February 2010 Archives

Tom Jones and Faith No More in the same room, at the same time...

It doesn't get any better than this, surely?

I was completely unaware of the Philips range of AmBX environmental lighting available for the home PC, until I received an email from eBuyer telling me they were selling these units for £25 (plus two top games). They were previously £130 and I love a bargain. I am not sure if these are a great piece of kit or a waste of technology. I must admit that the lights do appear to reduce eyestrain when using the screen for long periods.

However, they are quite hypnotic and when used in conjunction with a movie (the lights match the colour action of the screen) it really does draw the eye into the movie. You see this kind of thing in high-end home cinema kits, but for £25 it is a good bit of fun.

Another reason I bought it was I wanted to impress Verity. One of the roles of fatherhood is being a sort of shamanistic wizard figure who can conjure lights and stars with his bare hands. A while ago I bought one of those laser planetarium thingies to impress her and now Verity demands she sees the stars before she goes to bed. Of course, she was very impressed by the flashing lights...

In ye olde days, I was blighted by insomnia. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with sleep. Or maybe it's that by nature I am a nocturnal creature preferring to beaver around when everyone is in bed. I like it late at night when there's no-one about. It is if I have the whole world to myself (obviously that's not quite true because on the other side of the world it is daytime).

Anyway, having children and a lifestyle that doesn't lend itself to my various nocturnal activities (mainly recording music), my insomnia used to be a thing of the past. But ever since the incident, my sleep patterns are all over the shop. I've actually gone quite insane, really. Now I stay up in the (probably) misguided notion that if I am awake during these hours, nothing bad will happen to the house and if it does I am instantly on hand to ferry everyone to safety and deal with the miscreants. The incident has really fucked me up.

So this song is about what it is like to be me and trying to get to sleep. It's short, but sometimes when I lie in bed I honestly feel that if I do go to sleep that I might never rise again. I worry that I won't be there for the kids, that the stress of my situation my somehow finish me off. I've been aware of my mortality since I was five years old and when I have an attack of imagining my last breath, I now get very upset, because I want to life forever just so I can be there for the chlidren. What a sad pathetic fuck I've become, eh? My attack of shingles before Christmas was a warning signal about my health and stress levels, but there's very little I can do until I extricate myself from this mess. Ahh, I could give you the details but who wants to hear yet another sob story? Boo-hoo. Grow some balls, man, ferchrissakes...

Hold On Till Morning

And I lay here in the darkness
And I can hear the baby breathing
And I feel your heat beside me
And I pray I have the strength to carry on

The tension in my chest
Tightens like a press
And the world spirals
So far away from me

The Coils of Sleep
Won't drag me deep
As I worry on the how's and now's
Trying to find a way out

And I hope I can hold on
Till the early morning birdsong
Signals I've survived another night
And I'm greeted by the same familial sight

And you'll are there by my side

I finally added the words to the music. I ruined it all by singing. I'm sorry. But it needed to be sung. This is my song to express my utter devotion to Sharon, Verity and Herbie. Nothing more needs to be said. It's one from the heart.

The singing was done....very quietly...so as not to wake any small children...so that's why it's not a full-blooded vocal performance. More muted and trying for emotion.

Here are the words:

Give It To You

You fix me here
A reason to be
Put my feet on the ground
Someone to be around
To take care
To hold you in my hands
To help me understand

See the shining stars in sky
Every one is there for you
Count them if you can
Hold them in your hands
And If I could give them to you
I'd give you everything
That I have

It's not Shakespeare, but it'll have to do. This will be the last song on the new album (whatever that turns out to be).

Here is "Give It To You" again. This time I've redone some of the guitars, re-recorded the bassline completely (because before it was just a guide pulse rather than the "real thing") and added a middle and extended the ending. I feel it would make a strong vocal track, but I just don't have the confidence to spray my vocals all over it. Though I must admit it does sound like the playout track of a romantic comedy, perhaps? That's it Darren. Write music for films that don't exist. Excellent strategy...

And after nearly three months of non-recording, I've decided to do something. No writer's block, no lack of ideas, just didn't want to record. Felt it was a waste of time. Done it all before. But then everything has been done before, no?

Anyway, here's my first foray back into the land of the creatives. It's the bedding track for a song with a lyric. I've got the words in my head somewhere and the guitar line is singing the words if you listen closely. It's called "Give it to You" and it is probably going to be a song about loss of ego, materialism and selflessness. Might be about my children. Don't know. Of course, I'll have to bloody sing the thing and that fills me with no amount of happiness.

With this recording, I tried to do something different with the initial mix of it. I wanted more space in the middle, so the bass had your attention and the rhythm guitar was meant to be more ethereal. Not sure if it works. I'll rest my ears and listen again.

Enjoy!

Jah Wobble has been an artist that has slipped in and out of my consciousness for the last fifteen years or so. I remember distinctly helping The Missus with a packaging project for her university degree and going into the local Woolworths to raid their bargain bin for cheap CDs. One of them was "Becoming More Like God" and there were quite a few copies going for 99p so we bought a few in order to bastardise the gatefold digipack sleeves for The Missus's own designs. That's how forward-thinking and industrious we were in those good, old days.

Of course, I gave the disc a spin before heartlessly ripping the digipack apart and modifying it to The Missus's requirements. Of course, since then there have been various TV appearances and his "greatest misses" package came my way about six years ago, which was a very interesting prospect. I was also entranced by his work on Eno's Spinner project, which was an extension/revision of Eno's Jarman-based Glitterball non-soundtrack.

Where am I going with this, you is probably asking? Well I pretend to be an uncultured buffoon, I like to play up to my class and pretend that I drag my knuckles on the pavement, beat my wife and have a closed mind, but nothing could be more contrary to the truth. Without sounding like an online dating advert: I actually enjoy museums, art galleries and have even seen a ballet or two in my time. Fuck me, Darren. You sure you ain't some kind of shirt-lifting jobby-jabber, trapped in a lavender marriage?

No, I pretend that I don't read and an I'm the archetypal East End yob because I have nothing to prove and it is easier to play up to expectations. But seriously, one of the reasons I don't read, especially fiction, is because when I come to write my own works, the influence of what I've read is often too strong and I find myself inadvertantly writing in the style I've been reading, adopting all the semantic ticks and quirks, and diluting my own style. So I steer clear of fiction because it is bad for me as an artist.

However, I do have a penchent for biographies, especially music biographies. It's obvious really because I love music and I also want to seek our the shared experiences of other artistes. It's something I really enjoy and I should do more of if I had the time. Sometimes they don't really get to the nuts and gravy of the person (pick almost any Bowie biog), but I've read a book recently that is an essential read - even if you don't like music.

Now this bit is where my intro collides with the actual theme of this entry. Somehow I stumbled over the fact that Jah Wobble had written his own biography and I was compelled to buy it. Don't ask me why: I'm not his biggest fan, but I've always had an admiration for his work ethic and prodigious output. I can't stand artists who spend 10 years releasing albums (I'm looking at you Gabriel) because they ain't really musicians. Musicians are people who think music all the time and find rhythms and inspirations in all moments of waking life.

Anyway, I bought "Memoirs of a Geezer" last week as a birthday treat and read it from cover to cover, despite constant protestations from Verity to "put the daddy book down". Jah Wobble is a bit of an arsehole during his early years, but even he would admit to that, nearly ruining his life through excess, but always maintaining a way of providing for his family.

Image via Wikipedia

In his writing voice, this is someone who spoke to me in my own voice. Someone who was from the East End of London, who saw the ridiculous in everything and could see people for what they were. He is someone who was conflcted as an artist: does he piss his time away making music or get a proper job, he asks? This is someone who doesn't take bullshit and takes actions often to his own detriment.

This is the first book I've read where it answered some of my own internal questions and provided me with a grounding to who I am and why I tick the way I tick. I'm like this because of class and geography. You cannot change who you are, even though you might get the right haircut or change your accent. He also charts the cultural changes in the East End and echoes my own views.

Before reading this book I was seriously thinking of calling it quits on making any more music because I felt I've done enough and no-one is really listening and unless I am "out there" I am really wasting my time. But reading this book got me to realise that if you can do, you should do. If you have a talent, you should at least attempt to share it with the world.

Thanks Jah, I owe you one!

The auditions at StudioLock fall a little flat as Verity shows me her chops on the Korg Wavedrum...

On 17th February 2007, at approximately 1pm, my wife and I viewed our current property with regards to purchasing it. Today, 17th February 2010, at approximately 1pm, a man and his wife visited our property with regards to purchasing it.

It's those kind of coincidences (and there's been a lot in my life) that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I seem to be in a real negative fug at the moment. The downward spiral continues to go downwards and there's no way to steer towards the sky. Everything I see or do is cloudied by the negative and it is really getting to me. The only thing that lifts me is playing with the kids.

I'm fed up with being this complete and utter twat for the rest of my life. Why am I continually hemmed in by my own limitations? I bore me, so I must be boring you right now.

I bought myself a pair of surround sound headphones so I can do mixes in silences without disturbing sleeping children. They are Zalman ZM-RS6F headphones and while they are supremely shit for music mixing, they are quite effective for watching movies in surround sound. The problem with these headphones is the separation is pretty poor for music and there appears to be no subwoofer/LFE speaker channel, so everything feels a little hollow.

But despite the limitations, I did a reference mix of "START" in surround sound and it wasn't too bad. Obviously, some of the levels are way out but it is a useful and quick way of at least positioning audio for mixes. I can then connect the laptop to my proper surround sound speakers when I have ten minutes and fix the mixes properly.

Mind you, the surround sound version of START is woeful. You can almost hear the gaps in the music, such was my poor playing and scant ideas back in those days. It's not really suited for surround, but I did it anyway.

So there...who cares really? Anyone? No...people only come here to read about "In the Night Garden", my gay hands or to find out what the Korg Wavedrum/Digitech Timebender/Epiphone Les Paul with MIDI pickup is all about.

Moan, whinge, spit...

The unique thing about this slab of sonix from 1999 is that I actually played the drums throughout the whole recording. There's only one drum loop used, the rest is just me whacking my way through pieces in my own style. I'm not a drummer, no sirree. I have aspirations to play the drums, but environmental limitations have always prevented me from having my own proper kit.

Back in 1999, I invested some of my yearly musical budget spend on a Roland SPD20, which was a eight rubber squares for me to hit and allowed me to connect footpedals, etc. At that time, I was enamoured with the idea of having an electronic drumkit because I was listening to a lot of King Crimson (Hi Sid!) and very interested in what their drummer Pat Mastelotto was doing on drums. He was using exclusively an electronic kit and I really like the sound he was making. So this was my sad, pathetic attempt to commune with my heroes and so it came to pass I had an electronic drumkit, of sorts. But it needed to be mounted on a proper drum stand for me to get any use from it.

I went to a drum shop in Walthamstow where the propreitor, a very nice old man, was very helpful. Explaining my needs, he took me to the part of the shop which dealt with all the second-hand junk and looked like something the Jawas from the first proper Star Wars film might have inhabited.

He scrabbled around amongst the steel frames and connectors and looping, arching, abandoned drum stands that had seen their day and managed to pull out this really manky tubular frame. But on inspection, and despite its appearances being diminished by a layer of thick dust after years of abandonement, I realised this percussion frame was ideal for my needs. Asking the price, the man said without hesitation "£20" and the deal was struck. And so for a very reasonable amount of cash, I had my first and only drum frame on which to mount my SPD20, its pads and snaking entanglement of connecting leads.

My SPD20-based electronic "drum kit"

While it wasn't a fully-featured virtual drum kit in the style of the V-Drums range that Roland produces, it filled a rhythmic need in me at that point. I also couldn't afford to invest thousands of pounds on a proper set of electronic drums when my budget was more like £500. I had this kit for about five years before I sold it on. I appears here and there, mainly providing rhythmic accentuations - cymbal splashes, touches of ethnic percussion, and very rarely (like in this instance) full blown performances.

This "START" album was originally recorded around June 1999. It was a different time, I had a different set of responsibilities, I was still living in a flat in Leytonstone and working in a proper job in the industry they call media. It was meant to be experimental, different, forward-thinking, edgy. But at the time, the limitations of my playing and my music software shone through. None of the mistakes were edited, there were bits where the music software/soundcard stretched the sound so things were a little out of sync, and parts of it sounded as if it were recorded underwater because I knew bugger all about EQ settings in the music software I was using.

START

"START" is my equivalent to Mike Oldfield's "Hergest Ridge". It is the album that got left at the back of the cupboard and is unloved. Until now, that is. I've had some real fun revisiting the tracks and "putting things right". Luckily, all the master tracks were available and complete, so nothing was missing.

Being true to the spirit of the original, I've not done too many edits and left as many of the fluffs in as I can. I've only tightened things up a bit where before they were slightly out of synch. But everything sounds better, and it almost sounds like a new recording. I am very pleased with it now and amazed by some of the ideas going on there.

With the tracks "6s and 7s" "At the Temple" and "Working Backwards", the drums/percussion are played by me as live. This is why those tracks have a unique feel and sound quite different to anything else I've done. Only "Sort it Out" features pre-recorded loops created by a piece of software called MixMan.

In the instance of "Working Backwards" I remember sitting at the kit in the flat and banging around for about ten minutes with computer recording me. Then I reviewed what I played and edited down for size down to three minutes by lopping the beginning section off. The song was then constructed around this complete rhythm track by adding bass, synth and then the melodic details until the song as we know it emerged. It was like painting a sound picture, adding layers of colour and detail until the finished work emerged.

This 2010 edition sounds like a completely new album and is worth a listen purely for my laughable drumming. I'm presenting it here as one complete piece of music, but it is divided up into 12 separate tracks all linked together.

START
Featuring:
(i) Start
(ii) 6s and 7s
(iii) Sahara
(iv) A Cool Breeze
(v) At the Temple
(vi) Sort it Out
(vii) Fireside Dreaming
(viii) Starshine Falling
(ix) An Awkward Phase
(x) Acoustique
(xi) Reflections
(xii) Finish: Working Backwards

When I started recording digitally on my home computer, things were very different to now. Today, we take for granted the GIgabytes of storage data that's luxuriously provided by external hard drives, memory sticks and the like. Back in 1999, hard drives were tiny in comparison to now and if I wanted to buy an external backup drive, it would have probably been tape-based and cost me the same price as a small bungelow in Diss.

So in those dim-dark-days, you put your faith into recordable CD, which was still a relatively new medium. I remember my first CD-writer. It was a Hewlett Packard and I took great joy in spending over £250 on it and installing it into my home PC. In those days, I was paid with buckets of pound coins on an almost hourly basis, so money really was no object.

The only problem was this drive was a piece of shit. It wouldn't write to the media, the discs were either wasted, or worked for a while before becoming corrupt and even the recommended Hewlett Packard branded discs wouldn't work. Eventually, and after piles of shiny coasters produced by yours truly, I found some discs that would work with it.

The downside is that these discs seemed to have a self-destruct function and over time became unreadable. It is a fucking miracle that I've got any of my old music masters available, but sadly some tracks have been lost forever. I've gone over this old ground recently with my archiving project and it is sad when a particular song or mix exists no more in its fundamental parts. There's no chance to revisit, reassess and sprinkle magic audio dust over the tracks. Those songs become fixed points in time and space, never to be changed again.

In one way this is a good thing because it preserves them, like prehistoric insects trapped in amber, and means that I can't make a dog's breakfast of the remix. But it is sad to think that I can't make these songs sound a little bit better.

It also makes me grateful for this day and age when digital storage is abundant and relatively cheap compared to a decade ago. Now all my work exists on my hard drive, as well as being backed up on my network hard drive which has a backup. So effectively, there are three copies of my creative efforts at any one time.

How things have changed...for the better!

As part of my ongoing archiving project, I have been converting old master tracks into newer versions that are compatible with Sonar. As part of this process, I've been remixing tracks and making them a little prettier, but no matter how much you polish a turd, it's still a turd, no? Here's something from 1999...a 20mi...nute song suite pretentiously a concept about birds or something...

This called "The Bird Song Suite" and consists of:

(i) Ducks and Drakes
(ii) Sparrowhawk
(iii) On the Wing
(iv) High Altitude
(v) In the Storm
(vi) Swallows' Rest

It was originally featured on my "Loops & Scales" CD from 1999 and was my first attempt at creating linked pieces of music with a narrative thread - a concept song. Yes, more sub-par prog-rock rubbish for you to cock a snook at. Ho-hum...at least it keeps me out of trouble.

Purposely, I've not been recording of late. Hurrah, I hear you all cry, but instead I've been busying myself with this self-imposed archival programme. The problem is that I've got a lots and lots of recordings that were recorded on non-standard software that's no longer compatible with current computer operating systems/hardware and I want to have them in a format that's going to be accessible for the immediate future.

I've already converted one album to this format. "Fade In/Fade Out - The Legacy Edition" is available for download and was a joy to re-visit because it was just a matter of rearranging audio tracks and giving them a little bit of audio polish.

The next album in the archive chain is "Heavy on the Magick" and I must say I've never wasted so much time on something so dissatisfying creatively. The problem with this recording is a lot of it was recording on a synthesiser. A lot. In fact, I'd forgotten how little guitar I'd played on these recordings until I went back and look at the master tracks. There was MIDI data tracks everywhere and a little piece of me died inside.

I'm not against MIDI. I think MIDI is great. I just prefer working with audio tracks. In ye olde days, I tried to record all my synth parts as bare MIDI and routed the data to an external synthesiser unit - the Yahama MU50. This synthesiser was then fed into a mixer and the audio mixed down to a MINIDISC recorder. It was a very convuluted process compared to nowadays where raw mixes are created on the hard drive with a click of the mouse.

But going backwards, I no longer have the MU50, so I had to approximate all the synth sounds of the original mix. This is a task in itself, going through all the presets in the various software synths I have installed in Sonar and decided that patch sounds roughly like the original and spending an hour trying to find a patch that sounds like the waves of the sea and generally tying yourselves in knots.

And then you sit back and think you've finished and you compare the new mixes with the old and realise that you've wasted your time. The old mixes are still valid and these new mixes sound appalling, like a cheap knock-off, because you are missing those original sounds that embued the recording with the character you were aiming for.

On the upside, I have these tracks now stored for the future. The downside is that part of me thinks I shouldn't have bothered.

Here's an example of how I've made a complete pig's ear of this albums "restoration" thanks to not having access to my old trusty MU50.