Over at the Cakewalk Forum (which is all about audio recording software SONAR), someone heard my music and said that “you got skills”. I think that in modern parlance that this is a good thing. I think the young folk was complimenting me. I am honoured. I Got Skills…
(I think I might use this as the name of my next compilation album! Though I think it sounds more like something from the movie Napoleon Dynamite. Still it makes me smile at the thought of having some sort of skills – this is almost as good as the time when I was in Los Angeles and buying a guitar at Sam Ash near the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood and the goth girl behind the counter was really getting off on the fact that I was a bona fide genuine Brit who played guitar. I could have gotten off with her. Even the Missus said so!).
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For those of you who can’t wait, here’s the album to listen to in full:
As another CD of tunes has been recorded, I tend to look back at all the various stuff I’ve put down over the last decade I’ve been recording and reflecting on the nature of all of this. I often ask myself why I bother and why should I continue to bother?
Music is my hobby. I am not a professional musician because if I was, I would starve to death. So there’s no impetus to continue recording as there are no mouths to feed, no butlers to pay, and no mistresses to keep in Ferraris. I do it purely for my own entertainment. But why?
Well back at the beginning, the learning of an instrument was part of a phase all my peers were into. I guess I was drawn to the arty crowd at school, but due to coming from a single-parent family and not having two brass farthings to rub together, the chances of me getting a guitar for Christmas or my birthday was slim. In those days, guitars were expensive things of beauty and you just didn’t see the cheap starter instruments that you get today. To spend £130 on a guitar back in the mid-80s would be the equivalent of spending five times that today, so it was never going to happen.
By the time I did finally convince my grandmother to “loan” me the money for a bass guitar, everyone else had either moved on or dropped out of college. So I was on my own with my bass. This is a story I’ve told before, so sorry if I am repeating myself. But I was determined to play the instrument and get something from it as I had waited five of my teenage years to get one.
So I played. Then when I got my first grant cheque, I bought a tape recorder. Then I recorded. The important thing about recording is it let me do two things. Firstly, it let me hear just how frigging bad I was (though at the time youthful exhuberence tells you otherwise) and it put in me in a “live” situation, as I would often set the drum machine going and jam onto the tape. This enabled me to forget the fear of the red recording light and to concentrate on hiding my lack of musical ability.
I am not a natural musician. I am not someone who can pick up an instrument and play by ear. I have never had any interest in playing other people’s songs or licks, and have only ever been interested in creating what I consider “new” things. Why?
Well before the music was the writing. From the age of about ten years old, I was convinced that I was a writer and that I should have a career in writing. I loved telling stories and stringing lies together in order to entertain and involve the reader. Writing for me is a little bit like breathing or any other natural bodily function. I can just do it. It sounds arrogant, but I’ve learnt that with any creative act comes a certain degree of conceit. Call it confidence, arrogance, blind faith, or whatever, but if you don’t have it, you won’t create. Any wavering feeling of self-realisation or doubt will kill a creative project. So you have to have the power to believe.
So I grew bored with the writing. I could write a novel in six weeks if I wanted to. But who would read it? If I was any good an agent would take me on and get me a publishing deal, but that would take effort and I’m not very good at stuffing manuscripts into envelopes. I tried when I was younger, but got frustrated at waiting and waiting and waiting for the rejection letters to pile up. Then I grew to know the nature of the publishing industry and the old adage: “It’s not what you know, but who you know” never seemed more a truism. Some might say: “Oh, you are cynical because of your lack of talent”. I say: “This is probably half the story”.
The need to create or be creative is a strong one. The popularisation of the Internet, and more importantly, the development of the MP3 encoding format fell at exactly the same time the technology was made available to allow home PCs to record and mix multi-channel audio. All these factors converged at roughly the same point and I, being one for technology, bought into the idea of the home computer as a multi-track audio recorder. So after about four years of playing very little, I engaged with my instruments again.
For me, the process of making music is a lot harder than writing a novel, and so I decided to pursue a musical hobby rather than continually writing material no-one was ever going to read. At least with music, I could self-publish. And the internet has allowed me to do this. And if it was good, people would like it. And if it was bad…well, people soon let you know if something is bad.
I had recorded a couple of tapes in the early 90s, about four-and-a-half hours of dubious material. Most of it was rank, but a couple of tracks signposted what pathway I would take. While I enjoy writing lyrics and songs, I am not a vocalist and prefer “tunes”. So the impetus would be to explore the guitar and try and make songs that I could whistle.
So over the last ten years I have recorded twenty-five albums of material: from “Fade In – Fade Out” in 1998 to this year’s “EchoNET”. And out of that, I have made enough money to buy a single electric guitar in the medium budget range. So why do it?
I don’t know. Am I showing off? Am I setting myself challenges? Am I hoping that something will come out of all of this? I don’t know. What I do know is this is a thankless business…like all work, really. True, I get the odd positive comment on YouTube and the rare email once a year, but feedback is limited and it is getting harder to sell product, so that is why I give it away.
Take for example, the surround sound DVDs I released last month. I did that project purely to take my mind off dealing with insurance companies and the worry generated by my personal situation. But at the end I had three DVDs that I couldn’t sell – so give them away – I had the bandwidth there, so let’s see who wants them. Since their release last month, I’ve shifted over 400Gb of data. In real terms, that equates to over 400 individual DVDs – though the actual figure is hard to quantify. 400 DVDs? That’s without all the files that are shared on P2P networks. Well call it 500, shall we? In that time, I’ve not had one email to thank me or to ask how I did it or to tell me what a big fat fucking idiot I am. There’s just a void. An empty space between me pressing the mousebutton that FTP’d the files onto the website and the mouse click of the downloader as they burn the ISO files to DVD, ready for playback on their 5.1 surround sound system.
I’m feeling frail, I guess. A little worn. Like the dregs of the butter dish, yellowed and on the turn, I am spread thinly across the bread of life, with such effort that the knife has worked on the fundament of the dough and created holes and broken the surface tension of the whitened slice. The past seven months have been an ordeal and I don’t know how I am sitting here typing this…or even why I am publishing it.
I think this is the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new start. Although I am feeling isolated and emotional (I burst into tears while having a piss yesterday for no apparent reason), I do sense that everything is getting better. The Missus sees it in more simpler terms. When I ask her why should I bother recording she says to me:
“It’s what you do.”
So maybe I am a musican then? I don’t know. I just think I am messing about to be honest. The way I feel in my limited capacity as a musician
Before…
After…
Well I finally managed to put the pieces together to finish another CD of material and I bring you EchoNET. I’ve designed the new artwork and just need to fabricate the new CDs for processing and worldwide electronic distribution. The thing about the new CD is that it will be packaged with a free DVD that contains the 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound mix of the album, so you can immerse yourself in the audio experience. The album is just over 45 minutes long and features 14 tracks, most of which have been previewed on this site in one form or another.
I’ll post proper links when it is all complete and ready for purchase.
So you are probably walking around looking like Michael Jackson on a shopping spree in Dubai, resplendent with face mask and a prescription of TamiFlu, wondering if which of your family members are going to buy the farm during the great Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009? Well Swine Flu isn’t a new phenomenon, here’s an information film from 1976 which follows a similar slant to what we are getting today.
Does anyone remember the great Swine Flu pandemic of ’76? No, neither can I. All I remember was the blazing hot summer and having my right arm in plaster up to the shoulder. Summer 2009 is going the same way…but no arm in plaster, right?
I awoke from a dream in which none of the local newspapers had been delivered…
When we got to the shop, I opened the drop bin to find that the local papers had not been delivered.
Dreaming the future sucks all the surprise out of the day.