…thus spoke the great Jim Anchower.
It’s definitely been a while (just over a year) since I wrote anything on here. In my defence though, I’ve been posting stuff on Soundcloud, just not writing about it here. There’s been a bit of disruption in the house, and, my somewhat Heath Robinson UK/US voltage rig literally blew up on me. Luckily, only the step down transformers went to heaven, but it caused some headscratching. And some rationalisation…
Cue another equipment cull – I needed new, UK voltage audio interfaces, I didn’t need my monitoring system, or my old channel strips. Enter a pair of spiffy new Focusrite Scarlett 18i20s. In the quest for single voltage, I also shed my old MIDI interface, and got a small USB powered jobby. Now I’m down to a single step down, with my Alesis weighted master keyboard plugged into it.
After a lot of manual reading, and getting my head around the slightly odd way the Focusrites are configured, I managed to get everything working. It’s all much more streamlined, and it sounds pretty damned good!
So, what have I done musicwise since April last year…
Bass so finishes a song
I’ve talked about Papa Bravo before, and I loved the James Bond-ness of it, but I always regretted not being able to put bass on it, so when I could record bass, I went back and finished it, or “finished as much as I could, given my songs are as finished as anyone wants them to be.” I really enjoy playing bass as it’s such an interesting role – hold down the rhythm, hold down the chords, echo the melody – or at least it is if you’re not set on simply sticking with the root note of the chord!
I usually record bass on a loop, and can trance out in the groove for quarter of an hour at a time, getting lost in eight or so bars of music, until it really feels like the glue holding the track together.
I’m not a gear head, but I have good gear
The clue to what Helix Melancholy is about is in the name – I wanted to be able to track guitar more easily than formerly (wheel out the Vox, mic up etc.), so I got a Line 6 Helix rack. This track is about testing the new piece, which of course required that I write a song.
This is very much a tone inspired song. I found a pleasant natural sound, the basic verse riff came out of enjoying that sound. The rest was just playtime. Since this, everything I’ve recorded on gutar or bass has been through the Helix. Very, very useful.
DAWs often have really good song templates and presets
Getting closer to the current time, Bravo Oscar Kilo came about from me playing with a synth that was part of a starter template in Reason. That’s the sound that starts the song. There’s also a really good rhythmic/sequence synth that I use throughout. From there on it was pretty easy – probably two days from first key press to upload, and that includes a bit of a glitch that stopped my tracking the bass.
The Disco never closes
What started out as a more 80s inspired piece (think a more interesting sequence in a Duran Duran song, or the generally excellent “Quiet Life” by Japan), ended up veering off into my fun place – DISCO! Say hello to Mexico Hotel! Then just for good measure, when I was arranging the song, I added French horn, a first for me, and suddenly we’re back with James Bond. Still, a very happy track, just the kind of track I like to produce.
You don’t know what’s there until you look
At the time of writing Mexico Hotel, I had 82 songs on my Soundcloud, which made me wonder what I hadn’t posted. The answer was “a lot.” Empty When Full grabbed my attention by virtue of the title: I remember being taken with the phrase when I saw it on a container of some kind. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the track was (I usually can’t recall what a track is from the title a few weeks after writing it!), so I opened it up in Pro Tools and remembered really liking the song. I’d tracked it without bass for some reason, so I added bass, remixed and remastered it.
The inspiration for the track was a short electric piano loop, from Reason I suspect, that suggested an atmosphere. The loop runs throughout, in one place I pitch shifted it. After that, it just felt like a langourous, slightly trip hop groove.
I know I’ve got quite a few other songs of that quality sitting on my hard drive. Watch this space.
Everyone wins in a fair fight with a song
No Reason to Stop came about as an attempt to keep up the creative momentum. I think it succeeded.
I’ve never had a problem using tools to stimulate my imagination, and in this case, the impetus came from Reason’s Chord Sequencer player. As I can’t play keyboards, tools like this allow me to find interesting chords that I can use along with synth sounds to get something going. I have to say the chords are pretty jazzy in places, lots of stuff I couldn’t identify on a guitar!
For this song, the path was pretty linear – I wrote the verse, bridge, chorus and middle eight in that order. There was a long time, or probably a day given how quickly this came about, while I tried to figure out how to tie it up. In the end it snapped together when I started arranging. I make no apologies for going back to Disco, or for using Reason’s Disco School pack, which yielded the wonderful drum loops, and some very messed up Rex loops for strings and horns. The pizzicato celli are purely gratuitous. I’m not apologising for that either.
I also like a long fade out.
I cried when I wrote this song 