Author: mister ebby

Updates galore.

It’s been a while since I updated the blog, but I’ve been working away at things – firstly moving webhost and all that entails, which always will make me nervy. I get the fear of messing it all up and losing everything and ending up with two hosting plans that are both charging me… But never fear, I managed it much easier than expected.

Little things that are noticable changes – at the moment I’m using some random wordpress template still but that’s grand. I’m hoping to change around the look of the site a lot now that I’ve got more time on my hands again. Secondly, this hosting service lets me use subdomain pointers, which my previous one didn’t, so now http://music.misterebby.com/ will bring you straight to my bandcamp store. It’s the little things like this that make me happy. Next, I’m gonna set about making the site look a lot prettier and add all the content about the album that I’ve had written up for ages and not had anywhere to put yet.

The youth theatre musical I’d been working as the Musical Director of went on stage last week, which saw me hiding away in the theatre for a week with long day sitting in the orchestra pit playing an awful lot of piano. It was wonderful. Besides, the teenagers were doing Guys & Dolls, which is just so much fun to play.

The day after the show wrapped, I was off to the little hamlet of Ballymoe, Co. Galway to meet up with folk from Golden Plec for their Tea And Toast charity drive across the country. I played a version of my song “Wet Feet” on ukulele for them before they whizzed off to catch the next band on their trail. It was a lot of fun though, and completely worth it for the look on the face of the young girl working in the shop in Ballymoe when she found out that something was making a stop in Ballymoe. Pure shocked that I’d be across the road playing a song that would go up online. There’ll be an accompanying radio show on the 2xm show Fourcast, and I’ll post the podcast link for that when it’s available.

I’m playing a small set here in Galway on Thursday in Kelly’s bar as part of the Noisy Plug sessions, so if you’re knocking around Galway this week, do drop in – it’s free, and there’s a great line up of four different acts on the night: here’s the facebook event for it.


Things have been slow getting the limited edition, hand printed versions of the album out to funders, which is something that has been a bit frustrating all round, but unavoidable unfortunately. However, I did get sent this photo earlier today, along with a message that the prints are almost ready. Which is pretty wonderful:

To top it all off, someone did a cover of one of my songs, and is planning on doing another. It really made me smile yesterday when I was linked to it, as I’ve never heard anyone covering one of my songs before. He had quite a different vocal style, and does his own take on the song, but it makes me happy to know that one of my songs made enough of an impact on someone that they wanted to do a cover of it. So, here’s Jack Mason-Goodall’s version of my song “I Wish You Were Here”, which he has posted on his Soundcloud:

And finally, the two dancers who have been working on a piece to one of my songs got in touch to say they’re nearly ready to show it to me before the film it. I can’t express how excited I am by this. To have someone to use some of my music as the canvas for their own creative work and create a piece in response to the music I’ve recorded is thrilling. Hopefully next we’ll be making a video of the dance piece accompanied by my music as the next step in this collaboration.

Video: I Wish You Were Here

I’ve been intending to make some videos for the songs on the record now for a while, and this is the first one to be finished, probably because it was the simplest of all the video ideas.

I’m collaborating with some wonderful local creative talent on some other videos, which will be shot in the coming weeks too, and I’m looking to work with more people too – so if you’re interested in making videos and want to work with me on a project, then get in touch.

There’s a nice sort of reciprocal approach happening where everyone is getting something out of the projects – be it a video to represent their music, as in my case, or a vehicle to showcase their art, or dance, or whatever it is they are bringing to the project.

For a solo musician, it’s a joy and an inspiration to work with other people at times.

So, subscribe to my vimeo or youtube accounts, as there’ll be some more videos uploaded in the coming months as they get finished. Some of the ideas for those videos I’m really very excited about, and can’t wait to get working on.

Piano habits

Improv is how I interact with a piano mostly. As much as I’ll go and play music by some wonderful composers, or my own music, very often I’ll just sit at the piano with a coffee and play away whatever comes into my head. I have been known to be playing with one hand while reading twitter with my phone in my other hand, but that’s a bad habit I’m trying to do less of.

I go through phases with what I play when I’m just improvising away at the piano. Lately a lot of my piano improvisations have ended up exploring similar rhythm patterns, and a lot of close playing with overlapping hands. For a while I was really exploring a lot of simple chord progressions and melodies, out of which grew some of the piano instrumental pieces that I still play and have done demo recordings of. There’s one piece that I’ve not recorded at all yet which is sort of a link from that stuff to the kind of exploration I’m doing at the piano these days.

I’ve found myself playing compound chords, odd progressions, lots of repeated chords with accents providing the rhythms, and melodies forming and dispersing out of those chords. There was a quote that stuck in my head from a piano masterclass from Daniel Barenboim I was watching on youtube, where he said something about how you are either playing with all ten fingers as individual fingers, or else with both hands as one unit. It stuck in my head, because it’s so true:

“You don’t play with two units, with two hands: you either play with one unit made of two hands, or you play with ten units.”

Daniel Barenboim – Masterclass on Beethoven – Chicago, USA. July 2005

The kinds of music I explore through improvisation is very much a signifier of what kind of music I write around that time, as very often it’s through improv that I’ll find a melody, or progression, or whatever, that ends up as a song. Certainly I can pinpoint which songs of mine were written around the same time, merely by looking at what kind of piano part it has.

I’m always tempted to record myself every time I improvise, but that’d be a heck of a lot of random hours of playing music, with a lot of repetition as I explore an idea. Instead, if there’s something I really like that I’m playing, I’ll play around with it and really watch what I’m playing. Also, I don’t really like people listening to me improvising, as it’s always riddled with “mistakes”, or messy playing, or half formed ideas, and as interesting as those sketches might be, they’re really just sketches which might become actual works later on. Also, the improv can be a lot closer to the bone, and it’s like a musical brain drain I guess. It’s also my favourite way to practice and exercise my hands, but not perhaps the best way, as it gets too limited in focus sometimes.

One of the simple little piano pieces that grew from an improv is the extra bonus track on the Bandcamp version of the album, but you can download it for free if you sign up to my mailing list with your email address.

I always tell people that piano is easy – the notes are there, you just play them, but playing piano well is the difficult part. But really, if you’re interested in piano you should watch that entire masterclass with the three different pianist being coached by Barenboim. It also features this wonderful piece of wisdom about the piano:

The piano, like this, a very primitive, neutral instrument. Any weight you put on the keys produces a sound, look. It’s a C# – not particularly interesting, but I do with the elbow. You can do that with an ashtray – anything, you can do that!

You try to do that with a violin, you get nothing! You have to first find a note, then you have to know how to put the finger, then you have to know how to connect the two hands.. then you have to decide… so before you can actually make the equivalent of that [pointing to the piano note].

Therefore, the piano is, from that point of view, a very neutral element, and it is precisely this neutrality which gives it the possibility of so much expression. Because you can put on the neutral wall any colour you want – you cannot put whatever colour you want on a wall that already has a colour – blue, red or whatever it is.

And the neutrality of the piano is what gives it the possibility to be so expressive. But in order to do that, you have to accept the fact that in itself, left to its own devices, it is a very neutral, inexpressive instrument, but that it is open to 20 million different ways of seduction of each finger.

Daniel Barenboim – Masterclass on Beethoven – Chicago, USA. July 2005

It’s a slow process

Later today I’m heading in to watch Grace set up the screen to go and print the handmade covers for the CDs finally. We were waiting for a new screen bed to be installed in the studio, which was yet another unexpected delay that you just can’t plan for I guess. Hopefully Sunday will see us folding endless covers and sticking them into envelopes to finally start posting the limited edition ones off to the wonderful funders. There are still quite a few of those funders who’ve not emailed me in their addresses, but I’ll be going through those one by one and emailing them individually to remind them after I’ve sent out the cds to everyone who has already sent in their addresses.

In the interim I’ve been busying myself with meeting people who are interested in helping put together some videos for my songs. This Sunday just past I met up with two wonderful contemporary dancers who want to work on a piece using one of my songs, so I’m really excited to see how that develops. Hopefully we’ll be filming the dance piece and making it available for people to watch online. But even to have other creative artists collaborating with me and wanting to use my music for their own art is reward enough for me to be honest.

There’s another video piece being worked out at the moment too – I’ve had some ideas for videos for some of the songs, and I’ve been looking for people who are interested in getting involved to help make them happen, and it seems that one of those ideas might come to fruition. Meeting someone tomorrow who might be the very person to perform on the video, I just need to make some more contacts with filmmakers here in the west who are interested in getting involved in low/no-budget video projects using my music. But at the moment, there’s four different video ideas being actively worked on, and at various different stages so far.

Aside from all that, I’ve been continuing to teach myself how to play things on the ukulele – which I picked up a few years ago as an instrument that I don’t have to play for work, or play well, but that I can just noodle with idly at home while waiting for something to load on the computer, for example. Ukulele and knitting were my two de-stressers when I had major computer problems last year. I really enjoy the lightness of the texture from the ukulele – in many ways it’s the complete opposite to piano for me. It’s something I don’t play well, and has this light fragile sound sometimes, but that’s possibly just how I play it.

But, last night I recorded a quick one-take cover of a Fiona Apple song on ukulele just for fun. I’ve had the song running around my head for weeks now, so I figured the best way to deal with it was to learn it somehow and try sing it. Her music has really singable melodies, and they’re such a pleasure to sing too between some of the wordplay and the range that she sings in. Her albums are some of my favourites to stick on a sing along to at the top of my voice while baking, for example.

But here’s that cover if you’re interested in hearing it. I posted it last night on twitter, tumblr and facebook, so you’ve possibly already heard it, but I don’t trust myself to write a blogpost when I’m tired anymore, and this thing was recorded at about half ten last night:

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