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And so the demo track “Balls” has pupated and turned into the rather ugly butterfly “Stand Up and Be Counted”. I think there might be a lyric in there somewhere, but I present an instrumental cut complete with me putting on my best electric lead guitarist impression. Oh how I wish I could really play. Heigh ho, you make the best with the tools you are given. Alternative title is “Keep the Cat off the Ham”.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Meanwhile during the recent thunderstorms, Alex the Wonderdog has taken to abusing my studio equipment again. So once more I present another picture in the series “How Not to Use Recording Equipment” and in this Alex discovers which knob turns off the looping function on my RC-50.
“Yes, I’m recording an album. It’s going to be called ‘Tubular Bones'”.
One of the staples of my childhood was watching “The Benny Hill Show” on ITV and if you aren’t familiar with that particular show, it always ended in a Keystone Cops-style chase with Benny being pursued by various characters to the inimitable saxophone track. Well the player and composer of that song was a musician called Boots Randolph and he died this week after slipping into a coma. When he was alive, he said that not many people could play his tune and that he was proud that it was his trademark. Well, for some of us it was a cultural watermark and there’s always a wry smile whenever I hear that piece of music.
And here’s evidence that this song can make just about anything funny…
So I have made a concerted effort to do some more recording. I’ve been slacking off lately, preferring to play silly games on the Xbox 360, but with some new drum loops at the ready I’m going to produce some more mediocre musical musings. The first one up is a bit of a cut and shut job. It’s working title is “Balls” because I think it sounds like a load of old sphericals. It’s a work in progress, so I am not sure exactly how it will end up. Anyhoo, get your lugholes around this old noise:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Oh, and happy 9th wedding anniversery to The Missus who will probably read this entry tomorrow. You are almost the size of a small whale, but I love you and our child that you carry with such aplomb. What an adventure, eh?
I am a bit of a stats whore and every month I look on in glee to see how much data I’ve shifted off this site over the past thirty or so days. For the month of June, I managed to put out there over 83Gb of data, mainly video and music files, of course. 83Gb! Wowser, that’s a lot of data and a personal best for the site.
This is clever. It is a website that allows you to search for music and plays it back in a seperate Flash player, allowing you to search some more. You can even embed playlists created by searches you’ve made and here’s the one I’ve done for a couple of the MP3s hosted on this site.
SeeqPod Music beta – Playable Search
The really great thing about the World Wide Web is that most viewers/listeners are very generous with their praise. The ambient/looping/soundscaping stuff I do with my guitar gets a lot of good responses from surfers and this is one of the reasons I have continued with it, despite my own reservations that I’ve done all I can do with this type of music.
Now I got turned onto looping via a couple of albums/artists. The most important and often-underlooked is Terry Riley and I remember buying his “Rainbow in Curved Air” album on a whim after discovering a portion of it was used as background music for the “Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” original radio series. When I heard the CD way back in the late 1980s, it was one of those “blow the top of your head off moments” and I found this kind of music very contemplatative and ideal for my sleep problems (and I don’t mean that as an insult, this kind of music relaxes my mind to sleep). Then after that I naturally explored the Fripp & Eno looping experiments. Getting to Fripp via Peter Gabriel and King Crimson, the “Evening Star” CD is still an album that continues to entrance me. I’m not a particular fan of “No Pussyfooting”, the previous looping album the duo produced, it’s too dense and hard to digest for these ears. However, “Evening Star” has an opening suite of tracks that just work for me and are quite tuneful for a looping experiment. Since has led me onto Robert Fripp’s later audio concrete experiments “Frippertronics” and latterly the Soundscapes series of recordings.
So what is this music? Well in the case of Robert Fripp and his Frippertronics system, he used to use two tape recorders to put down loops from his guitar and then he’d solo over the top. The way the tape recorders were connected meant that the loops would degrade over time and so they’d naturally evolve and distort and disappear, being replaced by new loops recorded on the fly. Think of it as an echo but an echo that repeats for a couple of minutes before disappear: it has that quality. This two-tape system was later replaced by Eventide units which replicated the process digitally and with the addition of guitar synthesisers, his palette of sounds has been expanded somewhat.
The way I approach soundscaping is a little different as I don’t have access to the same equipment as Fripp, but I am using a Boss RC-50 Loop Station that allows me to do similar things, but it does have its limitations. The great thing about this kind of music is that there’s two basic strategies to adopt: you can either improvise or start with an existing idea and improvise over that. I tend to just make it up as I go along. The trick with this kind of music is learning how to react to it because essentially you are soloing against yourself and sometimes if you’ve three loops all bouncing off each other it can be easy to lose track of yourself. It’s the easiest kind of music and also the most difficult to produce too. Too little detail and you have a drone, too much and the it turns into dense noise. It’s a carefully prepared sound soup.
Anyway, this was just a long pre-amble to my latest spurt of soundscaping. I’ve gone back to basics and I’m just making up using a short delay and a single repeat. I like this one because it is simplistic but the deeper tones reverberate within me. Here it is:
Direct download: CLICK HERE