Technology is a wonderful thing, especially music technology. It has enabled me to indulge my hobby for over thirty years; from my first tentative steps on my Vestax MR-44 four-track recorder onto my initial dalliance with digital multi-track recording in the late 90s to where I am today. Recently, advances in AI technology has allowed us home recordists to go back to our old recordings and try to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.
So over recent years, like a dog going back to its own vomit, I keep circling these old tracks and keep using all the technological trickery available to me to try and make them sound a bit more how I wanted them to sound in my head.
They sound bad due to a couple of issues:
- I couldn’t sing/play/write songs. I’m in an unusual position in that I have recorded right along my musical development, so you can watch in real time how I have progressed (or regressed) over the years and these early steps are just that: early steps, full of naivety and youthful bravado.
- I had limited recording skills at my disposal. By that time I was avidly reading Sound on Sound magazine but it takes time to learn from your mistakes and these early recordings were mistakes. Recording sounds “too hot” or “too cold” and bouncing down bad takes or mixes. Bouncing down is where you mix two or three tracks together into a single mono submix in order to build up your song on a recorder that only has four single mono tracks to record on. Doing this muddies things up. But AI stem separation can now pulls those muddled muddy bits apart.
- I had limited recording equipment. While my main investment was a Vestax MR-44 four-track recorder that looked like it would be more at home on a Russian submarine or nuclear power station, the rest of my gear wasn’t so premium. For example, my microphone was a £20 one I’d purchased from Tandy and really wasn’t up to standard at all.
But as I went on, my recording techniques and my playing ability improved and you can almost hear that in the recordings. So for those of you who are into gear, these recordings were made using the aforementioned Vestax MR-44, an Alesis HR-16B drum machine, a Zoom 9000 guitar processor and a variety of guitars and basses that I owned at the time.
Electric God
This is one of the first things I committed to four track back on the 11 November 1992. It’s a simple premise that our entire existence in reliant on electricity from the power stations that fuel our homes to the electrochemical currents that spark in between our ears and take our senses all around our bodies. Our god isn’t a big bearded invisible man in the sky, it’s the electricity that fuels the cosmos and without it, we would be nothing.
I can still remember programming the lolloping drum rhythm and recording the song on a Saturday afternoon. In those, as I was busy with university, I used to record exclusively on a Saturday and this takes me back. I still like this one to the this. I often think about re-recording it, but I don’t think I could ever recreate that youthful dopiness of it all.
Birdsong
This was my first attempt at an instrumental. At that time, I was interested in pushing myself in all different directions and so this is my attempt at that. Instrumental songs are hard to pull off because there are no vocals or words to catch the listeners attention and so I thought I’d try and create a guitar solo that would emulate the swooping bird songs I could hear in my grand parents garden as the wildlife there sung from the mighty cherry tree that sat there. I even recorded the birds with the intention of mixing them into the song, but I ran out of track space.
Much later on, I recreated this track for a collection called “Fragments” under the title “The Birds Sing to Me”.
Apathy
This is meant to be totally contradictory. So you have a high-energy punk song, because I do like a good simple-minded thrash – who doesn’t? But you back that song with lyrics that are the complete opposite: in this case, it’s about someone who is totally apathetic to everything around him to the point of not being able to finish the lyrics of the actual song. It’s meant to be funny and stupid and I think it succeeds really well.
The original mix was very harsh but thanks to AI stem separation, I think I managed to soften it all a bit and sweetened the pill. It’s still a hard listen though due to its overly-abrasive nature. That £20 microphone does me no favours here.
Last Train to Leytonstone
At that time, I was travelling nearly ever week day from my home in Leyton all the way to Ealing Broadway in order to study my degree there. This journey would take up 90 minutes there and back (during rush hour too) and it seriously started to affect me. This is song in its edited form is a reflection of those days and how I used to enjoy riding the tube but those years made the experience unbearable to me, even to this point today. The drum track is meant to elicit the sound of a train on the track. The song amuses me and reminds me of a very different time in my life.
Timelapse
The recording of this one was fairly clean, though I wish I’d spent more money on that microphone. The song was about the time I was hit by a taxi and I had one of those “life passing before your eyes moments” as I hurtled through the air. The song is short and sweet and I think it works. When it came to remixing it, it was fairly clean to being with so it sounds pretty much like it did but without all the muddiness.
Devils Claw
I remember just messing around with stereo delay with my guitar and my bass and everything! So I just was jamming and reacting to all the repetitions of the chords bouncing around the place. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it sounded it a bit like U2. To top things off, I had no lyrics for it, so I plugged the microphone into the guitar pedal and growled into the thing, again reacting to the distorted delay that was added to my voice. Completely lunacy that goes on a little too long, but the swelling guitar notes that plays a melody line is a sound that began here for me.
The Clock Keeps Ticking
This was a result of me putting an old Casio keyboard into the Zoom guitar pedal and just creating all this weird swooping keyboard noises. I then just reacted to those noises with my guitar. The best part of this was the lyric which was taken from a poem I’d written at the time and sung in one take over the instrumental – I just did it in one go. I remember pacing it out and then just going for it – it was a very exhilarating way of recording! Again, even though it’s not the greatest musical creation in the world, I have a lot of fondness for this song because it’s what I heard in my head at the time. It just felt like mine. It was poetry and music together, which is what I wanted.
Nothing to Do
Written during an abysmal time after my time at university in 1994. My grandfather had died and I had to move out of my grandparents’ home and back in with my mother. I was finding it difficult to secure work, despite applying for countless jobs in my field, and I was living an almost twilight existence. This was a comment on unemployment and how you feel completely lost and adrift in the pointlessness of it all.
The Road
This was recorded on 1st June 1995, while I was working my first job. At that time, the M11 link road was being carved through Leyton & Leytonstone and many old Victorian terraces were being seized and demolished by the powers-that-be. I saw it as a wholesale destruction of our area and for what? For more cars… Thanks to AI separation, this song now sounds a closer to what I had in my head and you can certainly hear that I was becoming a lot more sophisticated in my attempts.
Over the Horizon
Another short instrumental piece recorded in March 1993, which featured an old mandolin that had been in the family for many years until my dear mother decided she wanted to sell it for pennies at auction. That act of familial vandalism still bristles me to this day. But yes, it’s a short, sweet piece played on a mandolin and backed by a couple of 12-string guitars.
