You are allowed to enjoy this…

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!

In early December a job opportunity came my way to work on a music technology magazine that I had a mild interest in. There were points against the job: its location, the smallness of the company involved and how to extricate myself from my current situation. But I applied because I’ve been telling myself that I should take more chances and was surprised when I made it to the final four to be interviewed.
However, the interviews weren’t going to be held until late January and I had over a month to stew and think and stew and get worked up about the possibilities and opportunities that might be thrown up by this job if I were lucky enough to land it. The snow delayed the interview by another week and over this period of about five weeks, I’d pretty much convinced myself that I’d got the job without even taking the interview.
I think it was the sheer amount of time between getting the nod and actually attending the interview that sent me a little ga-ga, but for a while I was completely deluded. I was the man for this position. This was the job for me. I actually thought myself into the company. What kind of dumb-fuck was I?
But I kept remembering my experience of recording music using the same technologies that were lauded in this magazine, my electronic talents to fit pickups to guitars and my body of recorded work that I would present to them in a handy little 4-CD sampler (with USB data stick containing PDFs of my written work, videos and more music). I was bugnuts, completely loopy-loo-la-la. I was going to get this job. This job was mine. The years of writing experience I’d amassed in my fifteen years working in the media would hold me in good stead. I was going to nail it.
The Missus offered to drive me the 200 miles to the interview and we stayed overnight at a local hotel. It was a nice opportunity for us to get a way from the kids for a nght, I guess, but I was dogged by a stinking cold and did my best to hold it all in.
I felt confident. There were no pre-interview nerves. The Missus was amazed by my confidence – she’d never seen me like this before. So I went into the meeting, did my little performance and left. I thought I did a great job. To me I nailed it. Everything I said, I wanted to say. I was my usual frank, honest self. Not too frank. I don’t think I said anything to blow it. The interview lasted an hour and I was very pleased.
Had I got the job? With that kind of performance, I thought I’d make it to the second interview that they mentioned during the meeting. However, the following day I received email confirmation that I had failed. There was to be no second interview (obviously I was that crap) and the person they offered the job to had accepted.
This was the brush off:
“Believe me, getting through to interview stage was a feat unto itself. I don’t doubt that you could turn in excellent copy, but the candidate we decided on had a broader range of experience with the music creation side of things and a background that combined journalistic and educationalist experience.”
I wasn’t upset that I didn’t get the job. It was probably unfair of me to drag the family 200 miles across the country if I had to relocate and to be honest, I didn’t want to live in that area anyway. Visiting the place was sobering and didn’t feel a good fit for me. Or maybe I am just kidding myself? I don’t know what to believe anymore.
But what I did feel was complete embarrassment that I’d managed to lie to myself and convince myself that I was good enough to get the job. I must remember my place. I am the also-ran, and there’s always going to be the better man out there, the one with more experience, more to offer than me.
I do try, I really do, but sometimes I think I’ve wasted my life on the media. Without feeling too maudling for myself, I always feel I never get the breaks. Just one break every so often would be nice. Please.
I can’t even bear to look at my music gear at the moment. I feel dirty…

It is hard to believe that this video is eleven years old, and the song itself still sounds quite fresh with its future-retro chops. I love the visual imagination on show here, the referencing of the Midwych Cookoos, the unsettling imagery at the end (the children riding the parents and the little girl surrounded by a SWAT team). I think this was before all the Marilyn Manson nonsense and is one of the few unsettling pop videos out there. It’s part Lynch, part Da-Da, part nightmare. I like it a lot and Shirley Manson makes me feel all funny in my private places.