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.

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.

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.

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.

But as I have hinted in the past, there is lots more music to come. Things I already have written, things I want to write, and things that want to be written! So with that in mind this post forms a new start. It’s the day I start talking about ALBUM NUMBER 2.

It doesn’t have an official name yet… I think I know what I want to call it, I have a huge, part written 20 minute prog epic, that will form the backbone of the project, and a couple of other songs that are quite well developed, but I want to leave it a while so I can develop some of the other musical ideas before making the final decision.

So once again we’re back into making-of-mode. There will, I’m sure, be more news on Fantasy Bridge to share with you as time goes on, and I’ll post about those as they happen, but in the meantime…

… Here we go again!

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.

First up is I have now installed a mailing list on the website.  Signing up for this will a) get you all the latest news, and will be the only place that freebies and special offers will be announced, and b) will allow you to snag two free MP3 downloads that will only be available vie the mailing list. There will be the Radio Edit of Don’t Give Up on Love, and the title track Fantasy Bridge.

You can sign up for the mailing list here

Secondly, I have now made the whole album available to stream.  Yes, you can listen to everything, in it’s entirety! I’ve installed a proper music player widget on the multimedia page, which is secure, in that it streams without the possibility of downloading the media files, because, as it turns out the free  XFPF player allowed downloads all to easily. But the new player means that I have made the whole album accessible to stream from higher quality 256Kb/s MP3s,rather than the 128Kb/S extracts that were there previously. Enjoy!

Finally (for now), I’ve added a few easy to see social media links at the top of the homepage.  You can directly get to the RSS feed of this blog, my Twitter feed and my Facebook Page at the click of a mouse. Go and follow/like.

Well that’s it for now. There is more to come very soon.

Well, it’s been a couple of months since the official release of Fantasy Bridge, and I haven’t blogged at all since reporting on the big day, so I thought it was high time to take stock, and reflect on the whole make a record  process, and the immediate aftermath thereof.

First up: I am really proud of the album.  I still have an emotional connection to all the songs, which has to say something, since I have now heard the all rather a lot of times.  The whole recording process has been life affirming, everything about the project has either met or exceeded my original expectations.

Secondly: I couldn’t have done it alone.  I listened back the other day to one of the demos I did of Don’t Give Up on Love a number of years ago, and frankly it was rubbish. (and at the time I did it I thought it was pretty much release ready!) So without the collaboration of the following people, Fantasy Bridge would not have come close to  being what it is: Ted Barrett from Phoenix Arizona, whose lyrics for Children of a Forgotten Sun made that song actually possible in the first place. My nephew, Adam Chinn who played the bass throughout. John Cornfield, whose deft touches in the mastering suite took a mix I was pleased with to something altogether amazing. Nick Crosby from New York for much of the guitar work. My long standing friend and often-times bandmate Paul Fuller who dragged the Premier kit out once again for all the drums, Steinar Gregertsen from Norway, for providing the blistering guitar work on the title track, Wim Koopman from the Netherlands whose sax work took the track Quiescence to a whole different level. My friend Andy Ullyott who provided some lovely acoustic and electric guitar on Together and Day by the Sea, and of course, my wife Sue, who not only provided the electric violin lead on Ode to Joy, but who was, I know, very long suffering over the nearly 2 years that I spent obsessing about the project, and without her support, and encouragement, it just wouldn’t have turned out like it has. While I’m thanking people, I should give a shout to the guys at Disc Wizards who took my graphics and created the most stunning packaging for the CD.

Thirdly:  You have to learn all kinds of arcane things to make an album.  It’s not enough to play an instrument and sing a little, and know how to work a recording device of some kind. The artistic and engineering skills required are just the start.  You need to know about copyright, and ISRCs and barcodes, and CMYK and PDFs and paypal and web-coding and .. the list goes on.

Fourthly: it doesn’t stop when the CDs are delivered.  Assuming you actually want to sell some, you have to turn yourself into a marketing professional, you have to prepare a press pack, spend hours searching the web for contact addresses, and emails for likely contacts in print media, radio stations, web sites etc.  It’s two months after release and I’m still working on who else I can send promos to or point the the press/media pages on the website. Currently I’m investigating Facebook ads and Google Ads, as a means of adding to the whole promotional activity, but they are both equally arcane areas to learn. Then I also have to sort out the iTunes question and get the album available there too.

Fifthly: This is hard, and frustrating. You have to realise that most people you send stuff to will not respond at all. Did they get the package? Will they actually listen to it? More importantly, will they do something about it? (And in most cases, the answer will almost certainly be ‘no’) For the most part, that’s all out of my hands. Though I always said that if I ended up with a cupboard full of coffee coasters shaped like CDs, that would be OK, it would be more OK if lots more people got to hear the music, and possibly like it as much as I do.

Finally: When all is said and done, and I ask the question: Would I do this again? The answer is a resounding yes! And to prove it, I already have a 20 minute prog epic 90% written that is likely form the backbone to a follow-up album. And that is a topic for another day altogether!

Well, as you might have guessed, we had a bit of a party to celebrate the launch of the CD.

And played some tunes.

It was a hot June evening, and everyone seemed to be in a mood to party.  It was great to catch up with so many friends from all over the place.

You can see some photos from the event by clicking here. As more pics come in from the various people who were snapping away, I’ll add them to the album.

I have to say DBs Weston did us proud with the PA rig and the lighting.  On the whole, I have to say it was a brilliant night. Notwithstanding the problems I had with the mainstage rig and the monitors.  We got through the first half with half my keyboard sounds missing, but it didn’t matter.  We just had a great time.

The set list was as follows

• Fantasy Bridge
• Together on the Shores of Time
• Autumn Rain
• Endless Ocean
• Quiescence
• Don’t Give up on Love
• Ode to Joy (encore)

I would like to thank Daren from DBs, Sue for all the help in organising it, and putting up with me in the run-up to the party, and of course Adam, Brendan and Paul for helping create the Fantasy Bridge live sound.

The culmination of nearly 2 years of work.  The CD, Fantasy Bridge is now available to buy from the MarkOneMusic webshop. Last night we had the launch party at DBs, here in Weston-super-Mare, we had a great evening and once I have the pics back from everyone, I’ll post a blog entry specifically chronicling  the event.

I feel exhausted and elated.  It is the fulfilment of a lifetime ambition. I am very proud of it, and of all the people who contributed to it’s becoming a reality.

I hope you like it too.