I know you’re used to it by now… I am a sporadic blogger at the best of times, but while struggling artistically, I’m just crap – there really is no other word for it! Still, . . . → Read More: Confession]]> “Father, please forgive me – it has been three months, two weeks and three days since my last confession…”

I know you’re used to it by now… I am a sporadic blogger at the best of times, but while struggling artistically, I’m just crap – there really is no other word for it! Still, I hope you’ll bear with me – just knowing you’re out there, listening to me whine – it makes it all worthwhile. Or something…

So, of course I’ve not actually recorded anything new in the last three months. But in that time, a few positive things have happened, musically-speaking – it’s not entirely been time wasted.

First off, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar, and this has lead to two things:

1. I’m a guitarist first and foremost, and need to face that and focus on that when writing and recording.
   I started out in music playing the school drum kit when I when I was about 14, muddling my teenage way through a mixture of Genesis covers and New Romantic papp-ery. I approached my parents to see if they’d buy me a kit – a friend of a friend had an almighty zillion-piece kit for sale for three hundred quid at the time – but they felt it wasn’t in my, theirs or our neighbour’s best interests to do so. I remember playing the congas in my first band, backed by an old Roland drum machine for want of an actual kit of my own.
   My sister had started, and given up on, learning the guitar a few years before this, and her old cheese-cutter guitar was still lying around, so I picked it up and started fiddling with it, and after a few months, my parents bought me my first, own guitar – a hefty piece of ash bolted to a cracked neck with custom wiring and a sound not totally unlike a strat, if quite different. And it weighed a tonne.
   Anyhow, to cut a long story short (for relevance) – the guitar is the instrument I’m most comfortable with, it’s the instrument I’ve played for the longest, and it’s the instrument on which I’ve at least started most of the pieces I’ve written. In the past I’ve tended to take guitar ideas and try to adapt them to the keyboard to give myself the massive range of options offered by synthesis and effects, but over the last few months I’ve been tending to think I should persist in recording the ideas in the form they were initially envisioned and add other sounds and music (either with more guitars, or keyboards) later. This, I think, will be truer to the original ideas and truer to myself as a musician.
2. I’ve probably 10 pretty solid ideas now which, if I could just get off my arse and down to recording them, would make a pretty solid digital release. Some of them you’ve already heard on this blog and some are totally new. Some of them are still piano-based (despite [1] above) but I’ve been happening across some really nice guitar ideas too. It’s a good deal of music, I promise, and even just as nascent ideas in my head and my fingers, I’m quite proud of some of them, so I really hope I can finally knuckle down and do them justice on record!

Secondly, I’ve recently been to London for my annual visit and had some interesting and inspirational meetings, not least a fascinating and invigorating lunch with Gareth Jones discussing limitation as a creative tool. It’s an idea I’ve touched on a few times previously – that with too much choice when it comes to instrumentation and effects, I just get lost and produce nothing, but Gareth made some really cool suggestions and I’ve come back feeling quite a bit more energised and positive about the whole thing than I have for a while (hence this blog entry, I guess!)

So, I guess what I’m saying is “Watch this space”, and while I know that what I’ve been saying all along, this time you might actually see (and hear) something worthwhile soon…

Once well again though, I . . . → Read More: Remixing She Makes War’s “Scared To Capsize”]]> Typical as it is, having set up and started to learn my new monitors, I fell sick and spent the next couple of days in bed, unable to get into the studio and take advantage of the “new gear buzz”!

Laura Kidd, She Makes War (image by Tim Collings)

Once well again though, I jumped in the studio to tackle a new remix, the opening track for She Makes War’s album Disarm, entitled “Scared To Capsize”.

Laura is an incredibly driven, talented artist and I wanted to get my teeth into remixing a track for her from the moment I first heard the album. Having heard my remix for Matt Steven’s “Big Sky”, she was more than happy to let me have a crack at a tune, so once the stems were prepared, I grabbed them from SoundCloud and sat down to listen to the building blocks I had to work with.

Twelve stems were provided – lead vocals, two double-tracks for same, a B(acking) V(ocals) track and a megaphone distorted climax of the lead vocal, along with two keyboard tracks, a guitar track and four loops of vocal build-up. Like Matt, Laura works a lot with a looper and layers a backing track from 4- or 8-bar loops before singing and playing live over the top of it.

Strangely missing from the stems was the opening (and thus defining) ukulele riff, but I knew I could rip that from the original CD if required.

My first decision was to decide what tempo my remix was going to be. The original track is at 117bpm and I wanted to speed that up a little, though I didn’t want to go into the 130s and create a “dance mix”. After playing on the acoustic guitar for a while I settled on 125bpm. This meant I needed to time-stretch all the stems I intended to use by 6.83%. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to use any of the original instrumentation (which is not as drastic as it sounds, given that a good deal of the original track is layered voices) so I stretched all the vocal tracks and cut them up into phrases, ready for when they were needed.

Then I got down to working out my arrangement. First off, I took two of the vocal loops and cut them up into two bar segments, alternated them on two separate tracks (which I panned 40% left and 40% right in the final mix) and then attacked them with a delay, some chorus, a bitcrusher and some other plug-ins. This created the opening rhythmic bed for the track which I drop in and out throughout, offsetting the lead vocals.

Next up, I played a fairly funky drum track into BFD2 (which was later tweaked to change some voicings, such as the ride in the pre-chorus). The drums were mainly acoustic samples, which I compressed using BFD2′s built-in compressors and added a little overhead mic ambience to before bringing separate tracks out of BFD2 to be further compressed (Stillwell’s The Rocket on both kick and snare). Then, finally they were bussed together again and compressed once more (this time with Stillwell’s Bombadier Buss Compressor) – I wanted a pretty in-your-face drum sound as I was planning on a pretty sparse arrangement otherwise.

(Starting during the first chorus there’s a clave sound, low in the mix and washed in reverb from ValhallaShimmer – they’re actually offcuts from some curtain poles we had left over from a recent bout of DIY!)

The bass sound comes from Vir2′s Basis instrument, hosted in Kontakt 4. Again I tried to go a little funky, with plenty of 16th-note doubles and a tight following of the kick drum pattern. I dialed in a completely DI’d sound from Basis and routed the output from Kontakt into Amplitube3′s GreenBA250 amp and matching cab and then into BBE’s H82 Harmonic Maximiser set for a subtle addition to the low-end (which is often missing from samples). A touch of FabFilter’s Pro-C compressor kept things (more-or-less) under control.

Then I took a look at the ukulele riff that opens the song on the CD and thought I’d record my own version on nylon strung guitars… With a capo on the 5th fret, it’s a pretty easy riff (though I arpeggiated it rather than strumming it). I recorded it twice, panned the tracks hard left and right and added a bit of Bootsy’s EQmkII to low-shelf away any mic noise and add a bit of warmth to the mids, and from there into Bootsy’s NastyDLA for some subtle panning and delay fun. This created another bed to interact with the vocal loop I created earlier.

Now it was the turn of synths and first up was Spectrasonics’ Trilian. I created a simple bass/sub-bass synth sound by mixing samples from a Cwejman modular and a Roland SH101 with filtering in Trilian and EQ’ing in Reaper using FabFilter’s Pro-Q. I took a side-chain from the kick drum to lightly duck away some of this low synth sound whenever the kick sounded as it pretty much stomped over the bass drum otherwise!

On to Omnisphere for the Solina String Machine sound, which I tweaked a little and played a line very reminiscent of Simple Mind’s “Theme for Great Cities” – a nod of the head to my past! In mixing, the pad is constantly being panned from left to right to add some movement to the track.

With most of the instrumentation done, it was time to start dropping the vocals in, tweaking the time-stretching where required and lining them up. I used VocAlign Project to sample-match the tweaked double-track samples (where accuracy is important) but I later matched the BVs up by ear (where a little lack of synchronisation is both humanising and harmonising).

The vocal loops (as used straight, in the breakdown and in the final choruses) were compressed together with a touch of Bombadier and very slightly chorused.

The lead vocals, the double-tracks and the vocal loops were then bussed together and treated as one. I didn’t manipulate Laura’s voice too much – a little EQ to low-shelf any sub-sonic noise and a little high-shelf to give some air and a fast compressor (ReaComp) to tame any peaks followed by a slower compressor (Stillwell’s The Rocket again) to smooth out the levels a touch.

Backing Vocals were compressed separately, with Stillwell’s Bombadier Buss Compressor. All the vocals were sent to Lexicon’s Native LexRoom reverb.

Once the arrangement reached the final choruses I used the megaphone distorted versions of the vocals, playing them straight the first time then cutting and mixing them up and interleaving them together to create a more insistent outro than on the original version.

I recorded  two electric guitars (panned 70% left and 70% right in the final mix), both effected differently through Amplitube3, then bussed them together, compressed them (with Stillwell’s Major Tom – for a change!) and added some movement using SoundToy’s EchoBoy plug-in, then dropped them into the mix to add some weight.

Mixing itself was fairly straight forward. I leant towards using filters to control volumes and fades – mainly Schwa’s Oligarch filter (on the bass guitar and synth pad) with FabFilter’s Simplon taking over the duties on the bass synth. The filter cutoffs are fairly heavily automated, carving shapes in the track all the way through the the end of the breakdown (where both are fully open, of course!)

The nylon guitars pad drops in volume during the middle of the song and a little volume automation brings a bit more power into the final choruses, with it, the vocals and the bass guitar all being boosted slightly. I also used volume automation to duck the un-effected vocal loops whenever the effected vocal loops played in the outro section.

Finally, I added some delay to a few parts of the final lead vocal, and a little reverb on the bass guitar and guitars using Lexicon’s Native LexRoom reverb (again – though a different algorithm than I used on the vocals).

Mastering was done using Slate Digital’s FG-X as a very slight mix buss compressor (a ratio of 1.2, tagging less than 0.5dB of gain reduction) and utilising its absolutely amazing transparent limiter to give a 2dB level boost. From there the mix went into iZotope’s Ozone for a little M/S mastering EQ, some further multiband level boosting and stereo widening, and then finally Ozone’s limiter, set on Transparent to raise the levels up to -0.3dB for finalising.

So here it is, the completed remix… I hope you like it! And, once you’ve listened, please go and discover more of She Makes War’s music at her BandCamp site, or on her own site.

But, . . . → Read More: An Hour A Day…]]> So, I know I need to do break the back of this unproductive period I’m going through. I’ve been calling it “writer’s block” because, well, because that’s easily understood and as most of my friends are artists in some medium or another, it’s simple for them to empathise and leave it at that.

But, the reality is that I am writing plenty. As I’ve said before, every time I play, I’m writing, even if it’s only an riff or a 4-bar chord sequence. Even when I’m not playing, I’m hearing music in my head and if it’s not the latest earworm, it’s either totally new music or a development of something I’ve been playing recently. I am writing! I’m not blocked.

What I am is unfocused, and, dare I say it, lazy. I’m very lucky to be in a position where I don’t need to work too hard to survive. There’s money coming in, and we decided some years back that the best way to be happy was to live within one’s means, so we took the first step in reducing our costs when we moved to Barcelona six years ago, and Granada, where we’ve been for 18 months now, is cheaper still. Sure, I could spend more money if I had it, but I don’t need it and I’d much rather have the free time than be beholden to some job or other.

So it all makes perfect sense – I’m writing, because I have the free time to play, but I’m not recording because I have no real need to.

But still, I love music, and you always want to share what you love. I have no interest in being famous, through my music or otherwise, but if it makes a few people happy then that’s cool with me. And in order for that to happen, people need to hear it. I no longer perform, so when it comes down to it, the only way it can happen is if I record what I’m writing and get it out there. The ‘Net makes it all so much easier nowadays, so it’s simple – record, release, let the people I care about know and see if it spreads.

I do need to record!

So, I’ve set myself the goal of focusing for just one hour a day, to record, mix, edit or otherwise produce some music in a tangible form. I can obviously spend more time, but I’m going to try real hard to not spend any less than one hour each and every day. I’m not setting deadlines to produce any completed tracks – just that I’ll work towards completing things, somewhen. And I don’t guarantee to write up each and every day here, either, though I’m going to try not to let it be whole months between updates again!

Today though, I spent my hour (and then a little more) adding the next section of the guitar work to the recording of “D-D-Droned” I made yesterday, so it’s now the full riff in electric form as played originally on the Taylor. And, as an act of good faith, here it is for you to (hopefully) enjoy!

The last month has been the usual cry of “Lots of writing (or, at least, playing) but little recording!”  And it’s true, of course, but a composer who doesn’t actually produce anything tangible is pretty much useless in this day and . . . → Read More: A (Much Needed) Update…]]> So, I’m not even going to apologise. Let’s just get on with this!

The last month has been the usual cry of “Lots of writing (or, at least, playing) but little recording!”  And it’s true, of course, but a composer who doesn’t actually produce anything tangible is pretty much useless in this day and age! So, again, I thought I’d give you some demos and rough snippets of some of the things which I have managed to get down on tape, so you can see that I’m not totally full of shit!

First off is a little acoustic guitar idea that I’ve been playing around with, as of yet unnamed. The rhythm brings to mind “And So It Goes” by Billy Joel, and there’s something of Simple Mind’s interpretation of the great Hubert Parry hymn “Jerusalem” about it too. When I first Boo’d it, a friend pointed out it also had a strong Celtic feel to it, so, who knows where it’s going, with a bastard mish-mash of genes like that! Anyhow, I recorded it very roughly on my mobile phone, a Nokia N900, and uploaded it to AudioBoo so I could link to it on Twitter, and here’s that Boo!

If you remember back to So What Have I Been Working On, Part II, you may recall “D-D-Droned”, and I have actually been working on that piece recently. The main riff and chord shapes have remained from the original acoustic idea, but it’s moved to being played on an electric guitar and I’ve introduced some time signature magic (the main riff alternates between 6/8 and 2/4) to bring out a a kind of stumbling march rhythm (which is heightened by using a marching snare drum sample from BFD2′s “BOMB” expansion). Here’s a brief taste of where things have go to so far:

The next piece I’ve been working on is paradoxically-entitled “Bouncy Acoustic Idea, Electric Version”. Although this was originally written on the Taylor, I’m uploading the electric version because the acoustic idea is just the backing, and here I’ve improvised a whole load over it (including tasty bum notes at 2:37) and I think some of that melody may actually survive into a final version. This is just my Thinline Telecaster recorded straight through the Sapphire 56 and into Reaper, with Amplitube3 taking on amp emulation duties…

Next up, another acoustic idea (I am really loving playing the Taylor these days, though you’ll hear in this next recording, it needs a little setting-up. I think part of the buzzing is the string ends inside, and that can be fixed by being more careful when I restring next time, but there’s also some general buzzing that could be sorted with a decent luthier set-up). This track isn’t particularly special as it is, but: a) I like the feel and recording this means I’ll be able to come back to it and try and retain that feel when I get around to trying to record it properly, and b) I’m scrabbling around trying to find as many things as I can to upload for you to hear! So, Another Acoustic Idea:

A similarly nascent sketch is this entirely hammered-on riff, again played on the Taylor and recorded on the N900, and again Boo’d for the edification of the Twitterati. The recording of this idea doesn’t quite convey the swing of the riff, but I’m slowly developing it and it’s really picking up an ebb-and-flow feel, like being on the beach watching the sea come in and roll out again.

So you see – I have been doing something! Admittedly, I am still struggling with the focus required to develop and record fully any of these ideas, or the ideas I’ve been coming up with over the previous few months. It’s frustrating, and that in itself doens’t help, because frustration only begets further frustration – it’s a vicious circle.

Finally, you may have noticed, I’m not hosting these ideas on SoundCloud. This is because I’ve decided I don’t want to fill my SoundCloud account with unfinished and low quality files – I want to keep it for completed tracks, or, at the very least, full length demos. Let me know if you have any problem listening to any of the audio on this page, and feel free to comment on any of the ideas I’ve presented! Thanks!

One of my major problems with writing is developing Ideas into full pieces. I can do Ideas – every musician does Ideas all the time, when noodling or practising, or just strumming . . . → Read More: Write Horizonally, Not Vertically]]> I’m not even going to say that it’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything here – that’s self-evident and… oh.

One of my major problems with writing is developing Ideas into full pieces. I can do Ideas – every musician does Ideas all the time, when noodling or practising, or just strumming the guitar – it’s all Ideas. The first thing to learn is to recognise when any one of those Ideas are any good, good enough to spend some time on developing. You don’t want to waste time working on an Idea ‘with no legs’. And conversely, you don’t want to let good Ideas go to waste.

I used to record everything – with modern DAWs, recording space is cheap and it was easy to just hit record and then play, practise, noodle, fiddle, whatever… If an Idea came along, I had it already captured and could go back to it and start playing around with it.

But, of course, the ratio of useless crap to good Ideas was an immense stumbling block, similar in a way to the preset overload I discussed in Technological Roadblocks, or The Kore Of The Problem? – too much choice stagnates creativity.

But there was a more insidious problem too – when the Idea was already captured in the DAW, I found it far too easy start trying to arrange and produce it, on its own and in isolation, before thinking about it in context of a full piece.

The rise of modern DAWs, cheap plug-ins and amazing tools means we’re no longer just composers and song-writers – we’re producers, arrangers, sound-designers and our own session musicians too. Now, rather than concentrating on writing a good piece of music, we get bogged down very early in the creative process with texture, sounds, effects and instrumentation… And before long, we’re writing vertically when we should be writing horizontally.

Recently, I’ve been trying to remove the DAW from the initial writing process – which is difficult as most of my instruments are inside the DAW of course – and have been forcing myself to think of developing the structure of an entire piece of music around an Idea before turning to the computer to start recording and developing it. Only when I have the full piece mapped out, and the other Ideas that support the initial Idea in place, do I go to the DAW and start recording.

Initially now I’ll put down a full guide track for the whole piece – normally acoustic guitar, but sometimes piano if the Idea is better represented that way. Only then will I start to develop vertically. At that point, it’s much easier to record whole passes of an instrument, to play segues properly, with the right dynamics and intonation to give the piece of music the correct flow. It’s all too easy if you work vertically to create beautifully arranged sections of a piece of music which just don’t fit together properly – or at all!

Hopefully this methodology is going to allow me to actually finish some pieces, and while it feels empirically to be a slower way of going about things, it’s actually only a slower way of producing something… It’s a much quicker (and better) way of producing music!

I . . . → Read More: Promise FAIL!]]> OK, so this week it looks like I’ve failed to record anything worth uploading for you guys to hear… But I haven’t been being (that) lazy, really! After my success last week with my remix of Matt Steven’s “Big Sky”, I thought I’d tackle another remix that’s been hanging around for a while…

I can’t yet say who it’s for, but it’s a female singer with an incredible voice, a lovely person and an amazing artist. A few months ago she gave me some stems to see if anything came to mind when I listened to them but, to be honest, nothing did. It’s an emotion-laden piano ballad with a tour-de-force vocal performance and between you and me, I was worried about killing it! The very last thing I wanted to do was stick a four-to-the-floor beat beneath it and call it a “club tune”!

So, the stems languished in my “To Do” folder until early last week, when I pulled them out and listened to them again and some ideas began to form…

I sat for an hour or so just playing the piano along with the stems – partly to get the harmonies and structure down, and partly because it was a really lovely song to play – and then I create a project in Reaper and imported the vocals and the piano guide track.

Structure-wise, I wasn’t going to change much – lop off the introduction, take a vocal build from before the middle-8 and move it to the end of the track, and lop off the outro. I quickly edited the vocal track and then looked at what effects needed to be applied to the vox, if any.

I really wanted to respect the vocals, but the stems were totally dry so I needed to do something to them. Rather than use reverb, I started with an echo preset from a Lexicon 480L, and a ducked delay to add some atmosphere, and a little EQ to add some warmth.

Then I started to record a backing track – a highly effected electric piano, a bass guitar (Native Instruments Scarbee MM-bass worked nicely, after an aborted attempt with a couple of the basses in Spectrasonics’ Trilian), some percussion from various sources…

But on listening back to everything, I started to get the uneasy feeling that the harmonies were wrong, and that while they worked, they weren’t true to the original piano and were changing the context of some of the melodies. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was happening though, so I ended up going through the piano melody bar by bar and working out all the fingerings and inversions and making a chart!

And, well, that kind of brings us up-to-date. I’m currently in the process of rerecording the backing tracks with the correct harmonisation and thinking further about mixing and effects.

So it’s all taken longer than I’d hoped and thus leaves me with a FAIL! on my promise to record and upload something every week. I feel ashamed!

I’ve had a few other ideas that I’ve been playing with – including a really nice idea in G Mixy that I really want to develop – but nothing’s been recorded. So, mea culpa! I’ll do better next week, really I will!

Last night, Gail and I went out for a drink . . . → Read More: Today I Have Mostly Been Remixing Matt Steven’s “Big Sky”]]> A week or so ago, Matt Stevens posted the stems for “Big Sky”, one of the tracks from his excellent album “Ghost” and requested that people remixed it for him. I grabbed them and they lay unopened in my temp folder until this morning…

Last night, Gail and I went out for a drink and we ended up chatting about my writer’s block. She herself is an artist and writer so she knows a thing or two about struggling to produce work and she talked about some things they would practice when she was studying for her degree to try and help to pull focus from the process of production and shine it on actually producing something! One of those ideas was to time limit oneself – they would have 5 minutes, for instance, to sketch out a drawing of a model before the model would change position.

So, after another sleepless night, I decided I would remix Matt’s song, giving myself only today to do it in. And, by jove, I think I’ve done it!



Matt provided 5 stems – the main rhythm guitar, three harmony tracks and a melody track. My first task was to listen to them all and get a feeling for the material I had to work with. I dragged all five tracks into Reaper and set it playing, and it was pretty much the version of “Big Sky” on the album, sans the very jazzy guitar line for some reason.

It’s worth saying here that Matt is solely an instrumentalist and there are no vocals on which to hang a remix. Often you can take the vocal line for a song you’re remixing and completely rewrite the music beneath it – the vocal is the most recognisable part and you can do pretty much anything you like if you leave that intact! With an instrumental piece, on the other hand, you need (and want) to retain the musician’s work as much as you can. The difficulty then, with an instrumental remix, is in trying to create something new, and imbue it with something personal of yours, while having most of the instrumentation in the remix played by someone else.

I started off by chopping Matt’s main rhythm track up, effecting various sections and piecing it back together again. The original feel of the song reminded me a lot of an Arcade Fire song and I wanted to get away from that, so my chop-up gave the whole thing a different thrust altogether and offered my up some places to hang my trademark electronic textures.

I didn’t alter the structure of the song, though I did cut out a few 8-bar passages which felt superfluous without the missing jazzy guitar line over them. I also shortened the outro somewhat.

I put some filtered delay on the rhythm guitar during the two quieter bridge sections and strapped a lowpass filter over the whole rhythm track, to give me a filter sweep after the first bridge and a reverse sweep in the outro, and that was pretty much it for the main guitar track.

The most prominent harmony track sounded a little invasive to me after effectively paring down and opening up the main rhythm track so I decided to rerecord it. I tested a few sounds before settling on the Scarbee Mark I electric piano samples from Native Instruments, with a touch of phaser and some drive through an amp to spread the sound out a bit. I put a lowpass filter on this track too and started it chopping off everything about 800Hz. This filter slowly opens up throughout the song, progressively adding more and more energy until it’s completely open for the Big Finish…

The other two harmony stems were used pretty much as supplied, with just a little EQ and compression, and then all the guitar parts were bussed together, compressed and EQ’d as a unit (with iZotope’s Alloy) and then routed via SPDIF through my TC Electronics M2000 processor on its Small Damped Room setting for some subtle reverb. (The electric piano was routed through the M2000 too, but not through the guitar buss.)

I created a bass line from Matt’s guitar playing by pulling out some prominent notes (rather than necessarily the <em>lowest</em> notes) and sequenced it using Spectrasonics’ Trilian VSTi playing a bass patch sampled from a CS80. Syncopating it with the cut-up rhythm track and adding some delays helped it fill the space nicely.

The drums I played live on my S90, using samples hosted in Native Instruments’ Battery, and then the kick, snare and hats were individually compressed (using Stillwell’s Rocket compressor) and EQ’d (FabFilter Pro-Q) before being bussed together again, compressed once more (Schwa’s amazing FerricTDS plugin) and routed through the M2000 again for some reverb.

Finally, the whole output buss was glued together using Stillwell’s Bombardier Buss Compressor (which I can’t recommend enough!). A few bits of fader automation on the drum buss and main output buss and that’s pretty much all she wrote…

I hope you like it!