Standing Next to a Mountain

I got the sad and unexpected news this morning that guitarist extrordinare, Steinar Gregertsen passed away after a battle with cancer.

Steinar will be known to you – in the context of this blog, anyway – as the lead guitarist on the title track of Fantasy Bridge.  His blistering solo on that track elevated it to a whole new level. And though we never actually met outside of cyberspace his passing has left me with a real sense of loss.

As I come to write this tribute, it occurs to me how little we actually know about the people we meet in the virtual reality that is the internet.  But nonetheless, that very ephemeral contact is no less real.

I first came across Steinar online where we were both members of a couple of music production forums, and where we would both post examples of our music for general production critique, to help out with technical issues, or often just to chat about music related topics and life in general. He was articulate, and kind, and always a gentleman.

I was looking for volunteers to provide some lead guitar during the recording of Fantasy Bridge, and Steinar, looking for a break from mixing his second album, graciously said he’d have a go.  And, what an amazing job it was too, sensitively interpreting my demo tracks and then enhancing the whole thing with an amazing solo of his own creation.

In the last few years Steinar’s passion had been the lap steel guitar. He recorded two albums, both of which are available at CD Baby, and I recommend you check them both out.

Southern Moon, Northern Lights A series of musical visions, both original and unique arrangements of some of his favourite songs, inspired by the music of the Mississippi Delta and the fjords of his native Norway, performed on his acoustic and electric lap-steel guitars.

Standing Next to a Mountain A tribute to the Music of Jimi Hendrix, which Guitar Player Magazine describe thus:

Covering Hendrix tunes— let alone recording an entire album of them—is risky business. Yet in this case, the superb musicianship, sublime tones, and superlative arrangements justify the effort.

Rest in Peace Steinar.

Today marks the release of Fantasy Bridge on iTunes.  This is the first of a series of releases on digital music stores. Expect to see the album showing up on Amazon’s MP3 site, Napster, Play.com, spotify, etc. in the near future.

I have to confess to a moment of pride seeing the cover art there on the iTunes store.  Even more cool, if you have bought the CD version, and rip it to your iTunes library, not only do the track names populate properly, but the album artwork downloads as well.  Yay!

In other news, there are a couple of reviews of the album on the Prog Archive website, and more importantly from my perspective, this month’s Classic Rock Present’s Prog magazine (Issue No 20) has a review of the album.  Unfortunately they don’t have an online version, so I can’t provide you a link. I will try to get a transcription for the website soon.

There are loads of companies out there doing CD manufacturing.  All offering various permutations of the same service, at all kinds of prices.  The thing is, most of them are probably geared up to big runs in the 10s of thousands, and little guys like me are not their top priority.

I am looking for someone who does minimum runs of 500, with a 4 panel Digipak rather than the traditional jewel case, and the companies that do 500 minimum quantities are  fewer than I thought, most doing minimum orders of 1000.

Anyway, there are a few companies that seem to meet my needs and I’m getting quotes in right now, so hopefully very soon I should know who is going to produce the CDs and than I can get their artwork guidelines and bash the Fantasy Bridge artwork into the right format.

As always, I’ll try and keep you up to date on that.

Well, there we are.  I am now a member of the PRS.  What this means is that should any of my music get performed, or played, and that music has been registered with them, providing they know about it, they will collect royalties for me. What this means in practice is of course yet to be seen.  Whether Fantasy Bridge will in fact go on to receive airplay somewhere, or multiple iTunes purchases, is something of an unknown.  Did I need to get PRS membership in reality? Possibly not, but I always said that I would do this self-release properly, as though it was a proper record company release, and therefore these registrations are necessary.

And anyway, I have lots of songs.  I might find a market for them somewhere, and hence the PRS.

VIOLINZ! – More specifically an electric blue, electric violin, in the hands of Sue!

And then mangled.

In Logic you have these two effects sections called pedal designer and amp designer, which carefully emulate all manner of stomp boxes, guitar amps and speakers. Firstly the violin passed via a classic Wah pedal and then into an amp model called ‘High Octane’ based on some modern heavy-metal all valve head, with the controls set to a setting named ‘shred’ paired with a 4×12 cabinet simulation… Well, lets just say, I suspect you might not guess it’s a violin.

This was a thing Sue and I have done live on and off for years.  It kicks off with a gentle orchestral arrangement of the Ode to Joy, before the Hammond sound kicks in with a straight ahead rock/shuffle intro, then the electric violin takes the lead on the famous theme.

Add in a dirty keyboard solo over the band riffing on G (which Mr Beethoven has nothing to do with) and a ripping synth improv over the final bars and you have… RAWK!

It’s always gone down quite well live (though in all honesty, never at this octane level!) and it’s been hugh fun to do. So enjoy this snippet:

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I just thought I’d post this pic of Paul doing his stuff with the roto-toms in the studio last Friday.

All went well, and not only did I get the extra roto fills I wanted, but we recorded samples of some roto-tom hits at various volumes and some cymbal crashes.  All of which I sampled into Logic’s ESX24 sampler.  Bargain!

Sometimes, you can just find yourself going around in circles, and getting more and more frustrated.  Especially when mixing music.  Take Together on the Shores of Time. This song starts as a simple guitar and vocal ballad.  Then the bass and mellotron come in, and it’s still pretty laid back.  And then for the chorus, there are big guitar power chords, four part harmonies, Taurus sub-bass, and huge stadium drums. Before it all breaks down to the vocal/bass/mellotron for the second verse.

And nothing I did would really make the choruses pop. Sure, they were louder.  The meters showed me that, the verses were peaking down at around 7-8dB and the choruses up around 2-3dB, but it just didn’t have the punchiness I was after.  I added compressors here, I tweaked EQ there, and just got more annoyed with it.

So at the weekend, I deleted every FX bus, zeroed all the EQs and started again.  And it all started to come together.  I had the light and shade, the choruses were loud and punchy, I have half the FX I did, I have way less EQ, and it all sounds so much better.

So it will be interesting to see what happens when Andy, a guitar playing friend comes over this Friday and lays down a real acoustic guitar part to replace the MIDI guitar part.

I’ll let you know.

Well, here we are…  It’s 2010!  No flying cars, no space bubble habitats and no silver lycra suits for everyone.  (OK that last bit is good!) However, hopefully we can look forward to the culmination of the Fantasy Bridge Project and it release onto an unsuspecting public.

Let me wish you all a fantastic new year.

Christmas in Fantasy Bridge Land was great, there were new studio toys, which I’ll tell you about over the next few days, and lots of opportunities to try them out. Got a bass tracking session in with Adam too, and got a rough cut mix of the whole album together for Paul to look at from a drumming perspective.  That was interesting to do in its own right, because it was the first time I sat down with a CD of all the tracks in the right running order and listened through on the big speakers downstairs.  I made copious mixing notes and highlighted some areas that needed attention in the tracking and editing department.

And so with lots of things to do in 2010, it’s on with the show…

We have a winner!

I have decided that voting on the album artwork is closed.  And the winner is Fantasy Bridge with 45% of the votes. Thanks to those of you who voted.  I created the image in Carrara which is a nice 3D application.  For the actual artwork it needs some work.  The sky could be nicer, the sea is a fairly simple wave pattern, and both can be improved immensely, as can the lighting. With Global Illumination turned on and Caustics (the interaction of light with transparent objects) the whole image can look a good deal more realistic, all of these things will make it a beast to render, but that should be something the computer can crank away at overnight once I’ve made the changes.  I will post the final image up soon.

I have also been looking at the logotype for the album, and in keeping with the whole 70s prog vibe I found a font called FLOW made by this guy, which I think fits in with the feel quite nicely.  The keen memoried amongst you will remember that I did use this as the Mark Green logo on the old website, and although I searched high and low, I really couldn’t find anything I liked better, so FLOW it is.  You can see what I’ve done with it above, using a little photoshop magic.  So this will be the logotype font for the album, and in the coming days I’ll be working on a high resolution album cover using the artwork and the logotype.

And now, back to music-making!