“Wing Beat Fantastic” by Mike Keneally + a new approach to music creation…

Hello,

I am beginning today as I often do recently – by listening to Mike Keneally’s musical masterpiece, “Wing Beat Fantastic” while I go about my business – since I recently finally got to see and hear Mike play guitar and keyboards (on the recent “Bizarre World of Frank Zappa “ tour when it stopped here in Glasgow) – since seeing Mike play – I’ve been going back to the items I have from his recorded catalogue – and I had almost forgotten just how much I love this incredible music – in my opinion, “Wing Beat Fantastic” is one of the most important records we have, and  for me it cemented the inescapable fact of Keneally’s genius as musician, writer, arranger, guitarist, vocalist (oh my God, those vocals!), keyboardist, engineer, producer and yes, I agree – guiding light – this album “kills me” – in the best possible way – because it is in itself, a perfect piece of rock music with some of the best arrangements of some of the best songs ever written in the pop idiom.

I think something happened to Mike when he made this record, the retired spirit of the Beatles visited him in the night, and sat on his left shoulder during the sessions – the sounds, the playing – the sheer joy of “Wing Beat Fantastic” rings so incredibly true – so much so that I can’t stop playing it at the moment – it is an experience like nothing else on earth.

I think that on top of that, that when the opportunity arose for Mike to work with these orphaned Andy Partridge tunes – that he took that with a seriousness bordering on the edges of “oh my God, I have to do these tunes justice – I have to make them into what should have been” – and “I also need to create my own tunes that are equal or better to make the whole thing sit together in as perfect a way as possible…”

It must have felt like an overwhelming responsibility – while at the same time, having the potential, the excitement – the idea of finishing up some half-completed masterworks by the Lennon & McCartney of XTC – songwriter / guitarist Andy Partridge of XTC –  I would imagine that just the idea of doing “Wing Beat Fantastic” had to be one of the most exciting things that can happen to a musician – to receive those tapes, to have someone say to you, “here – here is something so rare and so precious and so utterly unique – now – it’s down to YOU, Mike Keneally, to make something of it”.

 

 

And make something of it – he did.  Something fantastic…the ineffable oomph of everything that is “Wing Beat Fantastic”.

 

 

While the Zappa virtual show was the first time I had the pleasure of hearing and seeing Mike playing guitar and keyboards, and singing – it was not actually quite the first time I had “seen” him, though…

Many, many years ago, I had attended a special screening of an amazing batch of live music videos by various progressive rock bands.  This was a few years before the Internet, and certainly far in advance of YouTube – and Mike Keneally was the host – he gathered us in a small theatre, and then proceeded to blow our minds by showing us live performances by early Genesis with Peter Gabriel in full regalia – and to a bunch of Californian music fans – sure, we loved Genesis and Peter  Gabriel but WHO KNEW there was actual FILM of them actually playing – not maybe the best quality film – but for us, it totally brought these progressive bands to life for the first time ever.

We wouldn’t have had opportunity to see them in their heyday or in Europe and the UK – where they often mainly played in the earliest days of prog – Genesis didn’t start coming to California until the early 70s – so to see something like “Supper’s Ready” played live by the classic five piece line up of Genesis – what a treat.

I can’t really recall much else of what was on the programme – but it did also include a “more recent at the time” clip of Frank Zappa’s band playing live, and featured our video curator / host Mike Keneally himself, playing the picked-note pattern that is “Watermelon In Easter Hay” – so he included himself in the program, and why not? – but it was mostly his extreme enthusiasm for prog that took me by surprise – he knew his prog – and his appreciation for bands like Genesis, Gentle Giant, Yes and so on was inspiring – it made you feel less alone – hey, here’s a young guy, a great player in his own right, from Frank Zappa’s band – that ACTUALLY LIKES all the same prog bands that I like….hmmmm.

 

Taking the long. long view back to that odd night of grainy, questionable quality video curated by a young Mike Keneally – and then being catapulted by time to 2019 and seeing the man himself playing lead guitar, synth and singing so amazingly well, live – supporting his virtual band leader the late Frank Zappa, from beyond the grave – and there it was again – footage of musicians – but this time with a live band backing the pre-recorded vocals and lead guitars of the late, great Frank Zappa.

So video was a big part of both events – but – the mature Keneally, leading and inspiring this amazing band of musicians in their shared support of their old bandleader, the amazing Zappa – hearing and seeing Mike play in 2019 – well, I am so glad I finally got the chance to see him play – because in the last 30 or 40 years – he has become one of the most remarkably fluid, creative and interesting musicians on the planet.

I mean, I have the albums, I remember being absolutely blown away by “hat” at the time it came out – which is a remarkable record – but seeing him now, as a more mature musician – he is absolutely at the height of his powers right now – what a powerhouse performance he put on that night – and I was fortunate enough to be there to hear his lead guitar added to and blended with  Zappa’s and taking centre stage on compositions where there was no video of FZ – and his renderings of tracks like “Farther O’Blivion” was absolutely astonishing – this is a man who understands something about Zappa the player, Zappa the guitarist – the sheer genius of Zappa the serious composer and writer– and the reverence and joy in the performances was more than apparent – this band was almost like an extension of Frank – and I think Frank would have been flabbergasted and also amused to hear and see Keneally and friends playing live “backing” to videos of Frank that had been turned into holograms…Frank would have LOVED it!!

Why not?

So it’s been Keneally week around here, and that’s a good kind of week, I reckon.

 

As you might have noticed, I’ve not been writing a lot lately, but I believe that this year, that is going to change – and I am here to tell you why.  When I first started working on the blog (a few years ago now) – I had all these “ideas” about what it should be, what it shouldn’t be – what I should write about – and so on.  And that’s fine for what it is – but I think it needs to change now, and become much more stream-of-consciousness – and hopefully, much more interactive – I want to challenge, I want to talk about some of the more introspective and personal aspects of music – and I want to hear your thoughts on my thoughts…if you know what I mean.

 

So – planning blogs and choosing topics – that was then – this is now.  I want the blog to become to my writing, like an “improv” for writing – without the formal ideas and planning –  I want it to be the “writing” equivalent to what a good, unplanned and unique “improv” is to my guitar playing or piano playing – it’s a whole new decade about to start and the end of a most interesting one – and I hope that maybe, just maybe – I’ve learned something this time around.  I can do this without the safety nets – no net for the blog, no net for the guitar and keyboard playing.

 

Out of the ashes of the old, comes the new.  Fewer rules means more freedom, but by adding back in unique intangibles, hopefully I can avoid too much repetition of what has gone before – and move forward with new writings and new music for a new decade.

 

And today’s blog is a new thing – a thing I’ve not really experienced before – it’s done without any plan whatsoever – and that is in line with my new approach to music – I am going to stop “planning” – and start allowing music to appear based on – whatever the heck I feel like playing (or, for the blog – whatever the heck I feel like writing about), and without trying to compose, but to allow a kind of “improv” that can lead to compositions – I am going to try to (serious cliché alert – but it is the ONLY way I can describe this – wince) to let go as much as possible

To that end – I’ve done a bit of work over the past three or four months (yet another reason you haven’t heard from me much recently) – I’ve been very busy revamping my recording rig, rebuilding the studio, and preparing for a new scenario where I set up my equipment – plug in an instrument – and play.

Just –play – and see what comes out of it.  At the same time – there is a lot on my mind that I want to explore in the writing, here in the blog, with you – and I hope we can discuss a number of musical aspects that we haven’t looked at previously.

 

I think that for the mature musician, artist, player, or writer – that you have to go through a lot of stages during your development as a musician – first you have to learn your instrument, then, you need to acquire enough technique to navigate through that instrument – and over time, you build up infrastructure – obviously, physical infrastructure – so guitars and amps and effects and devices with which to record and perform – and the physical is undeniably a big part of your experience as a musician.  It’s what makes you sound like you sound…

 

But I think it’s the mental infrastructure that undergoes the longest and most lasting and most important transitions – and maybe, this just takes time – you have to have played your instrument, performed, recorded, composed with it – for x number of years – when quite suddenly, the mental infrastructure or if you like, your own set of “rules” – changes, or you suddenly perceive things in a new way that you never imagined or saw before.

That is sort of my lame and not terrifically articulate way of trying to explain the mental transformation I am going through right now (over the past several months – as I’ve rebuilt the physical infrastructure of my music – at the same time, I have been rebuilding the mental infrastructure too) – I think I had reached a point where I realised that most of the work in the physical – is just routine, it’s necessary, it’s good, it’s positive – but it’s more in your mindset, it’s in the mental infrastructure, it’s the road map – the way to get from silence to music and back again unscathed…that is what is important.

 

Another way to express this might be to say “it doesn’t matter what guitar you play or what amp you use or what modifiers you use to change the sounds your instrument makes – what really matters is – the notes you play”.  And those notes and chords – come from the set of possible notes and chords that form PART of this “mental infrastructure” – and choosing those well, is what makes the difference between a performance – and an inspired, beautiful performance or recording.

Which notes, which chords – yes, that is incredibly important – and choosing well might result in a rare, one of a kind performance where you actually exceed what you are normally capable or – or, if you are recording, it might result in the creation of a truly unique and remarkable composition – that you might never have come up with if you had just chosen ordinary or predictable notes and chords – so yes, that choice is important…very important…however:

On top of the very desirable goal of picking enchanted and beautiful and unique notes and chords – there are also what I will call “The Intangibles” – and that is perhaps, a more flexible set of mental infrastructure rules that overlay the “play this chord now, now play those three notes” kinds of instructions – so part of your brain is getting you to play notes and chords…but at the same time, there is another force at work – The Intangibles – and they can be the source of real magic – they can take an extraordinary set of notes and chords, and turn them into a once-in-a-lifetime tour-de-force performance or recording – or even just an enhanced, more meaningful experience of playing your instrument.

 

It’s those Intangibles I want to now take a good look at – because there are so many of them, some obvious, some subtle, some so subtle as to be done almost unconsciously – what are they?, and how can I harness their power?

I think now, that my goal has shifted to combining the “Magic Of The Intangibles” with “The Well Chosen Notes And Chords” – so that when I strap on that guitar, and I turn on the Physical Infrastructure that takes my thought and turns it into a chord or note – what Intangibles can I apply, to take that particular performance to the highest level possible – to make it the very best that it can be?

That is what I want to explore going forward from here.

I want to work out how to do that – so that I am no longer just “improvising” – but instead, I am applying creative ideas in real time – overlaying the notes and chords (which I hope, are being produced almost on “autopilot” by this time) with a new excitement and in particular, with something (The Intangibles – whatever they become) that elevates the music I am playing beyond the ordinary, beyond the “same old thing” beyond being predictable and repetitious  – even if it only happens once in a blue moon – it’s an amazing goal to work towards attaining – and that is what I am aiming to do right now – here as we approach the end of 2019, the end of a decade – I want to step up, and use The Intangibles to drive forward a heightened, impassioned, kind of new music that will take even me by surprise.  Universe – surprise me!

 

To bring us full circle, I want to say that I can definitely sense an absolutely amazing and unique set of “Intangibles” in the recording of “Wing Beat Fantastic” by the remarkable Mike Keneally – a musician who is defined by his brilliant set of internal, mental intangible rules for making records and for performing – it’s one of those records that has that special something about it – that most other albums just do not – and I might never be able to articulate what “that special something” is – and maybe that is the whole point – it’s built off of some kind of “intangible” or set of rules that Mike was holding in his mind as he created it – something inspired him in a way I doubt he’d been inspired before – to take the seeds planted by Andy Partridge – and in nurturing them and growing them into this incredible record – which to my way of thinking, is simply one of the best pop records ever made – and if you’ve heard Mike Keneally’s other albums – this record sounds unlike any of his other releases – so give it a try – it’s atypical, and well worth the journey – it truly is “fantastic”.

Moving forward, I want to try and articulate some of the new intangibles that I’ve been conceiving in my head and that I hope will inform upcoming recording and performance projects in an incredibly positive way – and hopefully, I will learn a few things along the way.

 

More as it happens – fellow music lovers and fellow travellers.

 

 

Thank you for listening.

 

 

 

Dave

 

August 17, 2019

 

 

N.B.  Honourable mention:  “Wing Beat Elastic” by Mike Keneally – a record of amazing remixes and a remarkable breakdown of the musical DNA from “Wing Beat Fantastic” if you like “Wing Beat Fantastic” – you will almost certainly enjoy this record, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advertisement

Having A Friend Like Michael Dawson…

I met my friend Michael, in a thing called a “record store” called “off the record” which was located on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, California, when I was about 20 years old – I am guessing – it was a long time ago, I can tell you that!

I don’t know what year it was, I really don’t – perhaps Michael knows.  But it was a long, long time ago, and Michael is one of the very, very few people that I have known continuously during that entire timespan.  For the record then, (not, off the record lol) that’s at least 35 years, probably a bit more.

I was buying, or re-buying rather, a few records that I was hoping would have less surface noise, and fewer clicks and pops, than the copies of them that I already had at home – I was trying to get a better sounding version by re-buying LPs that I already owned – sometimes, had owned more than once already.  This was one of the problems with vinyl – it was scratchy!  Surface noise, clicks and pops and other soul-destroying sounds damaging the precious music, which should be pure and pristine – it was still a long way to the age of compact discs.

Anyway, among other newer releases, I was holding prog rock classics by Genesis and I am not sure who else – and this tall, very skinny person, with a short, tidy beard and distinctly reddish hair, who was standing nearby as I was checking out, who spoke with an unforgettable, deep voice full of character “those (he said, nodding towards the albums that I was holding) “are  three of my favourite albums of all time”.

So that started a conversation, that has been going on, off and on, on and off, ever since – and a friendship that just grew organically out of that first meeting.  I’d seen Michael in the store before, it was a favourite haunt of both of ours, but this was the first time he’d ever spoken to me, and it turned out, we did share a lot of artists in common that we both really, really loved – and he just couldn’t help himself saying so when he saw some of HIS favourite records in my sweaty grip 🙂

It started out then, first by sharing our love of music, I can remember many a trip over to Michael’s, to listen to records (and he had a LOT of records back then, I mean – a lot of records!) and he introduced me to a lot of things with which I was then unfamiliar – for example, Marillion, who I had never heard of, who were actually playing prog in the middle of the very un-prog-friendly 1980s – so that must have been in about 1985 that he played me parts of “Script For A Jester’s Tear” and “Fugazi” – which I found to be quite remarkable, and of course, I started collecting Marillion albums myself then.

The story gets a bit blurry here, but since I’d found out that Michael was a fellow musician, it only followed that we should at some point, sit down and play some music together.  Michael was (at that time) primarily a bassist, which suited me perfectly as I was, as always, a lead guitarist; but he also played a lot of other instruments, including flute and saxophone, to name but two.  I can remember inviting Michael over to my place, and also, visiting him where he lived, and we did start a band, whose name I cannot recall – it was a trio, of myself on guitar, Michael on bass, and a friend of Michael’s whose name I do not remember (I am definitely getting old lol!!), on drums.

What did we play?  I can remember a couple of the titles:

Roxy Music “Love Is The Drug”

Talking Heads “Psycho Killer”

and an original piece in 5 that I couldn’t really master (composed by Michael, I believe).

At that time, pre-Fripp, I was strictly a 4/4 kind of rock and roll wannabe prog guitarist, and playing in anything but 4 was mostly, beyond me.  It wasn’t until I started going to Guitar Craft, starting just a few years later, that I actually was able to play in the odd meters – 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 etc.

I think we also wanted to learn “Crying Wolf” by Peter Hammill, but we didn’t get far with that one.  We were trying to play music that we loved, rather than resort to playing the popular music of the day – we wanted to play GOOD music, hence the selections we made.  I don’t really know why, but this band never really amounted to anything – we rehearsed, and then I think the drummer lost interest and left, and we couldn’t replace him – so I moved on, and that was the end of our attempt at being in a band together.  We never played even one gig, which always makes me a bit sad – a lot of good rehearsals, a huge potential – and then, for whatever  the reasons – it just never comes to fruition.

But – I am proud to say, to this day, that I was in a band with Michael Dawson !  It was great fun, because it was one of the first times that I got to play music I really loved in a band, instead of the dreaded “covers” – so that was fantastic.  I can remember really enjoying playing Phil Manzanera‘s chord sequence on “Love Is The Drug” – it’s a really nice piece of guitaring.

Michael is a very good bassist, and he had a quality bass, a Rickenbacker, which I wasn’t used to – most of the bassists I had played with up till then, had played Fenders or other basses like Music Man or whatever – but he had a real Rickenbacker, and it sounded amazing. That was really a great selling point for me, having a truly prog “bass” in the band – that’s the way it should be.  There wasn’t much else “prog” about us, we didn’t have a lead singer or a keyboard player, although I seem to remember that I did sing the songs off mike just as a reference (not the first time, or the last time, I was called upon to become the de facto lead vocalist in a band – I will say that!).  But that is another story for another time…

After that band broke up, life went on – I still saw Michael down at Off The Record, and we remained friends – to this day.  Not too many years after this, Michael moved up north, to Northern California, where he got the day job that I believe, he still works at to this day.

I remained in Southern California, but, we still occasionally got together – most often, to go see live concerts together, I can remember giving him a lift to some concert in the back of my pickup truck, which was not a good experience for Michael – but at least we got to the concert.  Not sure who we were going to see – it could have been just about anyone.

One of the nicest things about Michael is his incredible kindness and his infallible generosity, of which I will speak in a moment.  He is a remarkably kind and gentle person, and I was glad to have such an intelligent and well-read friend – he had, and has, far more culture and education than I ever did!  He was also an artist, I remember he was always painting, which was something I did not even approach until I was much, much older.

He has often “turned me on” to new artists that I knew little or nothing about; one of those would be the indomitable Richard Thompson – I remember that Michael was the one who first played Richard Thompson albums for me, and got me hooked on his amazing guitar playing – to the point where, alongside collecting his many solo albums, I then went to see him play multiple times at multiple gigs, including one very, very small, intimate acoustic gig (in a restaurant, no less) and once, I managed to see him with full electric band – and that was amazing.    I became a big, big fan for quite a number of years, and I still love and respect his music to this day.

I would have done none of those things – if it weren’t for Michael P. Dawson.  I would have no Marillion, and no Richard Thompson in my musical life.   He also introduced me to Gryphon, based on our shared love of Gentle Giant – so that added yet another brilliant branch of prog to my ever-expanding experience of progressive rock music.  He also introduced me to the music of Bi Kyo Ran, remarkable King-Crimson-cover-band-turned-professional-prog-band from Japan.

So even for adding those four amazing musicians / groups to my musical repertoire and experience (and it was many, many more than just those four!), just for that, I am forever in Michael’s debt.  He always knew the kind of thing that I would like, and he was always, forever saying “listen to THIS, listen to this guitar solo, here…” and I would be hooked once again, on a new musician that up until I’d met Michael, I knew nothing about.  He was a great friend in that way, he genuinely did not want me to miss out on these incredible listening experiences that he was having, he wanted to share the music, not keep it to himself – and for that, I am very grateful indeed – indebted!

I mentioned that Michael was generous.  One day, about 20 years ago, I was sitting at my day job, when a VERY large cardboard box arrived for me – and I was not expecting anything that I had ordered, so it was completely out of the blue – and upon opening it, I discovered that is was a Washburn Bass guitar – that Michael had just SENT to me, gratis – he was going to get rid of it, and rather than sell it; he’d remembered me saying that I wished I owned a bass – so he thought of me, and he very, very generously gave me his old bass!  I could not BELIEVE that – I had never had a friend, or known anyone as generous as that – he could have made money off of it, he could have sold it for cash – but instead, he remembered his old friend Dave – and Dave not ever having a bass guitar of any kind – and he just mailed it to me one day.

I didn’t expect it, and I had no way to reciprocate, all I could do was send an astonished THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU note to Michael, and try to express what it meant to me to have a real bass to record with and play.  Many years later, when I was recording multi-track progressive rock tracks, I actually used “Michael’s Old Bass” as I call it, in the recording of several tracks – one of which is “Wettonizer” (a tribute to the late, great John Wetton) which was recorded back in about 2008 or 2009).  It’s actually, a really nice bass to play, and it’s short scale and easy to play neck really inspired me when it came to do the distorted bass solos in”Wettonizer” – and really, that song and the others that included the bass, possibly would not have been made, if it weren’t for the fact that Michael provided me with a bass to use and play. when he knew I did not have one.

That was such an incredibly surprising and generous act, which I never, ever forgot, and to this day, I have to smile when I look at that bass sitting in the corner of my studio – I do tend to use sampled basses now just for the speed and convenience, and also so I can get classic Fender or Rickenbacker tones – but if I wanted to do any real bass tracks – I would still absolutely, happily record them on “Michael’s Old Bass” – I mean, can you believe it – he just put it in a box, and sent it to me, from San Jose, California, to San Diego, where I lived back then.  And it then traveled with me, all the way to Scotland – where it lives now.

How often in your life, do you get a Bass Guitar in the mail?  If you have a friend like Michael Dawson, then the answer is, surprisingly – once.

[Meanwhile, back in the present day for a moment:]  Imagine my total surprise then, when, just a few days ago, a parcel arrived for me at home – and I recognised the handwriting on it immediately, and said to my wife – “that’s from Michael Dawson” and wondered aloud, what on earth has he sent me?? (even while, my brain was telling me “effects pedal, effects pedal…”) and in fact, what it was, indeed, was and is, an effects pedal – a lovely, mint condition, Earthquaker Devices Organizer pedal.

A week previously, on a Sunday, I had published my recent blog about watching guitar effect pedal demonstration videos.  In California, Michael read that blog of mine on a Sunday, and on the following Monday, packed up and shipped this effect pedal to me, and on the following Saturday, five days later – it arrived with the mail here in Scotland.

Now, I was utterly blown away when he gave me the Washburn bass, and no one else has ever just given me a musical instrument before.  But to receive what is basically, a brand new effects pedal (which when queried, he said he wasn’t using it, and he wanted someone to own it who would make good use of it – me) which is just the nicest thing – but it absolutely blows me away, that he would read an article about me lusting after these effects, and just to make me happy, just so I could then own an Earthquaker Devices-manufactured pedal – he pulls one out of thin air and ships it half-way around the world to me!!  That is so thoughtful, so good – I wish I were that generous and that thoughtful!

Unbelievable generosity, and an unbelievable kindness in the thought that “Dave would like this pedal – he could do something good with this” – that just blows me away, and, it’s not like we have been close of recent years, we exchange emails only occasionally, and as happens, we have led pretty separate lives – although we have always remained friends, and we have never fallen out – we’ve always been friends.  I would say, it had probably been a year or more since we had emailed, when this EQD pedal appeared again, totally out of the blue – which absolutely shocked me to the core – what a nice thing to do, what an amazing friend – what a great and kind act – to indulge my desire for endless effects pedals – wow, that is truly amazing.

But I don’t have any other friends that are that astonishingly generous, Michael is the only one who has consistently blown me away with his kindness, thoughtfulness, and his good, good heart – he’s just a good man, a nice chap, and I am proud to know him, proud to call him my friend, proud of him as a fellow musician – he’s a brilliant player – and I would also say, you should absolutely check out some of his music – he’s been sharing his own albums with me from early on, and he makes the most incredible music you have ever heard – you really must try it – it’s amazingly cool.  It’s mostly beyond my comprehension, Michael is a serious composer when compared to me, I just mess about with songs, and improvs, but Michael writes real music, serious music, and I have a huge respect for that.

A few years back, I released a live improv on the internet, which I believe featured energy bow guitar and music created with Brian Eno’s “Scape” application for the ipad. A few days after I released it, Michael released a video of himself, overdubbing a live flute solo and flute part, onto, on top of, my improv !!!

I was then able to share this with people as a collaborative effort (our first, since that attempt at a band – way, way back when) and I was and am, incredibly proud of that little improvised number – and to be honest, I absolutely prefer Michael’s version – to my own. The flute parts and solos that he plays, are just perfect for the improv, and I was so surprised and really pleased that Michael had done this.

That was yet another very kind thing, that he has done – the ultimate compliment, he must have liked the piece quite well if it inspired him to play the flute along with it, so by adding his live flute overdub, he was taking a decent piece of mine, and elevating it to a much, much higher level – I think it succeeds far better with his parts added, than it ever did by itself.  That is the power of Michael Dawson – adaptable, and very adept with a multitude of instruments – I wish I could play half as many different instruments as he does.

I would say that like so many musicians, that Michael is a “musician’s musician” – and I would encourage any of you that are musicians (or not, artists, or anyone, really!), to have a listen to any of Michael’s existing published works – he is a brilliant and intelligent composer, and he creates albums celebrating creatures and features of the natural world that have to be heard to be believed – he excels when it comes to synthesizers, which he often employs in his compositions, but he plays all manner of instruments, bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, flute, saxophone (in at least two different flavours) and a multitude of others too numerous to mention.

He is a remarkable and talented musician – and I believe, you can also hear him play live on the sort of “jam night” scene near where he lives – I believe he now sits in on saxophone or flute at these live, impromptu musical events.  I envy him that – I am currently not performing – so he is really fortunate to have that musical outlet available to him.

He is also a very creative person, I remember he played one of his new songs (and by that, I mean, what was a “new song”, thirty years ago 🙂 ) for me, and it had a most unusual sounding lead instrument, it sounded slightly Indian or eastern in some way, but I just could not place it, so I said “Michael, what is that instrument that you are playing the main melody with?” and he then revealed what it was – it was his flute – but played through extreme distortion – he’d played it through a fuzz box and it sounded truly out of this world.  So there is really no limit to the creativity that he employs when he creates his solo works, they are full of surprises and I don’t think you can find a more original, progressive, modern composer around – and if that isn’t enough, his love of the music of the late, great Frank Zappa is more than apparent when you hear many of Michael’s pieces – Zappa being the only artist that I could really comfortably compare Michael’s work too – he sounds like he listens to a lot of Zappa.

And that is probably, because he does.  I have always loved the music of Frank Zappa, but I have only ever put my toe into the water, whereas Michael jumped headfirst into the Zappa pool many, many years ago.  And that has paid off, and rubbed off, on the styles of music that he has created over the years – and you couldn’t really ask for a better influence – I’d love to be compared to, or even audibly / heavily influenced by,  Frank Zappa !

Michael turned me on to a whole world of new music, and that changed my life in a good way, and we shared a lot of musical experiences together, everything from just chilling and listening to records, or later, compact discs, to going to the occasional concert together.  His influence on me musically, over the last 35 years or so, has been immense, and I am grateful to him for enriching my musical life by sharing so openly from his vast library of recorded music.  In so very many ways, Michael is a really, really good friend to have – and good friends, they say, are hard to find, and I would imagine – even harder to keep, which is why I feel so blessed and fortunate to have a friend like Michael Dawson – he is one of a kind, a true gentleman, and I am proud to be able to say once again, “my good friend Michael Dawson” as I so often seem to find myself saying whenever I sit down to write about music.

I felt it was high time that he got the recognition he deserves, and this blog is a very public “thank you” to a true gentleman and musical scholar, Mr. Michael P. Dawson. Long may he reign over the flute solo in “Girl From Ipanema”; and any other pieces that he attempts, live or studio, on any instrument – just keep on jamming, Michael !!!

From Gong’s Guitarist to Blu-Ray Music Extraction Processes to the NewestOld ios Application for IDevices…

I am becoming acquainted with the first five albums by Steve Hillage, beginning with his band “Uriel” and their album “Arzachel” in 1969 and moving up to 1976’s BBC Radio 1 In Concert – which is playing now in my headphones – the announcer letting us know that only 8 percent of BBC listeners are currently listening in stereo – and they’d like to get that number up as soon as possible!

On almost a whim, I decided that if I was ever going to get caught up on what I had missed in the solo canon of Steve Hillage, outside of his work in Gong, with which I am very familiar, would be to shell out for the remarkable new 22 disc box set, “Searching For The Spark”.  It arrived a few weeks ago, I then spent a few days ripping discs, and I’ve since spent a very, very enjoyable morning indeed, listening to all five of the discs currently on my IPod – and – Hillage is a remarkable person – and, along with his life partner Miquette, he fronts a band with ever-growing confidence – especially when we get to “that” guitar solo.

I was quite amazed at the jump in guitar playing quality between the first two albums that feature Hillage, the above mentioned Arzachel from 1969, and then, 1972 brought us “Khan” with their album “Sea Shanty” – and in the three years that had passed, Hillage’s guitar prowess had increased by a significant amount – but nothing like what was about to come – in the form of his first two solo records, the first that bore the name “Steve Hillage” – “Fish Rising”, followed by what is probably his best-known work (and, produced with Todd Rundgren, using Todd’s new Utopia – Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and Willie Wilcox – as Hillage’s backing band on the record) “L” – these two releases are where you can really hear the confidence and power of his playing – and I would heartily recommend them to anyone!

I did own a cassette with “L” on it, years ago, so I was familiar with that one album, but never had a chance – until today – to hear Fish Rising, the two early albums, and the first of many, many live CDs that are in the box – this wonderful BBC Radio 1 In Concert 1976 that is playing – in glorious stereo, I might add (after a lovely across the kit drum roll – which just went across my brain in lovely carefully-drum-miked stereo).

I think I will leave the task of a full review to someone who knows more about this, for me, this was just a “way in”, a way to hear the development of this incredibly talented guitarist – who I was really, really fortunate to see both the Steve Hillage Band and Gong, during a very brief UK tour in 2008 – and he was remarkable in both bands – the perfect musical foil for the late Daevid Allen – and it was a unique opportunity, to first hear Steve and Miquette play solo Hillage material (which was unfortunately at the time, besides the obvious cover of “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, unknown to me) as well as, play as an integral part of Gong – this was a remarkable performance featuring most of the main figures in Gong history, including his long time partner Miquette Giraudy, Hillage and Mike Howlett as well.

So that is my most recent listening, previous to that, however, I’ve been revisiting my catalogue of XTC releases, trying to get caught up with capturing all of the additional music hidden away on the Blu-Ray discs included in each of these amazing “Steven Wilson” re-masters – and I guess I can say that I definitely am collecting Steven Wilson re-masters – starting with the King Crimson re-masters – the ultimate – King Crimson in 5.1 sounds absolutely astonishing – it’s so worth it just for that alone – but, there is always a lot of additional music buried on the DVD or Blu-Ray portion, and I’ve developed a unique way to capture this additional material

In assessing my XTC discs, I now have four Steven Wilson XTC re-masters:  Drums & Wires, Skylarking, Oranges & Lemons, and Nonsuch.  I realised that I had only partially done the work on capturing the extra tracks from three of them, so I set out to “right” this wrong.

I also have the same issue with my Gentle Giant, and Yes “Steven Wilson” re-masters – again, I have ripped the ordinary CDs, which contain some of the additional material – but, the additional music on the Blu-Ray has remained accessible only on the 5.1 system – which I can’t take out with me on my iPods.

So – I have developed a process, which includes templates of blank folders, and a template in SONAR Platinum for capturing the music from the discs.  I was wondering if anyone else uses a similar process to this:

 

ACQUIRE BLU-RAY AUDIO CONTENT WITH HIGHEST QUALITY POSSIBLE:

• Set up your blank folders using the template, which prepares you to “receive” WAV files of the tracks you are capturing, and then later, converting them into MP3 files for your portable device.

• Those folders look something like this (after conversion from the dummy template folders):

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc01-SWMix-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc01-SWMix-WAV   (Note:  These are from the CD, which is just ripped normally – not related to this Blu-Ray process)

 

Sometimes there might be two, or even three, CDs (which of course, are all ripped normally)  in which case, those would eat up the Disc01, 02 and 03 slots, and your Blu-Ray material would then start with “Disc04” rather than “Disc02” – you just have to adjust as necessary depending on the contents of the set.  Then, follows your DVD or Blu-Ray ONLY Content:

 

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc03-AlbumInDemo&WorkTapeForm-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc03-AlbumInDemo&WorkTapeForm-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc04-ExtraDemos&WorkTapes-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc04-ExtraDemos&WorkTapes-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc05-RehearsalsAtLeedsStudiosLA-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc05-RehearsalsAtLeedsStudiosLA-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc06-Videos-Mono-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc06-Videos-Mono-WAV

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc07-StereoInstrumental-MP3

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc07-StereoInstrumental-WAV

 

These folders are only one arrangement, of course, the folder set I come up with, ultimately, just reflects what music is available to me to extract from the Blu-Ray in question.  The set of folders above, is probably suitable, with possible minor alterations, for any XTC album.  Of course, something like “Drums & Wires” has many, many more folders that this example, because there are several different Rehearsal sections on that disc – hence, many more folders (12 in total I believe, or 24 if you count the WAV versions).

 

For King Crimson or Yes, it would be similar, but perhaps, instead of “Videos-Mono” you would probably get “OriginalVinylUK” and “OriginalVinylUS” and so on – so basically – anything that needs captured, you build a folder for.

• Then, you take a copy of your SONAR Template session (.cwp file) (or equivalent in whatever DAW you use), which is set up with many, many Audio channels – one of my recent efforts ended up at 98 channels – and these are pre-set to use the special S-PDIF “pure digital” input of my sound card – so the S-PDIF outputs of my Blu-Ray player are fed to a pair of inputs on the Sound Card – and all Blu-Ray recording is done via this “pure digital” route – directly from the disc, to the sound card, to SONAR – where I capture them as 48K 24 bit WAV files – the best I can do. The SONAR CWP should be in the root of your work folder, so you can view it and work with it, AND see the folder set shown above.

• Arm for recording, a single track, which will have a title such as

XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-UNTOUCHEDORIGINAL

• Put the Blu-Ray into the machine, and queue up the Original Master Mix (the Flat Transfer of the original CD with the original Mix) from the EXTRAS section of the Blu-Ray.
• Press RECORD on the armed channel in SONAR, and once you see the transport moving, then start the Blu-Ray playing.

 

• Leave that entire disk worth of music to play, while of course, SONAR is recording it in the highest quality possible – Input = S-PDIF and SONAR = 48K 24 Bit.

 

• Normally, I do not have to adjust the levels at all – for S-PDIF, they seem to be pre-set, and they always make a clean, but never too “hot” recording – it’s ideal. They just approach 0 db, but never surpass it – so, loud and clean.

 

• Once the Blu-Ray has ended, and you have your recording of the entire CD captured as a SINGLE large WAV file, you can now move onto the next piece of music, and repeat the above process on the next target disc (in this case, it’s Disc03, “Album In Demo & Work Tape Form”).

 

• When completed, you then move onto the PROCESSING part of the process, which is probably the most time-consuming and patience-testing.

 

PROCESSING THE FILES:

 

• In your SONAR .cwp file, you now have a series of large wav files, each one representing a disk full of music. Using the back of the box set or it’s booklet as a guide, I then create a single AUDIO track just below the main, large WAV.  That is set up quite simply, you won’t be recording on it, but you need to set it up so it is playing to Master, and thence out to your headphones or speakers, as you need to monitor this process (I use headphones to be the most precise possible).  Once you are happy with your new empty, Audio track, before we work on any music processing – count the individual tracks that are in this large WAV file, and use TRACK CLONE to make the appropriate number of copies of your new, empty Audio track.  If it’s a 15 track album, then I would create 14 more of these, by adjusting the Count of Clones in the Cloning Window.  Push the button, and SONAR (or your DAW) adds 14 empty audio tracks – and now you have 15 empty spaces for tracks.  Which already have their name template ready for a track number at the end – then, go back – and put in your track number and names:

 

• Return now to your single large wav track, and before you do anything, take a COPY of it, and PASTE it into your new first audio track – TRACK 01 – which will be labelled something like XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-01-GardenOfEarthlyDelights-OriginalMasterMix, and first, clean up the lead in – there will be extra space there, so you want to reduce that to a very short lead in, and make sure it starts fairly quickly – usually in under a second, so it starts like a normal CD would – immediately.

 

• Then, find the end of Track 1. Determine the best spot to SPLIT the tracks, so that Track 1 has a proper ending, and that Track 2 will end up with the SPLIT quite close to its first sound.  Once you are happy with this transition point, go ahead and SPLIT the track (leaving the first long recording UNTOUCHED – as the name implies!) always do your first splitting, on the SECOND one – the COPY!!!

 

• Once split, REMOVE the large chunk of remaining audio, which contains tracks 2 through 15, and MOVE them into the next track.

 

• Repeat the split, each time, leaving the remainder (of your large wav file copy, which gets smaller and smaller each time you split and move it down) and moving it into the next track.

 

• Once done, you need to clean up the end of the final track, just to make sure there are no surprises.

 

• At this point, you should be done with PROCESSING, and ready for OUTPUT.

 

OUTPUTTING THE FILES:

 

• Ensure that all tracks except your Track 01, “Garden Of Earthly Delights” are MUTED. This is crucial, if you leave anything with sound on it unmuted except for the ONE TRACK you are outputting, it’s sound WILL MIX with your track – thus, ruining it.

 

• Select the track with your mouse, then, EXPORT – and point the output to your pre-made WAV folder:

 

OUTPUT FOLDER:      XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-WAV

 

• Once the output has completed, check the folder for the presence of the file, make sure it’s there, and, named to your satisfaction.

 

• Repeat with each track, making sure that you MUTE the previous track, and unmute the one you are working on (or you get a SILENT output file!) – and that ALL tracks except the one you are currently working on, are always MUTED.

 

• Once the WAV files have all been output, for each Disc – save and back up the .cwp file, save and back up all Audio files created during the session (your large WAV files).

 

• At this point, you have the best quality, 48K, 24 bit WAV files of the individual tracks, SPLIT out perfectly in the steps above, ready to now transform into MP3 files so you can load them onto your iPod or other portable device.

 

 

FINAL PROCESSING:

 

• Using DVDSoft tool “Audio Converter” (or any decent utility that Converts WAV files to high quality MP3 files), set the type to your desired quality (I use “Lame Insane Quality 320 kbps Frauhofen MP3” myself) and point the output to the root folder above your WAV and MP3 folders:

 

OUTPUT FOLDER:      XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-WAV&MP3 (or whatever YOUR project folder is called – the idea being, we want the tool to output ALL of the MP3s, from ALL of the WAVs, back into the root of your Project, so you can then assign their internal names BEFORE they are finally split up, by you dragging them into their individual, pre-made “MP3” folders.

 

• Once your type and target folder are set in the Audio Converter tool, you can now drag the files you want to have converted, into the area at the top of the application where it says “DRAG AUDIO FILES HERE” or similar.

 

• Open your XTC-1989-1-Oranges&Lemons-Remaster-Expanded-Disc02-OriginalMasterMix-WAV folder, and select all 15 / however many you have of your WAV files with your mouse by using SHIFT-mouse, and then DRAG them across into the top part of the DVDSoft Audio Converter Application. I usually just do all of the WAV files as one giant conversion, so after I drag over the Disc02-OriginalMasterMix files, I then carry on, opening each WAV file folder next would be Disc03, then 04, etc., and dragging their contents into the DVDSoft Audio Conversion tool.

 

• Once you have the entire set of WAV files in place in the Audio Converter, re-check that your output type is correct (for me, that’s always highest quality, 320 kbps MP3), and that your target folder is just the root folder you are working in – and then press “Convert”. The tool starts working, taking each WAV file, and converting it into an MP3 file.   This can take quite some time, depending on how many hours’ worth of WAV files you have loaded into the tool – be patient, it will eventually tell you that the Process Is Complete. NOTE:  When it converts, it adds a “Comment” into each MP3 file – in the field “Comments” it puts its little advert “DVDSoft.com”.

 

• It’s harmless, but I don’t want it in my file, so the first thing I do, is select all items, while they are all still in the main folder, and I DELETE this “comment”, leaving the Comments field empty as it should be.

 

 

• While the MP3s are still in the main, root directory of your project, you should go ahead and add in your “Internal File Data” – I start out, by doing a few bulk updates – I select ALL of the MP3s, right click and select “Properties”, select the Details tab, and then, under “Album Artist” and “Contributing Artists”, I add in the band’s name (unless it’s already there). I also do a bulk update on any other fields that are the same for ALL of the files, such as “Genre” IF they are all the same Genre.

 

• After that, you can highlight each album, or each file, and make whatever adjustments you need to make the INNER NAMES meet your own personal Standards – I have very particular standards, which includes an Album Name that is preceded by a Year and Counter, so, “Oranges & Lemons” is actually called

 

“1989-1 Oranges & Lemons – Remaster – Expanded – Disc 02 – Original Master Mix – The Surround Sound Series” in my collection.

 

…or something like that – by dating these (using this YYYY-Counter template), I can force them to sort into Chronological order, based on the Album title – it works pretty well, but I did start out with that Standard some 9 years ago, so it would take anyone else a long time to institute – but a very good percentage of my existing MP3 collection does contain these dates.  I have even recently, been converting posthumous live CDs back to their performance date, rather than their more current release date – because let’s face it, there were not that many Gentle Giant live shows in 2006 or 2012.  But there are a LOT of shows from 1975, released in the last 30 years – well, I have managed to get them into chronological order with just a few exceptions where no data exists for the date of a concert.  Oh well – it’s the best I could do.

 

• From here, you would then rename each MP3 folder to match your MP3 collection – to whatever Standard you use there – and then copy them to your individual folders on your drive or drives. I am currently keeping seven copies of the MP3 on seven separate hard drives, and four copies of the WAV masters (because I sweated blood and time extracting these tracks!) on four separate drives – that’s my backup at the moment.   Because I am always short on disc space, I am going to reduce the MP3s down to four soon, to recover a lot of space – but, it was set up as seven and that’s how it was for the longest time…a lot of redundancy!

 

• Finally, once the MP3s are added to your collection – you can add them to ITunes and sync your device, or, put them on your non-ios device by drag and drop or whatever methodology you use – your MP3 files of rare Blu-Ray content, are NOW FINALLY READY for your listening pleasure – ENJOY!

 

 

So – back to reality – how’s THAT for a Process?  Since I had to do the content of Skylarking and  Oranges & Lemons during the last week or so, I used those experiences to build the Templates and work out exactly how the process should work, getting it down to a science – but not a quick one.  I recently used the new process on XTC “Nonsuch” – and it worked beautifully – it’s much better to have a consistent process for this, because it is pretty complex – as well as three of my four Steven Wilson Yes albums that still need the process done to them.  And one or two of my Steven Wilson Gentle Giant albums.  And ALL of my Steven Wilson Jethro Tull albums…including the brand new Stand Up – The Elevated Edition which sounds awesome, I might add!

 

I’ve got it down from days to hours now, but it can still eat up most of a day, just doing one “album” – because they usually pack a LOT of amazing music onto those Blu-Rays.  It’s quite amazing, to have a 20 disc version of “Drums and Wires” by XTC !!! Lots of choice there…

 

 

The only catalogue that is actually done – is King Crimson – that was my first Steven Wilson remix, the giant DVD release of In The Court of The Crimson King in about 2008 – hard to believe it (my obsession with the quality recordings that are any and all “Steven Wilson Mixes”) goes back that far, six years!

 

The problem is, to do this PROPERLY, takes a huge amount of time.  OK, ripping the music off of the disc, you can just start it and walk away, and do other work while it’s copying the content to that WAV file.  Repeat as necessary.   Sometimes, I just let three or four discs worth play into a HUGE WAV file, then, split it by album, and move them to their appropriate channel.  But once that easy step of transferring the music over is gone – well, then you are back to that horrible processing section, and cutting up different versions of the same album, or, massive quantities of Andy Partridge demos – it is very, very time consuming – and, I am a perfectionist, so if it isn’t perfect – I do it again – but, I am getting better at it…slowly.  It took me two full days to process all of the content on Yes’ “Tales From Topographic Oceans” – 2 whole days!  That seems to be what it takes, although maybe I could do one in a single day under the right circumstances.

 

I do want to get on with the Yes and Gentle Giant in particular, because both of those sport Stereo Instrumentals, which I absolutely love.  I’ve been listening to the Instrumental versions of Yes’ “Tales From Topographic Oceans” and they are fascinating and beautiful – you hear all kinds of things that the vocals hide – and I played “Ritual – Stereo Instrumental” yesterday on the 5.1 system – wow – it sounded fantastic!  Weird without any vocals – but, fascinating, especially hearing what Steve, Rick and in the case of Ritual, Chris are really doing – how it sounded before any vocals arrived – it’s just astonishing.

 

Now that I have finished XTC “Nonsuch”, so that’s all four of my SW XTC Discs  done – and then, eventually, to Yes and Gentle Giant – as for the Steve Hillage CDs that I just ripped – thank GOD it’s just all audio CDs in this set – no DVD or Blu-Ray content – so, that makes it so easy!

 

Until just now, I’ve never written down this process, and now that I see it in black and white, it just seems like going to extraordinary lengths to be able to hear rare music on your portable device – but, I have it streamlined now, so it does go a LOT faster using the templates, and my experience and skill at cutting up tracks, has gotten much, much better lately, so – it’s not quite as bad as it was.  But it is a LONG process by gumbo!

 

OK then, onto pastures new, now that you have learned one way, probably NOT the fastest way (I just know someone will come back to me with a tool that rips all audio from a Blu-ray or DVD with one button push) and it can even split up your tracks for you while cooking you a delicious breakfast – but I don’t know, mine does guarantee consistent, high quality, MP3s, built from the best possible, super high quality WAV file – for the level of technology that I have, it’s not too bad – it could be a lot worse!

 

For me, it’s just for the chance to hear this remarkable music, these musicological gems that Steven Wilson finds on these master tapes, and brings to us all – some amazing music has been unearthed just by his standard processes of “re-mixing” classic prog and pop albums.

 

Speaking of music, well, despite spending SOME time on Blu-Ray content – I have actually also been working on new music – in the studio, I have a new track, which I started a couple of weeks ago, called “On The Cusp Of Yesterday” which I am currently having a titanic struggle with.  The basic track has been done for some time, and, for some weird reason, the last one-minute guitar solo is also done.  So I needed to add guitars, from the beginning to the beginning of this existing solo, which is a bit challenging.

 

I spent an entire day (a few weeks ago on a Sunday, I think) adding some new parts, using a lot of truly beautiful H9 patches, a nice, ordinary clean delay into a hall reverb, not too ostentatious, but just nice – and then some other more strident patches – doing guitar over dubs.  All day, and, I wasn’t happy with the last…two or three overdubs.  Maybe the first one was OK, or maybe it’s just the second one…

 

I was so dissatisfied, because it just had not come out how I heard it in my head, which I didn’t even bother to make a rough mix of it with these new hard-fought overdubs, which were technically ok, but weren’t doing the job for me.

 

So the next time I got some free time to work on it, “On The Cusp Of Yesterday” got a new makeover – I actually decided to go ALL THE WAY BACK to the backing track, hiding all of my previous guitar bits, including the good ones – and I would try again, with that lovely clean delay to start – but this time, a clean delay into a beautiful SpaceTime patch.

 

I did several takes, some involving harmonics, others, strange chords, others, melodies and lead guitar.  Saved everything, but listened to nothing.  Now, I am waiting for another chance to go back and hear what I did – and I know that some certain bits – like the very end – came out REALLY well, there is some viable music there, and possibly, enough to flesh out part of the track, perhaps leaving some spaces for me to populate.

 

At the moment, I am just avoiding it, I am not sure where it’s going, the backing track is exceptional – drums, odd bass, really odd “keyboards” courtesy of “REV”, and a lovely violin.  A good solid track, and I really like it – but, for some inexplicable reason, I am not sure what belongs on top of it.  I am tending towards something quite ambient at the moment, rather than “normal” guitar parts (which is what I did the first time around, where I REALLY didn’t like the outcome) – I am liking ambient guitar parts at the moment, so that might be the way – time will tell.

 

Update: another session, I was able to take the recordings made the second time around, and produce a nice mix of “on the cusp of yesterday” from those – it’s come out really well.  Probably ready to be uploaded…which I still haven’t done, because I still haven’t decided about it…

 

Next – is something a bit unexpected, I am now at this very moment, revealing my plans for my next new “Eternal Album” which has turned out to be something I really did not expect AT ALL:  “Garage Band” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

How did that start? I had read somewhere on the Interweb, that Garage Band had had a really good makeover, and was a really cool way to make music now – and I can remember seeing Garage Band years ago on a friends Mac – and I myself have used it, I have a few songs made with it on an old Ipad, that I’ve never published – and possibly won’t, they were very early experiments, before I really had working with Apps down to a Science.

 

I decided to try out this new, improved Garage band, and wow – I was very, very surprised indeed!  It really has a lot of great features, and I think it could become my go-to place for working with samples – and that is what sets it apart, is the “Apple Loops” which are professionally-recorded bits of music, 2 bars of this, 4 bars of that, 8 bars of something really strange.  A lot of grooves, drum grooves, bass grooves, a lot of it is rhythmic in nature, including ethnic sounds from India, Afghanistan and even Egypt – and, a nice batch of African sounds, mostly drums – I have to admit, they have supplied a LOT of great, ready-made content, that you can fit together into tracks in a very easy, intuitive way.

 

I have thoroughly enjoy my Garage Band Renaissance or GBR, and I immediately started producing strange and wonderful hybrid piece of music beginning in mid-September and continuing to the present day.  And I finally did upload the first five complete tracks, to the new album, a few days ago.  I am also nearly finished with a sixth track, working title “preponderance”.  So the Garage Band Renaissance has been a real hit with me – here are the tracks:

 

Start Date            Title                                                       Containing

 

20160919             Hare Rama Buys A Llama               Drum Samples, Manually Played Bass, Grand Piano, Synth, Raucous Rhythm and Lead Guitars, Bizarre Guitar FX, and Bass Samples, Strings Samples

 

20160926             Opposites Attract                            Wonderful Pastiches of African Drum Samples, Ever Changing,

Manually Played Bass, Cello Samples, Afghanistani Melodic Instrument Samples, Sub-Bass Samples, Dub-Step Bass Samples, Bass Synth, Melody Synth, Reversed Melody Synth, Drum Kit Samples, String Section Samples.

 

20160926             Metal Crisis                                        (Altered version of abandoned track “Cuban Crises”) Drum Kit

(Metal) Sample, Metal Chug Rhythm Guitar Sample, Metal

(Metal) Sample, Metal Chug /Blues Lead Guitar Sample, Funky Clean Wah-Wah Guitar Sample, Beautiful Female Voice Singing “Oohs & Aahs” Vocal Sample, Funky Fender Rhodes Electric Piano Sample, Synth Sample, Additional Drum Kit Sample, Manually Played Bass.

 

20161014             Nambutamba Rain Shower         African Drum Samples (Many Different Ones), African Percussion

Samples, Mysterious Electric Piano Riff Sample, Mysterious Guitar Riff Sample, Mysterious Synth Chords, Additional Conga Sample, Rock Bass Guitar Sample, Drum Break Sample, Crash Cymbal Sample (Note: In the end, I actually did not play a single actual note on this, it’s entirely composed of samples – and also, it’s probably the first ever Ambient African piece of music ever made!)

 

20161017             Ten Seventeen (Aka “Nine Nine”)        Drum Kit Samples (Three Different Funked Out Drum Kit Samples, Manually Played Bass Guitar, Sarod Sample, Indian Drum Samples (Khol and Pakawaj Drums), Transport Stop Synth Sample, Voyager 1 Synth Sample, Vocalised Synth Bass Sample, Boogie Right Vox Synth Sample, Vigilante All Sample (String Section & Timpani Samples).

Update: after several more sessions, I FINALLY got the manually played bass guitar part how I wanted it.

 

I am very excited about working with Garage Band again, now that it has had such a brilliant face-lift, and I love how very simple it is to create very intriguing and interesting music, using mainly samples – something I’ve not done much of outside of Komplete – but that’s a very different world of sampling – the Native Instruments world – and I am afraid that Garage Band is not quite up to that standard yet :-).  But – it’s not bad for Apple!

I had a blast recording these tracks, the first where I used an IPhone instead of an Ipad – it’s not bad at all – I found it easy enough to do.  I do like the samples that Apple has provided, and the temptation to just sit and create, is overwhelming – they have a lot of great-sounding samples (and, some terribly bad or terribly cheesy ones, too) which make composing a dream – they even “theme” them together, so for example, you can put a bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar “together” and they play back a chunk of an imaginary song by an imaginary band.  Of course, I like to manually force them to match up with the wrong track, cross-breeding them rather than putting them all together as intended – intentionally misusing the pre-matched loops…but that’s just me.

 

 

I have already used that technique twice during the last five weeks of Garage Band work, myself; once on “Hare Rama Buys A Llama” and again on “Metal Crisis” – it works well, and I like it. For the latter track, though, I brought in additional bluesy lead guitars, and purposely “mismatched” those over the other, patterned rhythm guitars – and it worked fine, because the musicianship of this unknown guitarist, was of a high calibre, and his beautiful blues riffs could have “fit” almost anywhere….by purposefully mis-placing them, I created some impossible and very musical moments in this metal / beautiful vocals track – a strange experience, but well worth it – I like this track!

So really, I am right back where I started, with music on an Ipad, often, Garage Band is the first thing you learn, and in my case, I am no exception, I did work with it for quite a while, until ambient apps came along and distracted me – once I had Scape, and Mixtikl, and Drone FX – that was me, away from “normal” apps like Garage Band, and when I did use normal apps, I favoured Nanostudio (and I still do!) as well as learning how to sample from the Fairlight, and so on – I began a long journey of discovery, that has now, in 2016…led me right back to the beginning, to where I started in 2011 – back to Garage Band.  Who would have thought?

Not me.

 

Now that the new Garage Band Eternal Album is loaded up at last, I am off to work on the guitar system which is undergoing yet another massive upgrade…as usual.  A game-changing upgrade I hope, including Pedalboard Mark 68, I can’t wait till it’s all sorted out…

 

 

Happy listening!

 

 

Dave

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the making of an epic prog rock “monsterpiece” – part one

on may 31, 2015, I sat down at my computer, and built an empty folder set for a new music project.  at first, it was named something like “20150531-01-komplete-unknown”, meaning, to work on a piece within the komplete application, content, unknown – but within a few days, it had grown to the point where I amended the name, because it seemed like such an obvious answer to a question that so far, no one had asked, namely, “what is the name of this song?” – obviously, it was – “the complete unknown”.

so the folder got renamed, and now it bears the name “20150531-01-komplete-unknown-thecompleteunknown” and that was it – I was away.

I loaded up komplete with four vintage keyboards – and I officially began my journey – a journey I am still very much on today – into the complete unknown – via “the complete unknown”.

I spent a few days, working out a piece for keyboards, that would work well as a “keys-only” intro to the song, I wanted it to have a fantastical, classically-based and with a serious feel to it, and then, after say, after a minute or two, the bass and drums would enter…I could just about imagine it all.  I could just about hear the song in my head…

I struggled mightily with my serious keyboard intro, overdubbing many different takes of many different keyboard voices playing the notes that I had chosen.  the entire piece was done manually – no sequencers were used, and it meant that I had to play a pretty tricky part, manually, over and over and over again, until it was just right.

Eventually though, I was happy with my little intro composition, and musically – it set the stage for the “song proper” – I was very happy with the way this short piece of quasi-classical keyboard music turned out, and I was extremely thrilled with the sounds of the vintage keyboards, which were all of course, courtesy of komplete.  the intro was complete – and I was thrilled!

note/the details: for the record, there were just four instruments (not six as I erroneously remembered and stated elsewhere – four, not six) used in the creation of the keyboard “intro”, which were:

dave stafford, vintage keyboards quartet:

soniccouture bowed piano X

soniccouture broken wurli – init (my own settings)

soniccouture novachord – novasynth init (my own settings)

soniccouture ondes martenot – poly ondes init (my own settings)

these four tracks were then mixed and mastered, with just reverb added to give it a big room sound – a completely “finished” piece of music which could then just be “dropped in” in front of where the bass and the drums make their grand entrance.

so, with the intro safely under my belt, it was now time for the active “core” of the song to be built, and as tradition has it, it started like all structured pieces in the rock world start – with a drum track, and a bass overdub of that drum track.  but I didn’t want just any rhythm section, I wanted a section with the skill of a powerful but wild drummer, I needed my own Andy Ward on drums, or maybe I’d borrow Marillion’s rhythm section…I wasn’t sure.

then – Chris Squire passed away, during the first few weeks of work on the song, so I thought a lot about Chris, and how Chris played the bass (and what a huge influence his playing had on me as a 15 year old guitarist who loved progressive music in 1973!), and it had a huge influence on the bass part in the song.  so the drums came from me – my own vision of a series of prog beats that run nearly continuously for 14 minutes or so…but when it came time to do the second overdub, the bass, it was all about emulating the God of Prog Bass Playing, the late, great Chris Squire.

If I was very lucky, I could get a sound like Chris’ and maybe “play” as well as Marillion‘s bassist 🙂 because no one, except perhaps Wetton or Lake, can emulate Chris – Chris has an incredible and very unique bass tone and style.

I also spent a lot of time on the drum part, I fleshed it out in the very first session, but it took many more sessions, to really get it into shape, to feel happy with the sounds, to add interesting fills, to use different variations of the beat, and there are even some special sections that I did by hand rather than by sequencer – and by the way, the drums (or drum machine, I should say – komplete again) is the only sequenced instrument in the piece – all others were really played by me – with one odd exception – the bass part, was played by me, but on the keyboard. It was not sequenced, I played every riff, every fill, two different bass solos – I really played those.

The same goes for all of the keyboard parts in the main part of the song, as well as the guitars – all of those are real as well.  I’ve never learned to play the drums, so, the best quality sampled drums in the world, will have to do!

The drum track took a few weeks to perfect, but the bass part – well, I laid down something to begin with, a bit at a time, a section at a time – but then, I was never satisfied, it sounded good, but it didn’t yet sound amazing – so I started doing a lot of work on the bass – I fashioned a quite wild bass solo near the end of the first half of the song, in the key of C major no less, but an awesomely fun solo to write and play.

I worked on the bass for quite a long, long time, and eventually, I felt completely happy with it – and I still do.  Now that I am laying guitars on top of drums, bass, organ, and mellotron – when I add a guitar part, and I hear the bass come up “in between” – I just have to smile, because it’s as if the “bass player” is responding to the guitarist, or, the other way around – and that’s an awesome thing for a piece that isn’t actually played live.

I am extremely pleased with the rhythm section, I spent far too much time on it, but, it was worth it, and the keyboard parts practically played themselves, because the bass and drums were so together.

 

So this is where it began – at least, the active part of the song, back during June and July this year. The first mixes then, were of nothing but the intro, plus the bass and drums – with no other ornamentation whatsoever.  I must have listened to this song, with just intro, bass and drums, dozens of times, whilst first, trying to perfect the drum track, and then later, trying to perfect the bass part.  That took even longer than the drums to perfect – but in the end, I feel truly happy with the results – and I am actually, especially proud of the bass part – it rocks.  It’s full of surprises, and I love where it takes the song – and, later, how it interacts with both the keyboards and the lead guitars – it’s excellent.

note/the details: the rhythm section looks like this:

drums: dave stafford – drum programming and manual playing of drum samples

abbey road modern drummer, alternative rock, “rage” setting changed from 98 bpm – sped up to 140 bpm

bass: dave stafford – performed on keyboard, inspired by the late Chris Squire

scarbee rickenbacker bass – neck pickup DI – direct injection

as the Scottish summer drew quickly to an end, at the end of july, I had a brainstorm – I would bring the introductory keyboard quartet, back in at the VERY END of the piece, to bring complete closure to the piece – no matter where it went during the 14 minutes in the middle, the sound and the melodies at the beginning and the end, were now tied together perfectly – and I was really glad of this decision, because some really good musical events came out of that decision, later.

I faded up the intro “in progress”, during the last long rock section of the drums and bass track, and I managed, after a couple of tries, to sync it up completely with the drum track – and eventually, unintentionally, I played a leslie’d organ solo over the top of it – and soon, it just sounded like it had been there the whole time.

then the time came, to work on the main body of the song, and add in a lot of supporting musical information – bearing in mind, that the drums and bass were complete, including a lot of very in your face, bright, Rickenbacker bass riffs, and, one very avant garde bass solo, and another quasi-solo later on – so those were now reduced, frozen and “carved in stone”.

so atop my finished drum and bass part, I began to add keyboards, beginning with the oldest progressive rock standby, the Hammond organ.  I really felt it was essential, to have chords and melodies on the Hammond, and, solos from the Hammond, because it’s such a very, very “prog” sound – it really cuts through the mix, and when playing chords, it’s so supportive with basses and guitars aloft on top of it.

So I worked on Hammond parts, using just one basic, straight sound, but varying it, by using the mod wheel on my M-Audio keyboard, to “speed up” and “slow down” the leslie effect – which is one of the finest things about sampled organs, done Komplete style – you get truly perfect sounding leslie effects, and I played every part as live as possible, using the mod wheel while I played, to speed up and slow down the effect – I had a blast.  There is one epic solo in the first half, and another accidental one at the end, with the leslie set to “fast” – a sound not usually used that much, but it sounds great, as the song proper fades away, to have this final organ solo with the “fast leslie” sound going – it’s really nice.

after I had added all of the organ parts, where I followed whatever key signature was stated by what the bass player was doing (I had injected several key changes when creating the bass part), and I was happy with both the organ sound, and the content – and the solos – I then moved on to the mellotron parts, which I used sparingly to try and give them more mystique.  I felt that using them throughout would be too obvious, and where the Hammond does sound great playing right through, you really want the occasional swath of a mellotron wandering in when you least expect it – that’s prog to me!

so – two separate mellotron tracks, using very simple, very pure mellotron sounds (nothing fancy, just the very basic strings and flute sounds) most of the time, it’s just mellotron strings, or, just mellotron flute and very, very occasionally – I allowed both – so you get a really full sound there, with drums, bass, Hammond organ, string mellotron and flute mellotron.  The string mellotrons became the backdrop for some really cool guitar sections later on, while the flute mellotrons were more taking on the melody, or in one case, as harmony, so they worked out very, very well indeed.

the mellotron parts went more quickly than the Hammond parts had, in part, because by this time, I knew how the chords went, and I just “knew” what the mellotrons should do – and they did it, beautifully.  Here I sit, several months later, and I am now marvelling at how they sound in support of some of the new guitar overdubs – they provide the perfect backdrop for lead guitars!

note/the details – the keyboard “section”

dave stafford, hammond B3 emulation

Komplete Vintage Organs – classic rock, Hammond B3 tonewheel emulation – preset  “j’taime” – leslie effect applied in real time with mod wheel during performances

dave stafford, mellotron strings

M-Tron Pro – Mellotron – Mark II Vintage Violins Basic

dave stafford, mellotron flutes

M-Tron Pro – Mellotron – Flutes Basic

so at this stage, after several months, of slow, patient work, I had a fairly complete song (no pun intended) with a full drum part, a full bass part, organ chords, organ solos, mellotron strings, mellotron flutes, plus the four vintage keyboards that inhabit both the intro and the outro…so, the time had come to deal with the “middle eight”.

the next idea I had, really, really changed things – I decided to cut the piece in half, and create an acoustic guitar interlude – in my mind, something like the live acoustic guitar interludes that Gentle Giant used to have during their concerts in support of the “Octopus” album – but in practice, what I came up with is much more dave stafford / guitar craft than gentle giant.

so – I split the track at a place where the drums were silent anyway (I had intentionally left a blank space in the song, with no bass or drums, knowing ahead of time that I wanted to split it in half), so it was easy to do – and I created an un-timed gap between the end of Part A and the resumption of Part B – with absolutely no idea what was to “go there” except I knew I wanted acoustic guitars.  what eventually ended up there – exceeded my wildest expectations of that time.

I managed to transition from the full song by bringing in two acoustic guitar leads almost simultaneously, playing two melodies which transition the song from “full band” to acoustic guitar duo / trio, and then the acoustic guitar section is off – the whole thing was played on my Ovation Balladeer, which is a not-quite-satisfactory replacement for my ailing Ovation Legend, which is no longer made.  In any case, the Balladeer did well enough, and I managed to get some very nice tones out of it’s pickup – it sounds good on recordings, in any case.

I had just a few notions about what the acoustic guitars should play, I had a little melody that I sub-consciously “borrowed” from Tales From Topographic Oceans, I play that melody a few times, and then suddenly, the rhythm of the piece changes, and there is another tiny section – and then, the magic happens – the third section, completely unrehearsed, came from nowhere – a slow, beautiful, simple chord progression, with a stately, played with the fingers-rather-than-the-plectrum lead part that just surprised the holy shirt out of me.  I am so, so pleased with this little piece of music, it doesn’t last long, but, it’s one of the loveliest melodies I’ve come up with to date, and I am really pleased and proud of this little miniature acoustic suite.

But then – then, a few weeks later, I had an idea – I would add bird songs into the piece, in stereo – during the most moving parts of the guitar solo.  I added several different species, recorded directly from an app on my ipad, some on the right channel, some in mono / centre, and some on the left – little bursts of different birds including the iconic british blackbird (because you know from the Beatles / White Album that they will sound good!)

The end result was astonishing – it made this already excellent part so relaxing, so natural – it just was the perfect little addition to the piece – I was so surprised and so amazed at what something like that can do to a piece of music – it naturalises it – if you know what I mean.

Then – for contrast, I followed the three acoustic guitar sections with some strange TC-11 synth sounds on the iPad – a solo and a looped piece, which worked very nicely as a contrast to the guitars, and leading back towards the song proper.  Several weeks later, I acquired a new synth on my ipad, the Poseidon Synth, and it had this really amazing sound that included the sound of human voices, so I tried replacing my original TC-11 parts with the Poseidon Synth, playing two stereo takes.

It was good, but, even better, when I added the original back in, and I realised that they both sounded good, and they sounded good together – so I left the old parts in, and added in the new synth part care of the Poseidon Synth – a really nice ios synth.

For quite a while, that was then tied to a drum riff, that led back into the second half of the song.  But then, I decided just a few days ago, that I was not happy with that transition, and I wanted something else.  After trying a very thrashy, sort of Steve Howe at his most dissonant Koass Guitar part, I discarded that, and set about making the exact opposite of that – something very, very melodic and beautiful…

This final part of the “middle section” is known as the “Hackett Guitars” section, which was made entirely with one electric guitar and the Eventide H9, two takes of guitar chords strummed finger-style, in a classical or flamenco fashion, but more reminiscent of a piece from the final sections of Genesis‘ “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” (the bit just before “The Light Dies Down On Broadway”, I think) so two gently but forcefully finger-strummed “Hackett” guitars, plus one reverse guitar solo – all of them drenched in luscious Eventide reverb. It turned out beyond my wildest dreams, a simple, beautiful section of music. Prog should be a mix of some dissonant and more melodic parts (or so it seems to me).

And with that, that brings us to what I consider to be “Part Two” of the song, which I will (eventually) describe in my next blog, in the New Year.  The “Hackett Guitars” section was the perfect vehicle to bring the middle section to a satisfactory completion, and a perfect way to merge back with the main part of the song – the resumption of the second part where I’d originally cut the piece in half.

Thats where we’ll go next time, then.  I will see you there!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

studio diary 20150214

I had thought that “fair play”, my new “korg gadget” piece, was finished, I did make the odd adjustment here and there, but I thought it had reached its final form, until I sat down to listen to it a few days ago.

 

the listening session was fine, I am happy enough with the song, “fair play”, as it stands – but, I felt like I wanted to hear more of the “middle section”, which, as it happens, is a key change up to C major, there were only a few bars, so I copied those three bars, inserted them before the existing three bars, and then set about modifying just the Chicago bass / synth (which I am mainly using as a lead synth, not a bass – the hammond has taken the role of the bass for the majority of this track) part so that I had, effectively, three “new” lead lines, and the third, was sort of a very monotonous, circular sort of riff, so I instructed the device to play that bar twice, which gave us this:

Chicago 1 Modified Chicago 4 X 1
Chicago 2 Modified Chicago 5 X 1
Chicago 3 Modified Chicago 6 X 2
Chicago 4 Originally Chicago 1 X 1
Chicago 5 Originally Chicago 2 X 1
Chicago 6 Originally Chicago 3 X 1

so, wonderfully, that means that the “middle eight”, which is a whole tone above the basic song (which appears to be in F or Bb, I am not exactly sure!) is…seven measures long ! I love stuff like that – it makes it odd – but musically, you would probably never notice, it just sounds like a synth “solo”, which is in a different key to the bulk of the song – and it brings musical relief because it jumps up a whole tone – it’s very exciting, it builds tension beautifully…and hopefully, no one is counting bars, and the fact that my middle eight is not, in fact, a middle eight, but a middle seven – will go unnoticed by everyone except; everyone who just read this paragraph. 🙂

we have then, a whole piece of music, at last, that begins (and continues for most of the song, to be honest) in the staggered, drum-driven rhythmic world of gentle giant, moves to some beautiful acoustic v electric piano sections, with a solid and wonderful hammond bass underpinning everything – it then, finally mutates to a seven measure long “middle eight” – (perhaps, I have invented the world’s first “middle seven” – who knows? I’d love to take that credit) and then, via a reprise of the opening segment, moves onto a spectacular ending featuring a four-measure version of the “middle seven” – why not?
So at no point does the “middle eight” ever equal eight bars, it’s seven in the middle of the song (and four when I re-use it at the end) – and I think that is just fine.

 

“fair play” to me, is a proof positive that the newly-enhanced “korg gadget”, which to be fair, they only added a few instruments, but, the instruments they added are so awesome, that it makes creation with them easy, in fact, with the 15 original synths, you could do a lot, already, but having the core electronic keyboards – well, one is acoustic, I suppose, so having one acoustic and the rest of the core electronic keyboards, to hand – gives us CONTROL…it means you can build songs using those more familiar, more comforting keyboards, and then bring in the 15 original korg synths – the “gadget” originals – to add colour and shade and light and dark…

 

I basically started this piece out with organ, acoustic piano, drums and electric piano – and that IS the core of the song, and all of those are instruments that are made available in “korg gadget” from “korg module” – which, right away, shows us the real value of “korg gadget” – and that’s just the start – what will it be like when you can access ANY instrument via “korg module”, in high quality samples??

I vote for mellotron, sitar, and anything else they fancy sampling…go for it. I want to see “korg module” become the premier sample based app on ios – unless native instruments jumps in – then, I would have to wait and see what THEY come up with 🙂

I was eager to try “korg gadget” now that it’s been “upgraded” – simply by the existence of “korg module”, that gives “korg gadget” a whole new face, and transforms it into a player of high quality instrument samples – directly parallel (in its basic function, anyway) to kontakt in komplete – we have our world class sample player now – the ubiquitous “korg gadget”.
this is a really clever idea from korg (they seem to be having a lot of really good ideas lately – witness the Ibanez RGKP6 guitar and bass, which feature a korg kaoss pad 2S built right into the guitar’s body – a fantastic idea whose time has finally come – a very clever idea). korg makes really interesting synths and other products, too, and the more I get into their stuff, the more I enjoy it – they have been around the block, they obviously listen to their customers, and, their stuff is well built and long lasting – korg is a name that says “quality” to me.

 

they seem too, to be able to compete in the world of ios, in the app world, at the same level and with the same commitment to quality that they show in the virtual world, the bricks and mortar world. I like that about a company, and I think that they are handling themselves well in both arenas – not something a lot of companies can probably boast about.

 

I have listened again now, to the playback of “fair play”, and I am now fairly certain, that it is indeed, complete. I hope I will not change my mind about that again! It’s ended up just about four minutes in length, which for this type of piece, is ideal. I hope to master it and upload it as soon as possible….(update: now done! “fair play” can be found here).

 

and then…well, things happen 🙂

I was and am totally happy with the completed track, “fair play”…but, while I was doing some final tweaks to levels and stereo placement, it struck me that I’d really like to do two things: I already have finished and mastered “fair play” as it stands, in it’s complete form, but also, I’d like to take it from the point it is at, and do some further work on it, make it an alternate version of itself – so I did a “save as” of the completed “gadget” track, and named it “fair play – advanced version” – and immediately began work on transforming the by-now familiar “fair play” towards new musical areas, I have removed some of the sparser parts, I’ve added more drums, there is far less “space” in this new version, it just rocks straight through rather than having dynamic sections as the original does, and so on.

I’ve also been doing some serious “randomisation” – this is a process that I tend to get into in “korg gadget” especially – where I will lift one melodic pattern, and randomly copy it over a different pattern in a different instrument, so, organ bass part becomes electric piano riff, or acoustic piano now doubles with electric, synth solo becomes hammond solo, and so on…taking existing themes, melodies, and solos and moving them to different places within the composition – it’s huge fun.

I might also decide to just remove four bars of music here, and then, copy two others into their place, remove five bars here, and not replace them, add some of my favourite bars from the first half into the second half, and so on – endless possibility, and it’s very quick, very easy, to edit in korg gadget, too – add extra snare drum hits, add extra bass drum hits, change single hits into double hits – it can all be done so, so quickly – and probably, within the first fifteen minutes of editing, I had radically altered the basic DNA of “fair play” into a completely oddball variation of itself – “fair play – advanced version” – which I plan to work on for a few weeks, to give it roughly as much gestation time as the original got – and then master and upload it as well.

I am very, very glad that korg has jumped into the area of high quality samples for ios, with the beautiful “korg module” app, and I am extremely glad that by chance, they made those samples available to the “korg gadget” app – that, prompted me to re-visit “korg gadget”, and create a song that utilised some of those amazing samples – and I find that it makes a HUGE difference to me, to have hammond organ, acoustic piano, and electric piano as three of the most important samples in my new piece(s) “fair play” and “fair play – advanced version” – which might get re-titled “unfair play” or “fair work” or some such – I don’t know.  or…it might just stay as “advanced version” – this remains to be seen.

I have a lot of work to get on with now, I’ve recently recorded a lot of guitar sessions which should hopefully yield some new videos (down the road a piece, probably, but, maybe some interesting takes in this last batch of videos…) as well as a lot of audio mixing to do before I even think about the video side of things – this is always the challenge for me – I am now able to record a lot of material very quickly, but with only myself to handle post-processing, it takes me weeks, or in some cases, years, or in some case, never, to create video content – or sometimes, even process the audio and create master audio mixes.

the backlog is not getting any smaller at the moment, which is actually OK, and what I’ve finally decided is that I will abandon utterly my original intention of trying to present my video work chronologically, I will master and upload what videos I feel are the most important, what videos are the most interesting or unusual, and then, as time permits, I will go back and continue work on the “old” video backlog.  controlling this, will be playlists.  I’ve already created video playlists, by date, for many of my legacy video sessions so I would suggest that whenever you visit the pureambientHD channel or indeed, any of my video channels on youtube, that you always go to the Playlists section, rather than the Uploads – because as of 2015, uploads will no longer be chronological, but completely random – so you will find instead, that in the Playlists section, you will find “dated” dave stafford live music video session in chronological order – and this then frees me to pick and choose between the now, and the historical-that-haven’t-yet-been-processed – so I am recommending that you stick to the chronology as imposed by my “dated” session Playlists – or else, complete and utter confusion may be the main result 🙂  as for me – well, I am chronically chronologically challenged anyway – and confusion, well, it might be my epitaph 🙂   but playlists will get you the unconfused view of dave stafford live music videos.

I really enjoy creating these music videos, and trying out new instruments and techniques, I have never gone in for the “here is my demo of the roland gr-55 guitar synth” and then sit there, and play you ten seconds of each of it’s voices – instead, when I acquired the synth – I just started making videos with it, I just started using it, so you can learn along with me – and I hope that this can, will and might inspire others to pick up some of these interesting instruments, and have a go yourselves – I reckon that it’s easier to learn about something just by trying it – so, for my first ever video, “st. alia of the knife”, I selected the “oboe” voice, set up a nice reverb, ran an existing reverse loop – and did a live oboe solo / improv on video.  from there – I just kept working with the synth, until I eventually used it to create my first classical composition, my “concerto no. 1 in em for oboe and guitar” and also, I’ve continued to use it on improvs, as well as part of multi-track recordings such as “this is a test”, as well as the title track, from the “gone native” album, and in fact, I used it on several of the tracks on “gone native” – I really think that the roland gr-55 guitar synth is a great instrument – and I find that all of us who use the device can compare notes and share what we’ve learned via video, audio, and other modes of communication – indeed, why not?

but I digress, this is mainly a report of the now split-into-two “fair play” – and I hope you enjoy the original version while I continue to develop the second version, “fair play – advanced version” 🙂

 

until then I remain

your faithful servant

yours truly, etc.

 

 

dave

pureambient HQ – 20150214

 

 

 

 

studio diary 20150202

it’s a new year, and since during the past two months, I have completed not one but two major works, first, “concerto no. 3 in D major for piano & strings”, and more recently “concerto no. 4 in F major for harpsichord & strings”, I thought it was high time I turn to some of the other very neglected, and very excellent apps – I am not ashamed to admit that I have allowed Notion to dominate my musical life in the area of applications, for pretty much all of 2014 – and, that’s fine, because out of that, I’ve created two very interesting bodies of work: “music for apps: notion – an eternal album” and “classical – an eternal album” – and the quantity and quality of the pieces in those two albums meets with my wholehearted approval – I think these are strong works using an excellent application, and I know that over the years, both Notion the iPad app and Notion for the PC, will be my go-to apps for classical composition, and for alternative works involving a lot of orchestral instrumentation.

that is for the future though, right now, in the here and now, I have embarked on a new composition, entitled (at the moment, anyway) “fair play” – and this is my first piece created (this year) using the most excellent “korg gadget” application, which, in a sense, is like a new app – because of the presence now of “korg module”, which, interestingly, directly interacts with korg gadget” – in practical terms, this means that I now have available high quality grand piano and high quality electric piano samples available within gadget, via module – which is brilliant, don’t get me wrong, the original 15 synths supplied with the original gadget were and are, they remain, very functional and some of them, like the beautiful ambient synth, are both unique and very pleasing to the ear – and, very useful when composing for 15 synths, too!

so, I had downloaded “korg module” several weeks ago, and I had played through most of the extremely high quality samples available, and, really, as someone observed, that if you have this, and “neo-soul keys” (which I have but haven’t used much so far), and maybe, what is it, “sample tank” (which I don’t have) – that is “all you need” for sample-based jamming fun. I agree, but at the same time, I would actually welcome any number of products similar to “korg module” – basically, world-class samples, available for use on ios. Not just the ordinary ones, either, sure, those are great to have, but I’d welcome a sort of “komplete” for ios, obviously, it couldn’t have the many GB of content that “komplete” does, but, in a very scaled down version, with only the best and most essential samples – it would, it will, be brilliant !! come on native instruments – build for ios! teach korg how to do it right lol !  🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

another example of this type of thinking, in new applications, is “ruckers 1628” a high quality harpsichord sample that I was very happy to obtain, so there are more and more of these apps out there based on quality samples – quite a lot of them already, really.

 

knowing that I now had the high quality keyboard samples available to me within “korg gadget” from “korg module”, I decided to create a new piece of music in honour of that. however, the song itself, had a strange genesis; when I first got “korg module”, I went through whatever process there was, and I was testing within “korg gadget”, to verify that I could indeed access and record with, say, the electric piano sample from “korg module”. I opened up a new, empty file, and randomly stabbed at the keyboard, just to make a noise, and recorded two bars of “music” – and there I left it. “fair play” for the first week or so of its existence, consisted of a sort of vaguely-gentle-giant-sounding electric and acoustic piano “riff” – so that was how it started. and when I say vaguely…I mean…vaguely :-). the riff was just about nothing, just a feeling…

 

a few weeks went by, and finally, I found some time, and I went in to create this new song – and I decided that its intro, at least, and possibly, part of the actual song, would be based on these random events that I had stabbed carelessly into the app weeks ago – so, I made a couple of very minor changes, and away I went. within a day or two, I had a lovely, 17 bar tune, with two decent themes, one of them based on that accidental intro.

 

The accidental intro worked beautifully, in fact, I ended up using it as one of my main themes, with various modifications, and it sounds as if it were planned into the song – when it absolutely was not – a complete and utter accident.

 

In the next incarnation, now at 34 bars, a third theme was added, which included some lovely parts done with the electric piano v. salzburg, one of the existing solo synths – a nice lead sound – I had them trading melodies back and forth, and it was really a lot of fun. I did also use acoustic grand piano, but not in a solo capacity, more in a supporting role, it’s time will come, but immediately, I was really enjoying the fantastic and very realistic electric piano sound – and I even took the opportunity, in the next incarnation of the song, to have a couple of bars of it “solo”, playing a lovely circular once-again-a-bit-like-gentle-giant riff – and it sounds great, when the drums stop, and then, when they start up again, it just rocks – really nice effect, having JUST that beautifully-sampled electric piano playing on its own out there for a moment, into a nice bit of reverb – fantastic!

 

the final session to date, added yet another 17 measures, bringing the total up to the current 51 bars, and this was really just further development of the existing themes, some different juxtaposing of electric piano v. salzburg riffs, and other refinements and improvements. when I do a play back now, I can’t believe this started with just two stunted, inaccurate bars of non-music riffage – it’s really sounding quite, quite good already.

 

It’s odd, when I read back the above description, it sounds like a really long song, so I should probably say, that the entire piece right now, in its unfinished state, waiting for a resolution to bar 51, which is just hanging in space, in the middle of a song, clocks in at a modest 2:15 !!! so I am thinking that I am perhaps, half way through the piece, compositionally speaking – I can’t see it being a lot more than four or five minutes – maybe, but it depends what happens next. I like the activity of the piece, I love that there are a number of themes and changes that really grab the listener’s attention; but I am far from finished with the piece.

 

so now I am just in a period of reflection – what will happen next? – add more instruments? carry on with additional content?, more refinements?, repetitions of themes? – or, make it short, end it sooner? – I have no idea (!?!?!?!!!!!) – what will happen next.

 

 

I will say, though, I have REALLY enjoyed working with “korg gadget” this time, moreso than ever before, and that is simply because the app has grown up, instead of those 15 synths of varying usefulness, there is now a core of truly great sounding important, core, sampled instruments, with the 15 synths providing a bit of variety and spice to those central samples. It’s amazing how going from 15 to 17 or 18 synths (depending on what you get in terms of in-app purchases) makes all the difference, but, it really does.

 

the weak spot: users of “korg gadget” will already know what I am going to say: drums. yes, there is a choice of drum machines, and some pretty decent and some pretty interesting choices of instruments within those drum machines. but…they all sound a bit wimpy, when I mentally compare them say to the drum samples in “nanostudio”” – well, then, I long for the powerful sounding drum kits of “nanostudio”. ok, sure, for a lot of modern styles (which I have almost no interest in) such as I don’t really know, dance music or whatever today’s version of “hip-hop” is) – the drum machines provided with “gadget” are probably sufficient.

 

I can (almost) make them sound like rock drums if I really work at it, but that’s really my only “gripe” about “gadget” – and I would have said so from the very beginning. I should be a bit clearer here: the drum synths are not BAD, they are just not in the Dave Stafford style, and they don’t have a lot of big, loud, rock and roll drums like some other devices do have – “nanostudio among them.

 

I think in time, with a few more high-powered, well-sampled sounds inserted, that “korg gadget” will be top of the heap, at least in terms of a sort of “studio” where you have a lot of good instruments from which to create whole songs. It’s already one of the top (MIDI) studios, along with “nanostudio and a few others – there are a lot of these, and some are better than others – but “korg gadget” is one of the good ones – and, it’s made better now through its marriage to “korg module”, which gives you more powerful sampled keyboards – which has taken a great app and pushed it towards the fantastic – well done to korg for that.

 

It still surprises me sometimes, after being away in the wilderness for many months using mostly “Notion” for everything, occasionally dabbling with other apps just to learn more about them, that I can return to an app like “korg gadget” or “nanostudio” after many, many months of not working with it – and (much to my surprise!) I can set up and build a new song as if I’d been using the app every day for a year! I think apps are like this – once you learn them, you don’t forget – unless it’s really, really tricky, in which case, you will need a written procedure ANYWAY – so for “korg gadget” or for “nanostudio” – I just sit down, and I build a drum track, and then some bass, and then some synths…and then I’ve got a song. they are equally easy to use, and I actually really love working with both of them.
there are others, like, “synergy” – I’ve done exactly one piece in “synergy”, which came out ok, but I’ve never “finished” it; same for “isequence” – one song, never finished; same for “cubasis” – one song or part of a song, never finished; same for “impc” – well, that’s a sampler, really, but again, I have started a song in it – and it’s an interesting process; never finished – but not nearly as easy to use and not as easy to get going in, as “korg gadget” or “nanostudio” are – those are the two most user-friendly, almost without a doubt.

 

then there is “auria”, which is audio only, and works well enough, it took me a long time to really get going with “auria”, and actually, it was through de-constructing that amazing james mccartney song that I learned about editing in “auria”, and it’s extremely useful for throwing tracks together quickly, just to see if they “work” together, or for editing audio which isn’t easy to do elsewhere on the iPad, I am glad I have “auria”, although my tendency is to master tracks in their original app, and then take them to the DAW on the PC for proper mastering, EQ and reverb – I have a LOT of tools for those processes on the iPad, but I just don’t trust them, and it’s just a bit tricky getting around on the iPad – I can do it SO fast, on the PC, that usually, my goal is, get the piece done, mixed as well as possible, and then, get it exported – get it OFF the iPad ASAP – and then take it to the DAW for all processing.

 

when I have time on my hands (almost never) I promise myself, that I will spend time working more in “auria”, using my various stereo placement and mastering tools, using my beautiful reverb units (and, I cannot fault the quality EFFECTS available on the iPad – I have a lot of those, and I do use those on tracks), in Audiobus, when I want a beautiful atmosphere for a track – I will use ipad reverb units – the best of which, strangely is probably AUFX: Space.

 

but it really depends, most songs, I tend to get to a certain point, where the playing is all done, and the mix is OK, and all I want to do is get it off the ipad! And hence to the PC for some PROPER processing! Master it, reverb it, etc. using the superior PC tools available in SONAR – I have an audio mastering template that is fantastic, where I can add appropriate amounts of compression, EQ and reverb – at will, whenever I finish a track – I tend to finish it here.

 

so somehow, I am not able to commit fully to the idea of making music FULLY on the ipad – I am happy enough to create in the apps, and mix in the apps, and even sometimes, use reverb to treat whole tracks – but then, it ends, and I want it off the device and onto the PC, so I can master and eq and compress and reverb to my heart’s content, the old-fashioned way.

 

I am completely set up for making music on the ipad, the WHOLE process, so I could carry on, add EQ as necessary, work on stereo placement, add reverb, etc. – and create FINISHED tracks that would not require a trip through the DAW mastering stage. I will try to start doing this in 2015, to see if I can “let go” of this desire to do things half and half – I want to create ipad music on the ipad, from start to finish, and PC music on the PC, from start to finish, and maybe even some pieces that combine the best of both worlds – who knows???

 

So that is what I will attempt to do, for one of my many resolutions I suppose…see if I can resist the temptation to do it the “easy way”, in SONAR, and instead, develop high quality, quick way of mimicking the PC process on the ipad – thousands of musicians are doing that every day, and I am avoiding it! I guess I am more old-fashioned than I had realised…

 

However – I am sure I can do this, there are already a few tracks of mine that were created without the PC process, so I know it’s possible. I can do it – it just takes time 🙂 :-). The challenge will be to create a mastering process that is just as quick and easy as it is on the PC (and, more importantly – just as good) – and I think that now, in 2015, that is actually possible. There are some nice mastering tools available now, for the iPad, and I am sure with time, they will just get better and better.

 

As time goes on, too, there seems to be more and more a “merging of church and state” – i.e. PC and ios ideas and processes are often duplicated (for example, “Notion for Ipad” and “Notion 5 for PC”) ok, that’s a bad example, because they are not duplicated, but, they are essentially the same, it’s just that the iPad version is less capable. So I believe that often, the processes on PC and ios are becoming more similar, although ios has lagged, and because of Apple’s desire to be a bit of a CONTROL FREAK, for example, Apple makes the “what SHOULD be the simple act of moving a WAV file”, into a ridiculous production – a little thing called “iTunes file sharing”. It took me a long, long time to accept that this is actually the way I have to move files in most cases (thank you, “nanostudio” and a few others, for your Nanosync or equivalent…bliss) but now, I am used to it, so I just hook up, attached to iTunes, download all my files, and distribute them to the correct folders on the PC for processing.

 

So Apple wants to control you, it wants to make things difficult to accomplish, and that is annoying and that is partially why everything takes so much longer on ios than it does on PC – it’s just SLOW!!! Annoying! Too slow…PC is a million times faster, for every process. But – the gap is closing, slowly.
Audiobus, was a huge gap-closer, a great workaround, and I love it, especially now the turbo-charged version where you can have multiple chains – wow – that is amazing! I love you Audiobus, – long may you reign.

 

OK, I have bent your collective ears long enough, I really just wanted to say that I am very happy to be working in “korg gadget” again, and I am looking forward to working in a LOT of different applications this year, to try and keep up the good work – please wish me luck – I really want to add many, many tracks to all of the existing eternal albums, while at the same time, I’d like to ADD as many NEW eternal albums as is humanly possible.

 

So we move from the notion year, to the everything else year – that’s my plan, and I hope I can stick to it. Am I missing “Notion”, am I craving lines and notes on the staff?

 

You bet I am.

 

But I will resist, and I will work in many, many other apps – without a doubt – and I will present the results somewhere on a Dave Stafford eternal album; existing or new – that’s my 2015.

 

Oh – and, I will also be doing guitar work, and guitar songs, and guitar improvs – including some new things which I will talk about next time around…can’t wait till then !!!

 

peace love apps and guitars

 

dave

🙂 🙂

pre-orders – remasters – alternative mixes – a boon or a curse?

Now that the good Steven Wilson has succumbed to the temptation to remix almost every important pop, rock or prog band that ever existed, in glorious 5.1 surround sound, with instrumental mixes, and extra tracks galore, I am afraid that I have succumbed to a new technological phenomena – the “pre-order”.

It was probably Amazon, bless their cotton socks, that started this trend (with my personal new favourite CD Store, Burning Shed, also well onto the pre-order bandwagon): order your favourite re-master or 5.1 expanded version of your favourite re-master, or an exciting new release, ahead of time, and you have the advantage of receiving it on the release date. That’s definitely a positive, it means you can get to the important bit all that much sooner: listening.

I mostly consider this concept a boon, my pocketbook, however, views it as a curse, especially since the advent of Burning Shed here in Europe, a specialist shop featuring all of the music candy that I cannot, cannot stay away from – so now, it’s a double curse – if Burning Shed don’t have it, Amazon probably do.

This is the problem though, another part of the curse, which might be labelled as “The Curse Of The Crimson King” because King Crimson (or rather, Robert Fripp) is guilty of this as much or more than many bands, as time goes on, they re-release their classic 60s or 70s music catalogue over and over and over again; on the one hand, taking advantage of the leaps and bounds of technological advance, so we can get ever-cleaner, ever more amazing-sounding renditions of our favourite music, on the other…making us buy it over and over and over again… Sigh.

At first, it made sense – so, using King Crimson as an example – I totally understood why: in the earliest days of the compact disc era, Fripp’s record company produced CDs of the original 10 King Crimson albums on CD when CDs came out, and they did a pretty poor job of transferring this very important music – so, Robert Fripp invented “The Definitive Editions” which were the first truly good-sounding versions of King Crimson CDs, and I had no issue at all with paying again, for something I had bought multiple times on vinyl, and then, on cassette, and then, on bad transfer CD, and finally, on Definitive Editions.

The problem is, more time passes, more technological leaps and bounds occur, and it’s that time again; time to remaster every King Crimson album yet again. Until finally, in 2014, we get what really is the definitive edition: the Steven Wilson remasters, in normal or deluxe versions. We get to hear the original multitrack tapes rendered into state of the art 5.1 surround sound, by someone who if he wasn’t already, is fast becoming the guru, the master, of the arcane science of 5.1 mixing, the remarkable Steven Wilson – who started out tackling one of the most difficult catalogues of all, the King Crimson catalogue; everyone held their collective breath, but, Steven was sensitive, understanding and very kind to these songs that we all grew so attached to in the early 1970s or even, the late 1960s.

This, begins to cost some serious money, and, I am not complaining, no one held a gun against my temple, but…if I had known, I would have just kept my chrome cassette tape of my import Crimson vinyl, until such time as the Steven Wilson expanded box 5.1 surround sound sets became available; if I had skipped the first three CD generations I would have saved, literally, hundreds of dollars / pounds i.e. a shed load of MONEY, on King Crimson alone :-(. I shudder to think how much money I lost across the entire Prog genre over the years :-).

But that brings me from one of the worst curses, which is not in any way limited to King Crimson, almost every prog band in the universe has immediately jumped on this same cash cow bandwagon, from Jethro Tull to Gentle Giant to Caravan, to one of the best boons – and that is the 5.1 experience itself. Now, when I was in my 30s, I decided to invest in a 5.1 system, mostly so I could watch films with their proper sound tracks, in theatre style. Audio 5.1 was a rarity for a long, long time, I was always interested in it, but, there really wasn’t much to buy for the longest time – so we had to be content with our wonderful sounding movies…

Of course, change is good, and the change came – now, 5.1 surround sound audio is becoming as common as nails, on both DVD and even nicer, on Blu-Ray (my personal favourite format) and I for one welcome it, and I say “boon”, it’s a good, good thing, it allows you to hear your favourite music in startling new ways, ways that can make you jump out of your seat they are so surprising and revelatory, ways that I cannot really describe using words – you have to hear it. I started getting into this seriously when the King Crimson 40th Anniversary / Steven Wilson editions albums started coming out, I got my 5.1 surround sound system back out of the box and set it up, because at last, I had something to actually LISTEN to on it….

And listen I did, and I do – and the Crimson catalogue is while an early triumph for Wilson –it’s still one of the very, very best jobs he ever did of re-configuring a strange and wonderful catalogue, into the 5.1 surround sound format, and of course, at the same time, unearthing all manner of remarkable rarities, from outtakes to alternate versions to previously unearthed live versions to, in one case, on Starless (either version, either the 2-disc Starless & Bible Black 5.1 package, 2 discs, or the new 27 disc version – yes, I said 27!) unearthing a live track that no one into the band could remember. Luckily, their lyricist did remember, so now we have the piece of Prog delight that is King Crimson’s “Guts On Our Side” – a remarkable track, rehearsed for a few days, performed once, dropped from the set, forgotten for 27 years, and now – it’s back!! You want to talk about bonus material – you need to see the new giant Starless box set, it is simply amazing.

But – also – see this brand new disc, just released on October 27, 2014, and arriving on that day via of course, my Burning Shed pre-order – the 1979 classic album “Drums And Wires” by XTC. Wilson already had one XTC disc under his belt, the most excellent 1992 album “Nonsuch”, but he was just using that to warm up, and now, in 2014, he has delivered what may be his master work – “Drums And Wires”. I sat down last night, and listened to the entire album in 5.1, plus, a generous helping of B-sides in 5.1 surround sound, and then, taking up over two hours of my evening, from the Blu-Ray edition, a massive number of “bonus tracks” – sessions, live tracks, and a full rehearsal session that is every XTC fan’s dream – including discussions, instrumental run-throughs, and a remarkable timeline of music that leads up to the recording of the actual album.

In the case of XTC, that series of sessions and rehearsals was really the sound of the band transforming, butterfly-like, from the “old” XTC of the madcap organ and piano of the ever so slightly deranged Barry Andrews, to the beautiful, all guitars attack of “Drums And Wires” – with new member Dave Gregory undergoing trial by fire, learning a massive number of songs – including some, from an early session, that sound very much like the “old” XTC, and it’s a wonderful thing indeed, to hear the band evolving at speed, and to hear Dave’s contributions to the songs – and, the leap of confidence that Colin Moulding underwent, with his song writing and performance “double whammy” of “Making Plans For Nigel” and “Life Begins At The Hop” – fronting the band, and changing the dynamic once again – his songs, of which there are several, suddenly leaping ahead into a new maturity that no one really expected, while Andy Partridge, as always, up his own song-writing game by several thousand percent – as always.

But if I leave aside the glorious batch of extra songs, including several I’ve never heard, and, including two wonderful promo videos that I’d never seen – and I just concentrate on the album itself – oh my. It’s a real beauty, it really is. Everything about this already amazing sounding record is amplified, enhanced, emboldened, and I nearly did jump out of my chair at several points, surprised, because I was for one thing, hearing this music in a way I never had done before, and, at the same time, Steven Wilson had pushed certain elements to the fore in the mix, making a lot of great choices on instrument placement in the 5.1 surround sound field – an amazing job this time, maybe his best (excepting the King Crimson catalogue possibly) – a lone tom-tom hit from Terry Chambers, bounces off of the rear right speaker, into a huge cloud of reverb that then pours across to another speaker…two astonishing, unexpected cymbal crashes during the first few notes of one of the songs, scared the life out of me – I swear I have never heard those in any other version of this album I’ve owned, or rather, I’d never heard them so well.

Then there was the instrumental version, and that’s something that over time, I’ve gotten really, really interested in, and I am so glad that apparently, Steven Wilson feels the same way – for example, the instrumental version of Gentle Giant’s “The Power And The Glory” is absolutely mind-blowing, it is so powerful, so precise, and yet, so full of the joy of music – Kerry Minnear is an incredibly joyful player – and that is the sound of a band at the height of their powers, captured perfectly across five speakers by the very talented Mr. Wilson.

Of course, there are others out there, re-mastering and re-mixing prog, pop and rock classics into 5.1 surround sound, including such luminaries as Jakko Jakszyk of King Crimson, but right now, it’s all about Steven Wilson – and who knows where he will turn his ‘magic 5.1 wand’ next?

Some bands don’t seem to want to go down the 5.1 road, at least, not yet, but, they are interested in re-masters, sometimes, re-masters that we the listeners have waited for, for a long, long time – and this time, it’s Mr. James Patrick Page that I need to wag my finger at, for making us wait until 2014 to hear the re-mastered Led Zeppelin catalogue! Torture. But, worth waiting for.

The first three albums arrived a couple of months ago, but, Led Zeppelin IV (an absolute classic rock album) and Houses Of The Holy (Led Zeppelin does prog – or something akin to it, anyway) – arrived as part of the October 27, 2014 pre-order event, this time, from Amazon, and while there are no 5.1 mixes to drool over, the re-masters themselves are absolutely pristine and exquisite, done only in the incredibly perfectionist / with painstaking attention to detail, and – lots of guitars – that Jimmy Page can.

Each re-mastered Zeppelin disc comes with a second disc full of out takes, alternate takes, and various other musical delights, and as the albums have been arriving, the quality of those bonus tracks has just improved and improved, with these two – “Led Zeppelin IV”, and “Houses Of The Holy” feature the most amazing bonus material of all, from gentle acoustic guitar and mandolin tracks for songs like “The Battle Of Evermore” and “Going To California”, to instrumental versions of “The Song Remains The Same” (replete with lots of extra lead guitar – as if the song didn’t have enough lead guitar in it already!) and “Over The Hills And Far Away” – a song I used to play in Pyramid, the band I was in when I was about 20 years old – hearing just the instruments, reminds me of the hours we spent learning the song, I had to do the solo, so I spent hours and hours with this track – and I know it backwards and forwards – so it’s great to hear it, with Robert Plant set to “mute”, and just the band, and of course, Jimmy’s many, many overdubbed guitars – the master of the overdubbed guitars if anyone is.

OK, I can forgive how long it took, regardless if this was due to a small, or even medium-sized monkey on Jimmy Page’s back, or just his loose, lackadaisical way of working – but I have to smile, when I hear the alternate version of the strange, disco-funk track that is “The Crunge”, the guitar part just cracks me up, it’s so unlike anything Page played before or since – and the rhythm section rocks, as Plant moans over the top of this funky mess – and then there are those amazing John Paul Jones synthesizers, sounding absolutely astonishing in this alternate version of the song – we all used to argue about this song, was it rubbish, was it great – I would tend to vote for great, myself, and it’s fantastic to hear alternate versions of all of these songs.

Hearing the multi-tracked lead solo of “Dancing Days”, the band are just kicking it, and such an unusual rhythm, too – I’ve always loved the odd “meter” of this track, and it sounds absolutely wonderful in this “new” version, in the vocal-less “No Quarter”, John Paul Jones’ keyboard masterwork, is brilliantly renewed in this alternate mix, I’ve always loved this song, I’ve played it on the piano or on electric piano or synth, for many, many years – another very, very progressive track – and Page’s sinister guitar riff is fantastic, while Jones plays wah-wah electric piano – fantastic, and, with the vocal focal point taken away, sounding absolutely remarkable.

I can still remember the day the original vinyl Houses Of The Holy was released, in 1973 – I went to the store, which was just a department store, that had a records section, that was nearest to my house, I was still in school at the time – the store was a White Front (because, the front was white) and I was there when the opened, had to wait while the staff un-boxed the album – and, there were a LOT of boxes – and a lot of us waiting to buy the album – this would be the per-cursor to the pre-order, back in the vinyl days – going to the store on release day, to get the record within the first five minutes of it being available. Fantastic. The strange Hipgnosis artwork fascinated me, it’s a truly beautiful record visually, too – and I took it home, and played it and played it, and then – played it some more.

What had happened to Robert’s voice? In the two years since Led Zeppelin IV, something happened, it just sounded so weird, until you got used to it. Pagey and the rhythm section, as always, made up admirably for any inconsistencies in Plant’s vocal performance, but in hindsight, I think he did a great job of the vocals on this record – they are excellent, especially on the rockers – like the wonderful “The Ocean”, another one that Pyramid learned and played, an absolute BLAST to play on guitar – what a rocker. “Got no time to pack my bags, my foot’s outside the door….”

The outro of the alternate UK mix in progress of “The Ocean” is absolutely amazing, with Plant singing in a very high register indeed – vocals that do NOT appear on the original album, but that are quite brilliant – so singing live, in this mix in progress, we catch a glimpse of the erratic vocal genius of Robert Plant – a great set of extra material this time, on both of these new Zeppelin re-master releases – they just get better and better and better. I am really amazed, and I really give Page a lot of credit for taking the time to produce this catalogue, and, to do such a meticulous, pristine, careful job of it – Jimmy Page is probably / possibly the 1960s equivalent to today’s Steven Wilson, maybe.  Or maybe, Steven Wilson is the 2010’s Jimmy Page – who knows?

I don’t know about you, but personally, I can’t wait for the re-master of Physical Graffiti – that should be another event entirely – and, for me, it’s the last “good” Led Zeppelin album – after that, they were never the same. But this period – 1971 to 1973 was awesome, two of their very best records, while really, from 1970 to 1974, was ALL sheer genius, on the road, and in the studio – well, really, starting with Led Zeppelin III – for me, this is the Holy Trinity of Led Zeppelin albums:

This is the 1970 – 1975 version, which does give a good overview of the changes the band went through…

1) Led Zeppelin III
2) Houses Of The Holy
3) Physical Graffiti

Or, the “Super-Purist” Led Zeppelin Fan version which covers the timespan 1971 – 1973, and this was an amazing short period of sheer creativity, on a scale that they never really got back to after delivering these three amazing records:

1) Led Zeppelin III
2) Led Zeppelin IV
3) Houses Of The Holy

It was at the end of this period, in 1973, that I saw the mighty Zeppelin, live at the San Diego Sports Arena, getting to delight in a tour that was half a tour in support of “Led Zeppelin IV” and half, the tour that saw some of the tunes from Houses Of The Holy being previewed for the first time ever. I then saw them again, twice in one week, remarkably (due to insane levels of ticket demand – on a Tuesday night, and then, on the Friday night of the same week – in 1975, which gave me the view from Physical Graffiti looking back). Both tours were amazing, and unforgettable, and the 1973 concert, also happened to be the very first rock concert I had ever attended, at the tender age of 15, but I was already rocking then, and starting out with Led Zeppelin live is not a bad way to start at all – it has stayed with me, and I try to remember that youthful energy now when I play the guitar – a few years on.  🙂

But, whether I like it or not, whether it is a boon, or a curse, or both (probably both, I am betting) the pre-order is here to stay, at first, I did tend to resist it, but now, I take advantage of it every time, so I can get that “waiting for the store to open to pick up my new album, by my very favourite band at the time” feeling again. Wonderful days, when I just had The Beatles, and then Led Zeppelin, and not a whole lot else, to listen to.

Starting out as a lead guitarist, for me, Led Zeppelin was a great grounding for the aspiring rock lead guitarist, learning all of those songs – some, simple enough, sometimes, it’s quite easy to imitate Jimmy Page (say, on “Tangerine” or “The Ocean”) – including some really difficult ones, like “Ten Years Gone” from Physical Graffiti, in trying to learn that bastard of a song, my respect for Jimmy Page went through the roof – he was really a very, very serious guitarist capable of a huge range of expression, and he wrote some cracking good songs, too!

Will we ever see or rather, hear, Led Zeppelin on 5.1? I don’t know. But I do know, now that I have a collection of 5.1 audio discs started, that I would probably be the first 15 year old kid, in line at a digital “White Front” called “Amazon”, no longer in 1973, to get my brand new shiny 5.1 version of “Houses Of The Holy”. I will be there.

Please.

 

Meanwhile, I would have to agree that pre-orders; re-masters with expanded bonus tracks, sessions, mixes, takes – are both boon and curse, the curse being, I haven’t really got the kind of money to buy all the AMAZING stuff that is coming out on CD – for example, I have my eye on the new five CD box from original Genesis guitarist Ant Phillips – but I don’t know if I can afford it, so I have not yet ordered it. I can’t decide, I know I would like it, that’s not an issue, it’s just the cost. So the curse, which started with having to buy multiple versions of the same King Crimson albums, over and over again, year after year – now continues with a positive river of reissues, re-masters, 5.1 expanded editions, box sets and rarities collections – and my mind says “I want it all, all of it” but my pocketbook does not agree with me, it does not automatically say “yes” to every new release.

Would that it would or could. But hey – if I skip one five CD set, maybe then I can afford a nice affordable 2 disc set? Or, I can save up to buy REV, the latest software instrument for Komplete / Kontakt, that I have had my eyes on for several months – I really should just lay off of CD buying for a while.

But – I probably won’t, because invariably, burning shed will send me an email, with just ONE thing I want, I will go to the website, and find another four or ten things that I really, really want – and I try to compromise, maybe buy two, or three, but not eight, or ten or 12.

This is so complicated. Almost like a Complicated Game. And then, you get pre-orders. Sure, they are handy; they mean you get the disc quickly, you can also get special promotional items if you are one of the first to order, I have both a beautiful “The Power And The Glory” postcard from the Gentle Giant set, and, a beautiful “Drums And Wires” postcard, personally autographed by the good Andy Partridge. That can go with my full set of autographed 2009 XTC re-masters, I suppose. Except…they are re-mastering them again. With the right music, with more of the music, much more, with the right artwork – I am so, so glad that Andy Partridge created APE records, and has put right the many questionable activities of his former record company Who Shall Remain Nameless.

And perhaps the one thing that APE records and Andy Partridge have “put right”, is in creating this absolutely powerful new version of “Drums And Wires”, which is visceral as all hell, and so powerful when rendered into 5.1 surround sound by the good Mr. Steven Wilson, I was truly riveted throughout both the 5.1 album version, and the 5.1 instrumental mix – utterly fascinating, and it really does give you an absolutely new appreciation for the songs, you really do “hear things you’ve never heard” when you hear a good Steven Wilson 5.1 mix.
In my humble opinion, not speaking as a musician now, but just as a fan of music, and a fan of the band XTC for many years – I was so, so lucky, to see the very last live show the original quartet (the one with Dave Gregory, so not the original, the almost-original, quartet) in San Diego, before Andy packed it in for touring – that this 5.1 version of “Drums And Wires”, is, to date, the BEST of the Steven Wilson 5.1 mixes.

He takes a great, well-made album, and turns it on its head, making you hear things that were there all along, but, that you never quite appreciated because you were too busy listening to Andy sing or listening to one of Dave’s incredible solos…but, the amazing musical touches of the original production team, and in particular, the power and majesty of the now long-departed Terry Chambers on drums, coupled with the rapidly becoming-McCartney bass playing of Colin Moulding, well, those two are an INSPIRED rhythm section, and you don’t realise just how good they are, until you hear this in 5.1 – providing the perfect rhythmic bass and drums “bed” for the two guitarists to work over – and, work they do.

A supreme effort for Mr. Wilson, then, (and a proud rendering of what is almost certainly the band’s masterpiece) and I for one, offer a tip of the hat for his amazing work on this disc, it floored me, I am so, so glad I opted for the Blu-Ray, it just sounds SO incredibly good – it really does.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming:

October 27, 2014

Three Pre-Orders Arrive in One Day:

1) XTC / “Drums And Wires” – The Surround Sound Series – Steven Wilson 5.1 Mix
2) Led Zeppelin / Led Zeppelin IV – Re-mastered by Jimmy Page and expanded with a full second CD full of alternate mixes and bonus tracks.
3) Led Zeppelin / Houses Of The Holy – Re-mastered by Jimmy Page and expanded with a full second CD full of alternate mixes and bonus tracks.

CDs for the collection, or rather, four Led Zeppelin CDs and one XTC Blu-Ray full of 5.1 mixes and bonus tracks, and one XTC CD – so, five CDs and a beautiful Blu-ray – not a bad evening at all, a very nice thing to come home to, I should say!

And I do say.

Let’s have then, next, along with the obviously-hopefully-forthcoming Physical Graffiti from Mr. Page, how about XTC – The Big Express – followed by XTC – English Settlement – two of my personal favourites, from Mr. Wilson?

This would be a boon to my ears, and a curse to my pocketbook – but never mind, it is all about the music – and it is the music that matters, as you will know, if you regularly hang around in the land of pureambient as I do.

I guess I will continue to do pre-orders; which means that more and more, I will be expecting x number of items to arrive on a certain date, which will mean then, an evening of listening, learning and exploring – for example, I saw two videos that I’d never seen, and I heard several XTC songs that I had never heard before, when I sat down to explore the “Drums And Wires” Blu-ray at some length – and that was a wonderful experience, the videos were hilarious, with our heroes goofing around in classic style, but again, it was hearing all that music, music I’d never heard, early sessions, a rehearsal – so much effort going into the preparation of the album – and finally, making the album, with a long series of abandoned tracks and ideas scattered in their wake – but, still ending up with a couple of dozen truly excellent, and often startlingly innovative, tracks, enough for the album and for any number of B sides as well – plenty of songs to go around.

Well – when you put it like that…OK, dammit, boon. Not curse, boon. Sigh.

 

[expensive boon?] 🙂

the music of the moment – recalling the piano and vocal repertoire

since february 2012, I’ve been working,  in earnest, on “re-learning” some of the piano and vocal repertoire that I used to play when I was…younger, and it’s been both challenging and rewarding – as well as sometimes, surprising.  this repertoire is mostly of progressive rock, with some pop thrown in for good measure, but it was mostly repertoire learned between roughly, 1971 and 1981, which I then played for the next ten years or so.

an example of a surprise would be: the fact that I could take one of my own songs, which was originally written on guitar, and quickly adapt it to become…a piano song.  that surprised me, and my song about the death of john lennon, “john” is a case in point; during one of my test piano and vocal sessions, I just gave it a go – and was so totally surprised that not only could I play it and sing it at the piano, but it actually works well arranged that way, for solo piano and voice – brilliant.

an example of a challenge would be…well, mostly, the challenges are twofold – a) getting my fingers to play what I do know in my brain, and then, b) if I succeed at that (questionable) getting my 54-year old vocal chords to reach those notes that seemed so easy to reach when I used to sing these songs…

getting both to happen during one performance – very difficult!

an example of a reward would be: when it all works, when I get a really quite good take of a really quite difficult song…such as “flying blind” by peter hammill.  it took a few tries, but in the end, I did get one – a good take!

I persist, that is what I do – I persist.  the “easier” songs – well, those come back quickly, and I find them easy enough to play – maybe something like “vision” by peter hammill: it’s in an easy key, the vocal is not demanding – this, I can manage. few of the songs I know fall into this category, and even some of the lighter pop music I know, is actually quite complex – for example, early todd rundgren – it sounds simple, but actually, it’s full of complex chords with odd interval bass parts (which is part of what makes those early songs so sonically appealing). so something like “a dream goes on forever” from the “todd” album (1974) sounds pretty easy, but the intro is actually very, very difficult to play well.  I am getting it – it’s coming back to me, but, it’s more difficult than you might imagine.

but playing that song isn’t the problem – it’s singing it.  most of the verses, I can sing fine, but, there is one section that has a very high vocal part – and I just can’t hit those notes anymore…which is heartbreaking, it means I will perhaps have to satisfy myself with whatever historical recordings I have of me playing that song when I was a young man – but those will have their own issues, poor sound quality and so on.

now, I have devised a method whereby I drop the vocal to the low octave for that one verse – but in practice, a) it’s very difficult to “switch octaves” during a live take and b) it sounds a bit strange, to suddenly go for these very low notes, just so I can hit the few high ones – and then switch back up an octave again a few seconds later – it’s not really working.  so I may have to scratch “a dream goes on forever” from the list of possible songs for “a black box”…

speaking of todd, there are a number of pieces that I used to play by todd: “believe in me”, “be nice to me”, “sweeter memories”, “real man”, “black maria”, “couldn’t I just tell you”, “lucky guy” and many, many more, so over the coming weeks, I will begin looking at these pieces to see what is involved in relearning them. of course, a couple of those are guitar songs, and there are some todd guitar songs that I would REALLY like to learn – for example, I know huge chunks of “number one lowest common denominator” on guitar, but I’ve never learned it properly…so maybe I can invent a giant todd guitar medley – black maria/no. 1 lcd/couldn’t I just tell you…something like that.  if only I had time…

so I did learn and play a lot of todd and utopia songs – including the big utopian anthems, both “just one victory” and “sons of 1984” – todd was a big influence for a long time, and I can remember spending weeks trying to perfect my version of “lucky guy” – I even recorded a version of it with borrowed grand piano, and then overdubbed my vocals – as well as a painstaking re-creation of todd’s dual ebow solo in the middle – I really love that song, and I may have to have a go at it again now – it’s the highlight from “hermit of mink hollow” (1978) and it was a real joy to learn, sing and play that – a great piece of beautiful pop music.

if todd was my biggest pop influence, then peter hammill was my biggest prog / dark side / influence – and I am not sure I can even list all the peter hammill songs – of both van der graaf generator and “solo” variety – that I have learned, forgotten, relearned and re-forgotten…so, so many, from “man-erg” to “still life” to bits of “a plague of lighthouse keepers” to “vision” to “the birds” to “my room (waiting for wonderland)” to “the undercover man” to “the siren song” to “w” to ever more obscure items from the hammill canon “forsaken gardens”, “out of my book” (that’s a guitar song right enough, not a piano song) or “mirror images”…so again, as with the todd catalogue, there are so many songs that I used to sing and play, and I think while I can often quickly re-learn how to play the songs, it’s going to be the vocals that challenge me – every time.

I do hope that with some rehearsal (and I am never big on rehearsing, I just expect that I can sit down and play these songs, and that’s expecting too much!) – I hope that with a few weeks of recording and rehearsal, that my voice will loosen up, and maybe I can recover enough extra range to at least once, capture the odd good take of one of these songs.

over the past four months, my facility to sing and play these songs has slowly, painfully slowly, improved – where previously, two months ago, I could not even “get through” a full take of a complex song like “still life” (the title track of the album of the same name) or “the siren song” – now, at least, I can get through, although so far, with too many errors to make any of the takes “good” – but, I can at least, now PLAY the songs.  the good take – well, it’s always the elusive thing, I did version after version of “flying blind”, I even went so far as to master one version, make a video of it – then decide it was just not good enough, and, by re-recording it again on june 1^st, got a far, far superior version – so my intuition was correct, it wasn’t good enough, while the june 1 version, is.  so I need to learn to be more patient – I am impatient, I wish I could just sit down and reel out perfect versions of each and every song I’ve named here – and a host of others – I used to play so many different songs on the piano, everything from roxy music “a song for europe” or “pyjamarama”  to steely dan’s “charlie freak” or “doctor wu” – “charlie freak” being the first piano piece I ever learned by actually reading the notation – note by note, because I couldn’t figure it out by ear.

most of these songs, I learned completely by ear, by playing along to the album – and I mean the vinyl album (or if not, a cassette of the vinyl album) – this was the way I learned.  so something like hammill’s “man-erg” – it would start with me recognising one or two chords, realising there was a progression with a descending bass line, playing that bit, then working out the whole verse – but it would take deeper study of the album to learn the strange “middle part” or the long and complex chord progression at the end.  I would play along with the record, and write down the chords, and eventually, after days and days or even weeks of work, I could play the whole song.  but “charlie freak” had no chords, it was entirely composed of notes, so I had to use my limited sight-reading skills, and work it out from the sheet music.  I can’t play it now – I’ve completely forgotten how it goes I am afraid.

king crimson – yes, a few, not many, because songs by this band – they are not easy, but certainly “islands” in an abbreviated piano version (although I cannot touch keith tippett’s original arrangement – a fantastic pianist!), “exiles” in an all-piano arrangement – on guitar, a few others: “lady of the dancing water” (on nylon acoustic), “red” (on electric, obviously), “one more red nightmare”, “larks’ tongues in aspic part II”; fragments of “easy money”, “21^st century schizoid man” and even entire fripp solos like the infamous lead solo from “easy money” live on the USA album – I learned that note for note on guitar, because I love that solo so much.

there are others from the golden era of prog – genesis – I learned several, the only ones that I learned well were “the carpet crawlers” and “anyway” – both from “the lamb lies down on broadway” – and then there was gentle giant, the only piece I ever learned (and this was actually more recently, NOT back in the day) is the very, very beautiful “aspirations” from “the power and the glory”.

where available, I would and do use song books to get the basic structure, although when I was younger, I just learned them without the song book – and of course, for things like van der graaf generator and peter hammill – there IS no song book! (maybe I should publish one – 10 easy peter hammill songs for piano!) so you are forced to learn them totally, totally by ear. it seems crazy to me, now, to spend that much time learning a song, but I’m glad I did – because the chords and notes I took then, actually enable me to remember the tunes, using my 35 to 45 year old documentation – all neatly typed up on a manual typewriter !

so I have help – I have the chords, I have the lyrics, but as far as actually playing the pieces, I actually “make up” the bass parts and the melodies, I just “pick them out” as I work on the song.  so for example, hammill’s “still life” has a section at the end, where the voice follows a piano note, so I had to learn every single note in that sequence by heart, so I could sing that climactic section with conviction, yet follow along on the piano, note by note, to the heartbreaking end.  “still life” is one I am determined to get on tape, because I never, ever captured it on tape back in the day – so if I don’t manage to record myself playing and singing this song, there will be no dave stafford version of it left behind – and it was such an important part of my hammill repertoire.

over time, sometimes, with additional “listens” to the originals, these “made up” bass parts and melodies and chord inversions actually start to very closely resemble what peter hammill or hugh banton played – it just takes time, and practice, and persistence – and being able to listen really well, and “hear” every note…sometimes, if a piece is too complex, I cannot “get it” by ear – most classical music falls into this category – it’s too complex to learn by ear – but popular music, even prog rock, is not – because it’s mostly just chords, lots of chords, with sometimes, melodies or bass lines – much easier to learn than classical music.

it’s great when there is written sheet music, because that gives me a great head start, I can sight read, very slowly, very painfully, so if I have to, I will resort to the sheet music, but it’s tough when it comes to a king crimson or a peter hammill song.

growing up in the 70s, when progressive rock was at it’s height, peaking in 1975-1976 and ramping very quickly downhill from 1977-78 onward, I was so, so lucky because I basically learned every song I could learn, not really realising at the time just how difficult, just how complex this music was – but to me, it wasn’t “prog” it was just – music, the music I listened to, the music I loved, the music I wanted to play.

as you then grow up and become adult, there is less and less time available for things like practicing your piano repertoire – I eventually got rid of my upright piano and hammond organ, so the piano repertoire fell by the wayside for quite a few years.

now, in 2012, well, albeit slowly – it is coming back.  I’ve had such an amazing time these pasts weeks and months, playing pieces like “my room” and “the siren song” – what a remarkable experience, it is actually amazing that I can remember them at all, but – they are on their way back, if only I can be patient, can keep practicing, if I am very, very fortunate – one or two of them might end up on a rolling tape.  I hope…

“dreams, hopes and promises…fragments out of time…”