I was going through some old photos on my computer this afternoon as I was searching for a picture of a guitar I am selling on eBay at the moment and I came across this photograph.
This is the shed where I lived for nine months. OK, I didn’t actually live in it, but I spent a lot of time there: running the Lock business empire from it, printing up newspaper round sheets, doing my VAT returns and compiling my business accounts. It was freezing in the winter and like a sweatlodge in the summer.
I recorded over half of my “EchoNET” album in there and mixed the record in the shed too.
I really miss that shed…
Category: Diary
One of the things I was expecting having kids was being able to field their difficult questions and now, it seems, that little Verity is at that age where the most innocuous probing can put you into a tricky position.
“Why has that man got a different coloured face?”
“Why has Ceri from CBeebies only got one arm?”
“Where is your daddy, Dad?”
The first two I was prepared for and one elucidates about the differences there are between all of us but at our core of humanity we are all the same. I could go on and blow her mind about every living creature on earth being related and every single man-jack of us sharing a common ancestor from the trees to the tapeworm to the blue whale, but I held back on that little doozie.
The last question, I skirted around. I dodged it. Quick answer, keep it brief, keep it short, keep it closed, so there’s no room for any further questioning.
“I don’t know, darling,” I reply, “He left a long time ago, when I was little.”
I was expecting more questions but she looked at me with an understanding look and repeated what I’d said about him leaving a long time ago. She asked again the following day and I repeated my answer. I suspect that I will be probed further and I’ll have to give more details for Verity likes to know the truth. It would be much easier to just lie, no? I could say he fell under the drum of a steamroller or he ran away to join a troupe of Romanian tumblers with the circus, but if I did that Verity would only ask more questions and dig deeper and the truth about lying is that to tell a lie, you often have to tell another and another.
Of course, there might one or two readers out there who stumble across this entry and want to throw their coffee cup at the screen. I am just reporting my life and what happens. This is not passing judgement on anyone, this is real life. What’s passed has passed. But, for every action we make there are consequences, every thing we do has ongoing repercussions down the line.
The trick is to tread gently…
Yesterday, I posted that I was closing my comments due to spam. I have since found a “call and response” plugin that should weed out the spam bots. I have implemented it now, so please feel free to test my comment button and leave a message.
Unfortunately, my little blog is being spammed to hell and today I logged into find that I had over 4000 spam comments in my spam bin. This took an awful long time to clear up. So, with a heavy heart because I really like your little comments, I am disabling “anonymous” comments from the blog.
But don’t worry, if you really want to leave a comment you can log in using your Facebook account or one of the other proscribed verification systems that the Movable Type system uses.
So I expect this to limit feedback greatly from genuine users, but you can still email your comments to me (using the link on the home page – top right hand corner) and I will put them up myself, manually. Huzzah!
Normally, when it comes to explaining how I record, I tend to put out a podcast. But because I have a terrible cold at the moment and I sound like Malcolm from the “Tunes” advert from the 1970s asking for a “A second-class return to Dottingham (Nottingham)”, I thought it better that I jot down some thoughts about my musical meanderings.
Firstly, I don’t have as much time as I used to record. My studio is half-complete, I’ve got all my effects racks and mixer housed in a flight-case and this is the third iteration of “StudioLock” that it has seen. The first was a shed near an abbatoir, the second was the box room back at the shop and now I have a draughty corner of a 1930s house we are renting for too much money and is colder than living in that fricking barn conversion in the middle of the Norfolk countryside. Plus, I now care full-time for my kids during the day and sometimes feel a little burned out in the evenings to do anything. But I am sure once I get into the rhythm of things I will start spurting my creative juices from every pore. What a charming image I paint with these ‘ere words.
But I digress…
Andreas Hoffmann delivered a wonderful backing track. My initial thoughts were “What can I add to this?” I am primarily a creature of rhythm first, melody later. Attack from the hips – worry about the details when you have time. So it was just a matter of dialling up a suitably trebly patch on my VG-99 and adding a panned delay to the output. So, muting the strings with my right-hand as I picked, I created a suitably bouncy rhythm guitar part. It is simple and fit nicely with the loops.
This method of rhythm guitar I kind of coined from Mike Rutherford and his playing on “Invisible Touch” by Genesis. A lot of people slated that album off for being too poppy, but the 5.1 surround sound mix of it really brought out the staccato rhythm guitar of Rutherford and I was genuinely surprised by his technique (or lack of), but it seemed to fit so well into a very rythmic soundscape. So I’ve been using that technique for a while now, but throwing in some delay pedal for added depth.
Then there was the lead guitar, which was just another patch from the VG-99 dialled up and recorded in one take. I think my ears are on wrong though because sometimes it sounds fine and there are other times when I think it sounds a little out of tune, but hey, honour your mistakes, that’s what I believe. (Thanks to those Oblique Stategy cards, Mr Eno!)
Finally, it was a very simplistic bass line underpinning the proceedings. Unfortunately, the frequency of the bass drum on the original MP3 track kind of drowns it out, but it is there somewhere. This was all recorded using Sonar X1 Producer, my DAW of choice these days with a little EQ and reverb on the guitar parts and T-RackS3 handling the final mastering of the track.
Anyway, this is part of my actual contribution to that track with the backing stripped out, featuring the panned delay rhythm guitar, the lead guitar and the boring bass line.
The Hoffmann Effect [My Contribution Solo’d]
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Put all that together with the backing track and you have “The Hoffmann Effect”.
Tonight, I received an email from Andreas Hoffmann, the second Hoffmann the Internet has introduced to me. Andreas heard some of my stuff on the YouTube and decided to offer me the chance to spray my guitar all over one of his musical tracks like a feral dog on heat.
I don’t know if I’ve done a good enough job, but this is 60-minute’s worth of effort from me. And I’m suffering from a man-cold at the moment and haven’t played in about a month. Excuses, excuses, excuses… I must stop trying to impress the Hoffmanns… 🙂
Mind you, I was only thinking the other day about somehow being part of a band or something. Here is my effort for you to enjoy.
The Hoffmann Effect
Direct download: CLICK HERE
If you want to hear the unexpurgated version, truck along to this Soundcloud page.
Huzzah! ‘Tis my fortieth year on this lump of rock spinning through the void of space and time. To celebrate (or as punishment depending on your perspective) here’s a little sampler I created over on my Soundcloud account. It’s only 51 songs covering four hours of stuff I’ve recorded. As they say, there’s plenty more where that came from…
Enjoy!