I absolutely love the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and admire their late leader, Simon Jeffes, greatly. He’s a musical hero. He was the person who said: “It doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to go anywhere, it just has to have emotion”. Of course, I paraphrase that last bit for clarity. It’s all about the tune. It’s all about finding a modern British folk music. It’s African, South American, ragtime, folky, jokey, but never hokey. My only regret was never getting to see them play live and I cried when I found out that Simon Jeffes had passed away prematurely over a decade ago. Whenever I am down or need a little pep, some musical sunshine, something that can put a spring back in my step, I turn to the Penguins. Some might laugh, some might think that it is nothing more than middle-class chamber music, but it has soul. And it appeals and nourishes this soul…
Category: Diary
The debut performance of Verity’s rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” – the feedback is her channelling the rock ‘n’ roll spirit of Jimi Hendrix into her performance.
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
The CD is now on sale and in a few weeks time will be available from iTunes and other reputable online music vendors.
Oh look – someone has used one of my tracks as the background music of one of their own videos. I don’t mind, but I wish they’d email me to tell me they are going to do this kind of thing…
PDX – On the waterfront – Part 1 from Janaka Jayawardena on Vimeo.
All of us have fallen over at sometime in our lives. Either because we’ve imbibed too much of the jolly juice, or there’s been ice and snow on the ground or we’ve just been wearing slippers (the deadliest of all footwear and are banned in my house) we’ve all found ourselves A over T at least once. As you get older, the chance of going down increases along with the chances of not getting back up again.
Once of my most spectacular pratfalls occurred when I was a child during the heatwave of 1976, when I managed to fall UP some stairs and break my right arm. So there I was plastered up during the hottest period of weather in recent history with only plastic drinking straws pushed together to make a improvised scratcher to releive my irritation of the plaster cast.
Another time I fell over because I was roaring drunk, straight into the front garden onto the sharp rockery. But no damage done because my body was limp with booze and just seemed to bounce back up again as you do when you are younger, fitter and happier.
In the early hours of this morning, I was only early bottle duty, preparing a bottle for Herbie as he slowly tried to cry the house down like Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho, except using the power of his tiny (but loud) lungs rather than trumpets. The delivery driver was early and so I decided to be a clever bastard and bring the newspapers in while I was waiting for the bottle to warm up.
As I was moving from the kitchen through the office to the shop floor, I’d forgotten to open the conjoining doors, and began to swing my body around to put the bundle down in my left hand, so I could open the door and make safe passage through it. Unfortunately, my body decided that something else was going to happen.
I can only describe as an invisible hand pulled the rug away from me as both legs gave way and I toppled forward, headfirst into the door frame, right shoulder taking a lot of the impact after my head and then I slide rapidly earthwards… BANG, BANG – both knees hit the stone tiles, then I awoke a split second later with my nose pressed hard against the cold brass plate that covered the step.
Don’t worry. I’m still alive. Just a bump on the head, pains down my right side and two sore knees. If I don’t write another entry, you know why. 🙂
The problem with falling down is getting back up again, no?