You are allowed to enjoy this…

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…

Looking through the files for 2000s “Touched by the King”, I remember that I had a couple of CD-Rs fail on me back in the good old days and there are only half the original master tracks still in existence. This is a bummer, because a couple of those that are gone and lost forever are really nice songs that needed polishing up. On the plus side, I’ve found a couple of undiscovered gems on the disc that were never previously “released” into the listening world. Granted, they are only ambient audio splodges but they really show off what the Roland GR-1 can do. I’ll post them when I begin the archiving properly.

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!

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.

Direct download: CLICK HERE
That was the abortion of a redux and this is the nice, warm fuzzy original…

Heavy on the Magick [Original Mix]

Direct download: CLICK HERE
Next up on my remixing/remastering list is “Loops & Scales” which I am actually looking forward to hearing the original master tracks.

If anyone out there is interested, I’ve put all my musical stuff back on Jamendo so you can download it at your pleasure. My most recent musical noodlings are available as an MP3 download, though you can still purchase the high-quality version too.

Enjoy!