Is it really February already? And was my last post really November? I really can’t believe it. 2011 gone, the Fantasy Bridge release a distant memory. 2012 already a month in and no updates from me on Album No. 2.

I guess it’s time for a little bit of an update then. The bad news is that my faithful iMac has developed a fault, insomuch as it’s firewire port has died. Now any die-hard reader might remember that my Multimix FW is the primary interface for all things musical into the computer.  and that little FW suffix is the give away.  It moves all that musical stuff in and out via that Firewire port. So right now, as I type I can’t get anything from the mixer into the iMac and anything recorded on the Mac back out to the speakers.  The said Firewire port is integrated into the iMac’s main logic board and Apple want the best part of £600 to replace that, and that is getting on for half the cost of a 2012 spec iMac, or potentially a Macbook Pro, so at the moment I’m making do while I decide which way to jump.

I have sorted an interim solution, in that the Roland Fantom G has it’s own USB audio interface, so I can at least listen to stuff I’ve recorded, and if I’m using virtual instruments, or sounds from the Fantom I can record these. It’s put a bit of a kibosh on the writing process, but on the other hand it’s making me think laterally and use some of the other tools at my disposal for writing.  The Fantom and the Alesis Fusion both have built in sequencers for instance, and though their workflows are very different (and rather challenging after the gloriously easy way Logic works) it is a way to change things up a bit.

And what about progress on the album front? I hear you ask.

Well I have six songs written, and for the most part lyrics for all of them.  Also there are demos, in various stages of completeness, but sans vocals:

The Long Song (Title still to be decided). This one’s about the day the Seventh Angel in Revelation blows the last trumpet, signifying the end of the world – Well it is 2012 and there are all these mad ideas about this being the last year in the Mayan calendar, so I thought it a quite fun idea for a big prog epic.

Voices: About the life of a man who hears voices in his head all his life. There is rather a nice  horror movie twist at the end.

Learning to Fly: Which is basically as the title says.  It uses a classic Roland polysynth sound.

The Rhythm of the World: Based around a drum groove that builds up on various ethnic percussion sounds, and a chant-like vocal. Having recorded a demo though, I have discovered that it’s key is too high for me to comfortably sing, so I need to look at transposing it down somewhat.

Why?: A piano based torch song about a post-apocolyptic world where everyone lives underground.

The Embrace of Tides: (working title) A 3 part epic inspired by some of the ideas in David Brin’s Uplift stories and notably the idea that sentient life is drawn to live near ever steeper gravity wells. The three parts are: Event Horizon, Hidden Refuge, and  Light Rider. This is probably the least complete song of the bunch. I kind of know where it’s going, but a lot of the detail is missing. As are, at this point, all the lyrics!

The Long Song and Embrace are going to come in at around 20 minutes each, so I think these six songs will probably make up the album. I have a couple of other ideas rattling around too, and I’m going to carry on writing to get these complete, in case any of the others stick out as being wrong for the album as a whole.

I am tentatively looking to have fairly complete demos of all the songs by the start of Spring, and then start recording in earnest.

I’ll also try and blog a bit more regularly too.

Watch this space.

I’ve been working on a tune.  It’s not a brand new one, in fact it’s one I recorded a demo of a few years ago, but I’ve decided to start from scratch with it, record a completely new version, and add a new section.  some lyrics are on the cards too.

It has some fun time signatures in it.  The main theme is in 7/8, then it moves into a heavier section that has an alternating thing going on which is quite challenging, it basically breaks down into groups of 3 bars of 3/4 followed by a bar of 4/4 … and then repeat. Finally it moves into a 4/4 section that has the same bar length as the 7/8 section, so the tempo goes up to compensate.

The main 7/8 synth riff sounds quite simple, and although on the demo I had originally sequenced it in MIDI, I was keen to actually play it for real rather than just program into the computer. However it has turned out infuriatingly difficult to play, resulting in me getting quite cross with myself.  If only I’d kept up those music lessons. Oh well. Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

Or at least something not completely horrible.

So here we are.  It’s time to start on album number 2.

I am currently in writing mode. It’s an exciting time, there are so many possible ways the project could go from here.  For me ‘writing mode’ is something that doesn’t often involve any actual writing with a pen per-se.  I should probably call it ‘noodling with riffs, sounds and patterns waiting for something cool to happen’ mode. Generally, I have a couple of techniques that seem to bear fruit and I thought it might be interesting to talk about them.

One is to switch on the Fusion and load up a grand piano, and just improvise.  (When my good friend Paul Travers lived locally, I used to love sitting at his fabulous Bechstein grand and noodling, because that was even more immediate and raw) Anyway, hopefully something cool will catch my ear, a chord sequence or a melody, or something, and then I’ll work around that and build on it until something vaguely song like emerges. The trick then is to capture it, because so often I’ve done this, come up with something really nice, left it alone and then completely forgotten how it went.  The audio recorder in the iPhone has turned out to be a great way of doing that – and it imports right into iTunes ready to be reviewed at a later date!

Another technique I’ve been successful with is to choose a synth or keyboard and spin through stock sounds until I find something that I think is interesting, then load up Logic and use that as a basis to play around with the sounds manipulate them into something new add some other textures or very occasionally loops, and pulling inspiration from the sounds themselves to start developing some coherent themes.

Very rarely I’ll actually come up with a lyric that I think is cool and come at the song writing the melody for that lyric.

Unlike Fantasy Bridge, where all but one track was music that I had already well developed as demos, this new album is only going to feature about 50% existing material.  In fact it might be quite a bit less than that.  Take ‘The Big Song’ for example.  This was going to be one I had written years ago, but when I started working on it I threw away all of it except one opening stanza and one big instrumental break.  So, as I start to re-develop the other tunes there is the distinct possibility of more older stuff being consigned to the archive to be replaced by re-written material. It’s all a bit of an adventure into the unknown.

I will also probably end up in a bit of a grasshopper work mode.  Working on a bit of this, and a bit of that as the mood takes me, with the basic aim being to end up with a bunch of workable demos in Logic, complete with guide vocals that I can start so use to actually record the final versions of the songs. How much of that demo ends up in the final recording will very much depend. With Fantasy Bridge that varied from absolutely nothing to almost everything. At this stage in the game there are no rules.