You are allowed to enjoy this…

Look at the bendy guitar!!!

The interesting thing about this set of recordings is this is the moment I first adopted digital multitrack audio recording on my home PC. Thinking back, it was almost like alchemy to be able to record high-quality audio and multitrack it without any degradation.

Using a Guillemot high-end (for the time) sound card and the bundled Quartz Audiomaster software, I began to lay down these tracks. Before I was using four-track recording, if I was lucky bouncing down in stereo pairs and now I was able to mix from five or six stereo pairs, effectively turning me into a 12-track digital recorder. If I remember clearly, an eight-track cassette recorded would have cost over £1000 at the same time, so my investment of £200 for the computer equipment seemed like a saving to me.

The “concept” behind these recordings was that I was going to just record with guitar and no rhythm track. For years, I’d been jamming to a drum machine and I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be good fun if the guitar was the sole rhythm track?” And so the rhythm guitar on these pieces lead from the front. It was also a conscious decision to keep keyboards and percussion to a minimum, it was going to be my guitar album. No guitar synths were used in the making of these recordings!

In terms of equipment, I am using my newly-bought (at the time) Fender Fat Strat pumped into the Digitech RP12 FX pedal, the bass was my Yamaha and the original versions featured synth sounds from a Yamaha MU50 tone generator. However, this time around everything was done with software synths within Sonar X1.

The really interesting thing about this collection of recordings is that they are sequenced almost chronologically so you can hear my progression as a player and as a recordist as I go along. It’s a real organic album, which despite its various shortcomings, still makes me smile in places.

The following collection of material was initially compiled in 1997 from recordings made between 1994 and 1997. By this time, I was reaching the end of my time recording with a four-track cassette recorder and was moving over to the digital domain. As I remember it, a lot of the track here were recorded by bouncing down from two tracks to another, as a stereo pair, thus retaining some of audio fidelity of a stereo recording.

The downside to this technique was that once you’d committed yourself to a take there was no going back. It was like recording in concrete, you were stuck with your takes and mistakes. At this juncture, I’d pretty much given up writing “proper” songs and instead was quite taken with recording strange instrumental pieces. I’m not sure where this sprang from, probably because I was working and finding harder to galvanise myself to write lyrics that were pertinent to my situation. I don’t know, my memory is fogged up over this period.

I know that during this time I was experimenting with two different FX pedals. I traded in my Zoom 9000 and used a Korg AX30G for a while, which was interested because it had a pressure sensitive button instead of a traditional rocker pedal and it allowed you to pull off some funky pitch changes and almost synth-like effects. Later, this was traded in for a Digitech RP10, which was a pretty impressive piece of kit for the time. Though my enduring memory of it was having an almost brittleness to some of the guitar tones.

Of course, it is at this point where my first dabblings with guitar synthesiser can be heard. In late 1994, I purchased a second-hand Roland GR-1 (which I kept for almost a decade) with some money I’d inherited. I remember demoing in the GR-1 in the shop and being completely astounded that you could make a guitar sound like a piano or a trumpet or whatever. But it is on this collection of recordings that you can heard my first fumblings with the GR-1 and my first faltering steps into the genre known as ambient.

01 Now Here
I have absolutely no memory of recording this, but it sounds to me that I was experimenting with rudimentary looping. Perhaps the Korg or the Digitech had this function, I don’t know? But there’s something relaxingly hypnotic about all the bouncing guitar, even though the guitar synth line sounds as if it was recorded underwater.

02 Slipaway
Again, very little memory of this. The original masters were lost, so this is the original WAV file revibrated with a bit of EQ and squirted through a mastering plugin, though it still sounds muddy. There’s an idea in there somewhere but I think the lack of editorial judgement and inability to undo mistakes limits this to the “shit” pile.

03 Reverso
Now I do remember recording this one. It was a summer’s evening and I was still living at home and I had my bedroom window open and the sounds of summer were filtering through my headphones when I discovered this great reverse echo delay effect on the Digitech RP10. The main guitar line holds the song together with the bass and guitar synth following. Of course, the guitar was done in one take, no edits and everything else added afterwards. I really like this one because it is unique, even though some of the bass playing is very, very ropey.

04 Hevisqal
This was recorded using the Korg AX10 and a few of the subsequent tracks were done in a similar fashion with a pre-programmed drum pattern triggered and me laying down the lead guitar lines over the top, adding bass and whatever last. The idea was that you just played and played and somehow made it fit. There are some good sounds here but it needs to be recorded on a proper multitrack system, edited and mixed properly – rather than this stupid stereo bouncing system I was using.

05 Acoustisynth
Me trying to pretend that I could fingerpick and some splurgey guitar synth mush in the background.

06 Joe ’96
Now I have memories of recording this using the Korg AX10 and the guitar synth at the same time and jumping around on one leg from pedal to pedal getting these weird squeaking noises – because the lead line and all the squeaks and pops were played live with just bass added later. So you have this weird layered stereo wall of sound – it’s still too long and meandering. Parts of it reminded me of the Joe 90 theme tune, so hence the cribbed title.

07 Nothing to Do
A song about unemployment that shouldn’t even be on this collection…

08 Deelai
Again, this is a track let down by bad editing and me just running out of steam on it. Yes, by this time I had discovered the delay pedal and was intent on making the listener sick of hearing it.

09 Jazza
This is another track where the lead guitar line was triggering off a guitar synth at the same time and mixing three sources into the mix at once, with the bass and guitar synth added later. Could have been better if I’d done this on a digital system – to many fudges and lacklustre playing to be taken serious, but I make a little go a long way.

10 Tinkitar
This is the end section of another track called “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking” but it was castrated and set free to exist in this format and gives an indication of ideas to come – thinks certain sections on “START” and “Tempest”. The lead guitar is just too busy and too flakey.

11 Descender
I quite like this one – again we have three or four multitracked guitars holding down the groove with some bass backing. This is beginning to indicate where my recordings would be going in the future and is really a “missing link”.

12 The Road Home
More ambient nonsense with me noodling around on the Roland GR-1 with the sustain settings set to max on the patches so every note sings for a long time and you can layer notes on top of each other. Not quite soundscaping, but recorded absolutely live in one take…

I started recording music back in 1992 after buying a Vestax MR44 four-track cassette recorder with my student grant money, instead of buying books. There was no internet back then, there was no way of sharing your music with other people other than getting “out there” and playing. I’m not sure why I wanted to record my music. I can’t remember. I just had this compulsion which has lasted to this day.

At the time, I was still learning to play, learning to record, learning how to write songs. A lot of it was hit and miss, more miss than hit, in fact. The tracks showcased in this collection aren’t particularly good, but are a document of my early years. Whereas most other players practice in their bedrooms, get into a band and pay their dues performing in a live context, I learnt all my stuff while the tape recorder was running, so I have a unique chronicle of my development.

On these recordings, I was using the aforementioned Vestax MR44 to capture the recordings, which was then mastered to a stereo tape. Last year, I converted all the four-track masters to the digital realm and have been able to effectively polish a turd. The guitar used was my trusty Yamaha RGX121FP put through a Zoom 9000 effects unit and my bass was an Encore Coaster, which I still own and was my first instrument. The drums were provided by the rather funky Alesis HR-16B and my vocals were recorded using a microphone I purchased from Tandy for about £20 – not ideal.

01 Electric God

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This was the first proper song I ever recorded. I still have strong memories of programming the drum part and putting down the initial bass line. The lyric is a simple concerning how electricity is essential to our lives and we take it for granted. At a molecular level, without electricity our brains would not work and we would simply fall apart as the atoms lost attraction and dissipated.

02 Apathy

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During my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from terrible insomnia that had a profound effect on my physical being. One period of not sleeping caused me to become almost agoraphobic and I became a prisoner in the house. I had no energy to do anything or go anywhere. Thankfully, this happened during the summer break of my studies, so there was no ill effects, but I had a lost summer where I didn’t go out, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering girlfriend/now wife. This song is about that and is diametrically opposed in style to the content. Upbeat energetic, but about not being able to move. A punk song about giving up.

03 Control

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This relates to my insomnia and my inability to go out. It is about keeping in control of yourself and not freaking out when in public. I find it hard to look back to this time, because it doesn’t feel like me now – though there are times (particularly in crowds) that I can feel the drumbeat rising behind my eyes.

04 Last Train to Leytonstone

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During my university years, I used to commute across London from East to West and back again – three hours a day round trips and this is the song that came from that. It’s just about spending too much time on the Tube.

05 Timelapse

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This song is about when I got hit by a car and it really, really hurt…

06 Whole Lotta Nothing

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While at university I had my first experience of the chattering middle-classes, who openly mocked my East End tones and even one lecturer asked what a “barrow-boy” like me was doing studying for a degree. This coloured my opinions of the middle classes and this is about how they open their mouths and a whole lotta nothing tumbles out. Then I became middle-class and ended up the thing I despise the most.

07 The Clock Keeps Ticking

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One English teacher of mine told me to read a poem a day for a year, which I actually managed to do. This filled my head with lyrics and I spent a lot of time between 17 and 22 scribbling down lyrics and poems. This is the result of that and is my attempt at doing something freestyle like Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, which had a profound effect on me. It’s about the various troubling aspects of manhood, distilled into one “everyman” who can see the world for what it is. I still love this song and lyric.

08 Nothing to Do

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After getting my degree, I spent nearly two years unemployed. During this time, I applied for hundreds of jobs and received hundreds of rejection letters in return until finally I finally struck lucky. I found signing on for unemployment benefit soul-destroying and I filled my days with applying for jobs and writing songs. This is about the hell of unemployment and you feel your life just fading away before your very eyes.

09 Breathe In, Breathe Out

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I have absolutely no recollection of even recording this turd. I found it amongst the master tapes last year and was left agog by its supreme badness. I don’t know how I made that noise with my voice. I don’t know what the song is about as it doesn’t seem to relate to my experiences at all. I include it here to add to my overall feeling of embarrassment and shame.

10 Fallen Angel

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My father left home when I was seven-years-old, at a time when there was still a stigma associated with single-parent families. Overnight I found myself the butt of abuse from the other kids in the street when they found out and my nickname soon became “The Bastard” because I had no father. I developed a thick skin and shut myself off from people. I soon learnt to hide my family situation and lied about my father’s work taking him away from home. I held off from making friends because when their parents’ found out that I was from “a broken home” (which couldn’t be further from the truth) I would be viewed with suspicion. When I did make a good friend and they found out about my situation, I was labelled a bad influence and asked not to visit their home anymore.

The early 1990s saw the Tory government of the time blaming all the ills in society against single mothers (something which is oft held up today) and this song is a two-fingers against that bullshit. It was the ignorance a decade before that helped pour suffering on me and I despise those narrow-minded people.

11 The Road

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The M11 Link Road carved its way through Leytonstone and Leyton and many were forcibly evicted from their homes. This is a song about rampant road building. Yes, I’m anti-car and I have never learnt to drive.

If you wish to download all these files then they are available via a very handy torrent, which will splurge all this noise onto your own PC along with the artwork files to enable you to create your own Darren Lock “Rough Cuts” CD. Wow, I bet you almost fell off your chair with amazement at my generosity.

TORRENT FILE

And if you need to download a Torrent client, I recommend uTorrent which can be downloaded from here.