I’ve been recording music since the early 1990s, starting off with analogue four-track cassette recorders, which frankly left me a little dissatisfied with the process. Despite holding the knowledge that the Beatles recorded Sgt Peppers on four tracks as my template, I’d forgotten the fact that they also had George Martin and Abbey Road studios at their disposal, so my feeble attempts were always going to come up a little short.
Those early recordings lacked width and clarity, and the bounce-down process (where you bounced an edit onto a free track, whilst overdubbing another instrument on top of the original track), left mixes muddy and little scope for revision. But saying that, the whole four-track era (I recorded about four or five hours of music this way), gave me the discipline to be able to nail a performance in one shot – or at least be comfortable to leave my mistakes on record. In those days, you had to get it right because once you’d bounced down the performance to another track, that was it. You were stuck with it!
I’d practically given up recording between 1994-97 – dabbling occasionally with my four-track, but just feeling restricted by the technology – but then everything changed. Home computers suddenly had the processing power to deal with multitrack audio and soundcards were almost becoming pro-spec. I remember seeing an advert for a Guillemot (now they are called Hercules, I think) soundcard that boasted multitrack capability and featured its own recording software. I paid my £200 and waited. Four-tracks were expensive, eight-tracks nearly a grand – digital recording was the realm of the pro-studio, so I felt like I was on the cutting edge.
The first software I used to record was called “Quartz AudioMaster” and despite its age, it is still a fairly solid application. It allowed me the recording power of a digital sixteen track and soon I was revitalised, energised and able to get the recording results I wanted. For me it was all about getting the ideas down and in a way that could be accessible to the listener.
At the same time, the Internet grew in popularity, modem speeds increased and by the late 1990s both the advent of the MP3 music compression algorithm and the introduction of broadband internet connections, meant that you could, for the first time, share your music easily. And so my passion for recording fell in step with the technology around me.
I’m currently reading the autobiography of legendary drummer Bill Bruford (hi Sid!), a musician I hold in high regard. The book is informative and is more about music and his relationship to music than a biography per se. There’s a lot to think about and Bill, being a proper musician, seems to have an issue with us home recorders. He thinks that we are clogging up the system with unlistenable, unwanted music. That we are stifling his profession and that vanity publishing is ruining the music industry.
This gave me a lot to think about? Why do I do this? Well I record music because it is my hobby, it constantly challenges me as a person, I get a lot from it and I hope that my music finds its appropriate audience. I’m not a musician in the same way Bruford makes his sole living from playing the drums. I am the hobbyist musician – a new breed who doesn’t actually NEED to make money from music. I am also of the belief that all art should be free and when you mix money with the creative process you are no longer creating art, but product. Of course, there are flaws in my thought process but this is not the place to debate them. That is for another time.
Anyway, I record music because there appears to be no better way of passing my spare time. There’s something at the end of it and I can share this with the population, whether they like it or not. Yes, I would love to be a proper musician, but I was born out of time. I don’t think anyone out there would pay to listen to me or even book me to appear, so I’ll stay here thank you very much.
The album “Fade In/Fade Out” back in 1998 was my first “digital” recording in so much as it was recording and assembled on a home computer. It was just me, my guitar and bass and FX unit, fed straight into the sound card. Yes, there’s some MIDI synth stuff going on too, but it is minimal. The actual concept was to record a record where there was NO DRUMS, NO RHYTHM TRACK at all. The guitar would provide the rhythm, and so I believe that this is one of my purest recordings. It’s just me.
The idea of the Legacy releases was that I was heading towards a digital future where I could no longer access my old recording masters unless I kept a dusty old Pentium computer in the corner running Windows 98. So the plan was to go back, get a netbook that could run WinXP and Quart AudioMaster and extract the raw digital audio tracks and MIDI data files. These tracks would then be loaded into Sonar (my latest recording software DAW) and given some 21st century spit and polish. Remixing has been cut to a minimum other than getting rid of some of the extraneous noises/clicks/pops and altering some of the synth stuff. Of course, I don’t have access to the Yamaha MU50 tone generator I used the first time around to create the synth sounds, so I have used rough approximations.
The overall mix is clearer, and you can hear my development as the album progresses. Halfway through, (with the track “The Return of Carter”) you can almost see the lightbulb going off above my head as the synapses fire up and I start to stretch myself.
This presentation is brought to you in FLAC lossless audio format so you can burn your own audio CD and print up sleeves – or you can create high-quality MP3 files from the tracks. There’s full details in the accompanying ZIP file. You’ll need a BitTorrent client to download this file and I recommend uTorrent.
Fade In/Fade Out Torrent
Fade In/Fade Out [Legacy Edition] FREE DOWNLOAD