first.
File this under "just because I can", or possibly "something I'm doing while I'm waiting for some audio to finish processing"...
One of my favourite singles of the year would have to be "Dance Tonight" by Paul McCartney, from his latest album "Memory Almost Full". Full disclosure: I've been a Macca fan since the 1980s, but to be honest, I wasn't as keen on MAF as I was on Paul's last (pop/rock) opus, "Chaos And Creation In The Backyard" (2005), and I'm still not quite sure why. It's not just that I'd hold "Chaos" to be one of the best albums of Macca's career (yes, all of it)—I simply didn't feel that the songwriting on "Memory" was that consistent, and that there were just not as many strong numbers on the album as there were on "Chaos".
Maybe the key was Nigel Godrich, who produced "Chaos". I've read that McCartney himself credits Godrich with really "pushing" him on the project, rejecting many of McCartney's songs as "not strong enough" (my paraphrase) and encouraging him to show what he is capable of as a writer and performer.
Godrich also largely isolated McCartney from his usual touring band, persuading him to play most of the instruments himself. Whilst Macca is certainly no stranger to this approach (quite a few of his albums were recorded mostly or completely solo), being effectively forced to work differently to how he'd probably expected to do, may well have contributed to Paul producing an album quite different from most of its forbears.
But back to "Dance Tonight", which I think is just a great single. It has more hooks than an angling competition, not least with that thumping four-on-the-floor bass drum and the jangling strummed mandolin which provides the body of the song. It's almost primevally simple in concept, yet the song has a cheerful simplicity which just seems to pick me up when I hear it—and don't we all need that somedays?
And it gave me as good an excuse as any to try posting a YouTube video here :-)
If you've been reading here for more than a few weeks, you may recall a previous post where I promised I would make available some of the demos I've recorded in the last few years. Well, it took a bit longer than I expected, but to reward your patience I herewith offer up the first instalment of recordings for your free download (and, hopefully, enjoyment).
I should mention at the outset that these tracks are all hosted at the Internet Archive, and that the links below point to the archive page for each track. The recordings have all been converted automatically into various audio formats, including the ubiquitous MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, so you can choose which one you wish to use (and I'd recommend the latter two, especially FLAC if you want the best quality).
Unless stated otherwise, assume that everything you hear on the recordings is me—that includes some background noises (e.g. rustles, creaks, knocks, etc.), as I haven't always cleaned these up. These recordings should really be considered "rough", but hey, you're getting them for free... :-)
Sidings and branches - from the spring of 2005, one of my personal favourites. That's a real glockenspiel on there; the instrument is now unfortunately somewhat "trashed" after my daughter got her hands on it...
Inner Roundabout Way - another 2005 song, intended as the first in a series of spoof "lost" Sixties songs by imaginary bands with silly names, but this one ended up the only track I completed for the aborted project. (The band, incidentally, was going to be called "Icarus' Wings"—a folk trio who decided to go electric and psychedelic, with mixed results. You be the judge.)
Shell-like - again, from 2005, a sprightly ode to the delights of a seaside holiday in summer, with the odd unexpected lyrical twist.
Christmas morning - Written and demo-ed in the late spring of 2002, just after I got married, this song's lyrics actually doesn't have much to do with the festive season, but it fits that time of year quite nicely anyway. Best of all, I entered the song into the Folk category of the 2002 UK Songwriting Contest, and it was a runner-up in the category - perhaps my finest hour to date? My wife Joy plays piano and synth "bells", but the guitar synth "pad" is me, as is everything else.
All that I can do - The newest song of this batch, this jaunty number was written over August and September 2007 with the ukulele Joy gave me for Valentine's Day this year (aaaahhhh, it must be true love :-) ). This is a fairly rough-edged demo—two ukuleles and acoustic guitar—and please forgive any background noise you may encounter here and there. (This was also one of the first recordings I made on my Tascam 2488mkII multitrack, so I was effectively learning how to use it as I recorded this (still am, really).)
I should also point out that these recordings are all released under a Creative Commons licence (specifically, the England/Wales Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) 2.0 version). In plain English, that means you can't sell my recordings to make money (though you're welcome to distribute them for free), and you can use them as a basis for a derivative work (i.e. remix, add extra instruments, etc.), so long as you make the derivative work available under the same licence conditions. Basically, please feel free to download these tracks, use them in your podcasts, include them on your "great tracks I've heard" playlist or whatever—in fact, please do, and drop me a line (via the obfuscated e-mail link elsewhere on this page) to let me know :-)
I'll upload a second instalment of demos soon, and after that I plan to add some older "albums" of mine to the Internet Archive, such as the mini-album "Rosewood" (2000-2001), and the instrumental collections "Over The Bridge" (1999) and "Through The Arch Window" (1998). Beyond that, my "juvenilia" becomes, I think, increasingly embarrassing, and I'm not sure how much I wish to reveal!
Having said that, "Five Songs" (1996) has some moments I'm quite pleased with—I taped (literally) that collection in the autumn of 1996 on a Tascam 424mkII four-track, under the influence of melancholy singer-songwriters such as Nick Drake, and the early solo work of Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt.
Artistically, and particularly for me personally, the mini-album is rather of its time and place, and I'm interested in preserving it mainly for that reason. Mind you, I'm not quite sure how I'd go about transferring the tracks from the four-track cassettes (even though I still have the 424 up in the loft) to digital, nor to what extent I could "clean up" the audio and make it more listenable—nor, for that matter, can I say whether the effort it would take would ultimately be worthwhile. And come to think of it, I'm not 100% certain where the master tapes are...
Food for thought, indeed, and perhaps a project for the Christmas holidays?
You know, now that I've been learning drums for a bit (adding it to guitar, ukulele, mandolin, bass guitar and the rest), I can honestly say I think the tub-thumper at the back of the band (which they usually are, unless one's name happens to be Dave Clark) is often the most maligned and undervalued member.
Fine. So drummers don't play a melodic instrument as such—oh, and what a debate we could have there!—and some of them do tend to fit the "Animal" stereotype, if we're honest—but with the exception of the keyboard player, it's unlikely that any other band member will usually be playing two, three or even four independent parts at the same time, as the drummer may be doing.
That's what I've found most difficult to get used to when learning the drums, especially when some patterns might (say) require you to play quarter-notes on the hi-hat, whilst playing a combination of quarter- and eighth-notes on the kick and snare. And doing this whilst keeping accurate time and doing so over the full duration of a song...
...well, all I can say is: don't wheel out the drummer jokes until you can prove you're able to play what they can! And if you think about it, a good drummer can potentially save a bad band, but a bad drummer can kill a good band...
Whilst I'm here, I might as well mention that I've made no progress on either the original CD project I've referred to in the last month or two, and am even thinking of dropping it entirely, in favour of moving on to new material. I can't see there's much prospect of me being able to work on the old stuff for the rest of the year, not least because I have a couple of other short-term projects which are likely to take me up to Christmas (of which I may post more in due course).
Thanks for your patience in the meantime, and please keep an eye on the blog...
First news: I turned 35 yesterday. And now I've got that out of the way... ;-)
In the dim distant future, when I find myself with a spare slot in my ever-busy schedule, I would love to have a go at contributing to the Album-A-Day project (please excuse the URL—and for that matter, some of the language on the page).
In a nutshell, AAD is a challenge to the recording artist to be spontaneously creative—to see what you can come up with given a very restrictive brief:
The mission is to compose and record a set of songs (at least thirty songs, or at least twenty minutes' total length) within a 24-hour period. (As the project's founder points out, this idea lends itself more to lots of short songs, than to longer pieces.)
You can collaborate with others, but everyone must be working on the same song at the same time (i.e. no "parallel" working).
Every song you start must be included on the finished album ("no outtakes").
No ideas or songs from before the chosen day can be included (in other words, no covers or interpretations of existing material). It all has to be composed on the day.
Finally, the results should be made available for free download, although it is OK to offer it for sale as well (presumably with some sort of incentive to make this worthwhile).
It doesn't take a genius to work out that the output from such a project would lack some of the polish of something worked on over a longer period. However, the project makes this a virtue—an express aim of concepts like this is to force the participant to stop procrastinating, worrying over quality, etc., and just get on with the act of creating. This, for one, makes it a useful exercise for breaking the old writer's block; something I myself am only too familiar with...
I've only listened to one of the efforts to date (John Governale's "Songs of the Oxford Hills"), which whilst obviously not as polished an affair as a more leisurely-constructed set of songs, has some pleasant moments (especially the wistful "Coming Home To Hebron") and almost sounds too coherent for how I'd imagine an AAD should sound.
Whilst I'd really like to have a go at creating an AAD myself, the major bar I can think of is how I could find a whole day to actually do it, with my family to consider. I think I'd have to include them in in it somehow (Joy on piano, and Naomi (nearly 3) on constant interruptions!), and make this a feature of the finished project.
Ah well, file under "for the future"—for now, I have a couple of other recording projects on the go, inbetween which I'm still trying to get together my original CD project. At this rate, I think I'll produce an AAD first.
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.
Hoppípolla [a track from Sigur Rós' 2005 album Takk...] is the track television turns to when it wants to push the button marked Cower Before the Majesty of This Event, Puny Human.
If you've ever heard Hoppípolla (and if you live in the UK, you probably have without knowing it—amongst its many uses in the British media, the BBC used it on the trailers for Planet Earth), you'll know exactly what Alexis is talking about: a majestic arpeggiated piano introduction morphing into a sweeping orchestral epic which puts one in mind of vast glaciers or huge herds of gazelle leaping over the Serengeti.
I just wish I could've come up with Alexis' way of putting it.
Yesterday evening, I was sat down (and I won't say where), when I thought I'd see if I could do the exercise (crotchet beats, alternating left and right hands, with "bass drum" on beat 1 and "hi-hat pedal" on 3) without the sticks and practice pad. Whilst before, the exercise turned me into an uncoordinated mess, this time to my amazement, I found I was suddenly able to do it. Yes!
Moreover, I barely had to think about what I was doing. This is good, as it's important that I don't think much about it, if I'm ever going to be able to play drums to even a reasonable standard. It's rather like when you learn to play any other instrument, or ride a bicycle—when you can stop thinking mechanically about what you're doing, and just do it, you've made a breakthrough.
So, it looks like I've passed a milestone on the road—just thought you'd like to hear the good news :-)
As my nascent CD project advances with the pace of an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping (to paraphrase Blackadder Goes Forth), in the meantime...
It's been my intention for some time to make available at least some of the demos of the songs of mine, which are most likely to make it onto the CD, so you can have some idea of what form (hopefully) the final album may take. The oldest of these demos date back to the spring of 2002, whilst I threw together the latest one only about a month ago, so they cover quite a range of my "career" (such as it is).
Whilst the demos are not quite ready for downloading yet, I've started uploading them to their first online destination: the Internet Archive. I have had a login at the IA for some time, and even uploaded a 'test' track a few years ago—this time, I thought I'd try the Archive for hosting the demos, mainly because of bandwidth, more expansive hosting space, and the fact that (if I am correct) the IA automatically encodes audio into multiple different file formats, so visitors can choose the format which suits them best.
It'll take a little time, as the IA usually requests that audio files be uploaded in uncompressed WAV format, so that they can then be encoded automatically into MP3, Ogg, FLAC and other formats by their systems. However, I hope soon to start letting you know where you can download the tracks, so you can begin to get an idea of where the CD project is heading.
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...
I've been musing over how I'm going to achieve probably the major 'task' of my nascent CD project: recording some live backing tracks with real musicians. I mentioned in an earlier post that I'd like to have a 'real' (i.e. not programmed) rhythm section on some of the songs—on present thinking, about half of them—and have a reasonable idea how I'd like to go about it.
The main factor impacting on this laudable concept, can be summed up in three words:
wonga;
moolah; and
(oh, you've got the idea by now) cash.
Let's face it: most people would say they prefer hearing a live drummer, bassist, digeridoo player or whatever on a recording, rather than the MIDI/sampled/Casio keyboard equivalent. Sometimes, that would even include me, and in my younger and more ignorant days (circa 1991!), I admit to have (shudder) suggested to at least one higher-profile recording musician than I, that he might have made that last album of his with a bit less programmed backing. (Sammy, if you ever read this, I really hope you don't remember that gawky teenager saying that to you at that signing session, but if you do: sorry, and I'm older and a bit wiser now...)
I'd agree that nothing sounds quite like a 'real' band going through its paces, as opposed to programmed drums (and especially cymbals) and other MIDI backing parts, although to be fair there's often a place for the latter. This is why—after years of multitracked and usually partly programmed solo demos—I'd really like to have at least a live drummer and bass player on this CD project, even if they don't appear on all the songs.
However, despite all the advances in music technology over the years, it remains a right royal pain-in-the-proverbial to actually record a group of real musicians (especially if there's a drum kit involved), and even more so if you're doing so on a shoestring budget... or for that matter, next to no budget at all.
You may have picked up that my project here falls more or less into this category. I've already planned to cut down the time it will take to record the band tracks, mainly by
limiting the number of tracks which will feature the 'live' band (as I said, about half of them at present);
only recording the 'skeleton' rhythm track (i.e. drums, bass and guide guitar), with all the other parts to be overdubbed later at leisure; and
only requiring two other musicians (drums and bass) for the session(s).
But, that still leaves the question: where will I actually do the recording? The options are not, on the face of it, promising. One day in a pro studio would probably cost a few hundred, and recording in a rehearsal studio with the "Sidingsound Mobile" (i.e. my own gear) probably wouldn't save me much dosh when hire of the room was factored in, though I haven't checked that route much yet. Basically, even if I had that kind of money to spend on the recording, I'm not sure at this stage whether I could justify it, especially as at this stage I'm not even that sure what I'm going to do with the end result.
Which leaves what I think is the most likely option considering the above: set up all the gear in someone's home, and record everything there. In fact, at this stage, the primary candidate location is... our house's "music room", where Joy currently teaches piano. On the plus side, it's big enough (just) to accommodate a drum kit and two guitarists, and I'd only have to move my recording gear downstairs instead of across town.
Of course, you knew there had to be a few catches:
Joy actually works in this room (teaching piano), including on Saturday mornings, so it might be some way into the day (probably Saturday) before we could even set up drums, mikes, etc.
Our house is a 'newbuild', which as we live in the UK means cardboard walls (well, not quite that bad, but man, they're thin)
On that note, I'm not sure how our neighbour will take to us playing for the hours it will probably take to get everything recorded to our satisfaction
The room has little on the walls to absorb sound, and laminate flooring, so the sound is likely to be highly 'live' and reverberant, which you don't really want when you're recording drums (and that's assuming there are no unpleasant acoustic surprises in the room, like standing waves)
There's an upright piano in the room, and I bet the vibrations of a drum kit a metre away will cause it to resonate (and goodness knows how that will sound on the recording)
So, perhaps not an ideal location, then, but unless some Good Samaritan I know can come up with a better location which won't triple my recording costs in one go, I think our "music room" is looking the likely winner. And much as I'd like to put this off for a while, I'd rather like to get the 'band' recording for this project done soon; if possible, by the end of 2007, which leaves me with only about two months to sort this whole business out.
Rather a lot of trouble to go to, for a CD project that I'm not even sure what to do with when I finish it! Still, I think that if I can pull this off, I'll have a set of songs that I'll be able to look back on in years to come, and think, "that sounds pretty good, hmmmmm" (or maybe better, if I'm fortunate).
Anyway, it could be worse—at some stage, I'll have to think about how I'm going to get the project mastered...
One of my more unusual musical activities of late (at least, compared with the rest of my musical 'career') is that I've been taking some drum lessons on Saturdays with a friend of mine.
It's something that I've wanted to do for some time, not least because drums is the one instrument in the conventional rock band lineup that I don't have at least some measure of ability with. I've been playing guitar to what I'd call a reasonable standard, for twenty years now; I can handle bass guitar competently enough; my keyboard skills are at what I'd call "John Lennon" level (i.e. I just about know where the notes are!); and I'd say I can pick up a few other instruments (e.g. mandolin, ukulele, recorder) and get acceptable results out of them.
This has meant that I've been able to record multitrack demos over the years, playing most if not all the instrumental parts myself. However, when it has come to drum parts, I have either had to program them into a MIDI sequencer, use sampled drum loops or basic drum machine patterns, play other kinds of percussion parts, or just do without them altogether.
My hope is that I will soon be in a position where I can 'play' drums on my recordings, if the need arises. I'd really like to buy a
