Tag: music

Mastering, gigging and a free download

Mastering is an interesting art. I was able to attend the mastering session for my record at Wav Mastering in Limerick, and experienced the recordings gaining more definition and going from being a bunch of tracks that I’d recorded to being an album that made sense to listen to. I find it hard to explain exactly what it’s like without resorting to a bread analogy – so imagine you’ve made 12 loaves but baked them just as a round of dough on a tray. Now, imagine all those 12 loaves were baked in the same loaf tin instead. They still will taste the same, but they’ll look more uniform as a result. I guess that’s how I see mastering. I don’t know if that even makes sense – but it works in my head and I hope in yours too.

I was due to play at Song Cycle in Whelan’s last monday, as a sort of prep for myself to road-test some of the really new songs I’ve never played to an audience before. However, the mental floods in Dublin that evening meant that the evening didn’t go ahead at all, so apologies to anyone who may have braved the weather to make it in.

I wanted to play those songs live before playing them at the Jazz Festival gig tomorrow, but alas, they’ll just get their first outing at that gig instead. So, if you’re around Cork for the weekend, drop into the Festival Club on Sunday evening, and I’m playing in the Legends Suite.

I’d been hoping to have the record ready and out there before the Jazz gig, but various things always seem to crop up to add to the delay. But that’s really helped and added to the whole learning process. These last 6 months have been one big learning curve for me, and comparing the demos I was doing at home before going into the studio with the finished album I have now is mindblowing to me at times. But I wanted to be able to start sharing some of it with people, so here’s a track called “Helen” which you can listen to and download for free via Bandcamp. I hope you enjoy it, and spread it around. The full album will be available in November, all things going to my now re-adjusted plan:

A little piano track, mastering and some gigs.

fund:it, the crowdfunding service I used to raise cash for my album recording has been going now for over 6 months, and they’ve released a video about what was achieved over their first 6 months. They asked me if I had any music that they might be able to use for the video, and as it happens I had recorded one of my piano instrumental pieces on the last day of the piano & vocal tracking in the studio recording sessions. I’d an hour or two to spare and ended up knocking out a live version of “I Wish You Were Here” as well as the piano instrumental piece.

The song has ended up on the tracklisting for the album, and the instrumental is planned as a bonus track for the digital version of the record going out to those people who funded my project. But, now you can hear an edit of that track used in the video about Fund:it’s first 6 months, which they have entered into the “Better Together” competition in the hope of winning some money towards helping to develop and improve the service they provide. Please click on the link and consider voting for their entry, which will help enable other creative projects happen through the use of crowdfunding.

Here’s the video:

I’m heading off to get the record mastered later this week, having gotten to the point where I have final mixes that I’m happy with, and a record that I’m quite proud of. The artwork is still being developed with print artist Grace Mitchell, and I’m excited to see the work she has been doing all coming together to result in the final packaging for the record. We are planning to hand print and make the packaging for a limited number of the records, and everyone who bought the cd through fund:it will be getting one of those copies. I’m looking forward to having a finished product and I really hope that people who hear the record like it as much as I do.

Later this month, I also have a little gig on the 24th at the “Song Cycle” showcase night Upstairs in Whelan’s in Dublin, and the Cork Jazz Festival on the 30th. So, if you are knocking around either city around those days, drop in and you’ll get to hear some of the songs from the record before it is out, as well as some of the material I’ve held over for the next one, and newer songs I’ve been writing more recently.

I’m a sucker for songs with choirs.

Seriously, it’s like crack to me. I think I can probably blame my parents for this one quite successfully: my dad has always sung in the local church choir, and my mother introduced us all to the wonderful songwriter Melanie, and this song in particular:

It can seem cliché to throw in a choir for some extra emotion, but there’s something really rousing about a group of different voices coming together as one. The combination of all those different vocal timbres creates something very special indeed. Even if they’re just singing in unison, there’s so much power in a group of voices.

I’ve been in choirs since I was really young, and have a major soft spot for choral music as a result. Last year I was conducting a choir for the first time properly – previously I’d set up a mini choir for an amateur production of Sister Act that I arranged all the music for. That’s a long story for another time. But, it was my first experience of properly arranging music for a group of other people to sing, and I was completely hooked. I think I arranged about half of the material I got the NUIG choir to sing last year – stuff that varied from Elvis songs to Swedish folksongs.

Speaking of Swedish music, one of my favourite guilty pleasure songs with choirs is by the Swedish band The Ark, who some people probably remember mostly for their Eurovision entry in 2007. However, I remember them mostly for a Swedish friend of mine who was rather obsessed with them and introduced me to their music. This particular song is one that has stayed with me since, mostly for the choir entry in it. The song itself is pretty straight forward and quite emo lyrically, but the interplay between the choir and the lead singer in the last section of the song is absolutely stellar.

And I must take a moment to thank @donalmulligan, who reminded me of this great track that I first heard on the Pet Shop Boys “Back To Mine” compilation. Incidentally, you may also have heard it recently on the Channel 4 show “Sirens”, which I recommend watching btw. I lost that PSB compilation in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2011, but I’m glad that youtube is there so I can still find these tracks to listen to. Try not to dance in your seat as you listen to it.

I had a playlist on my old iTunes that was dedicated to “Choral Awesomeness”, as I put it, but alas it’s something I’ll have to rebuild from scratch again now. Not all the selections had such bombastic choirs – some were more serene, like Kate Bush’s “Hello Earth” which quotes the Georgian folk song “Tsintsharo”, featured in the Werner Herzog film “Nosferatu”. Or Thea Gilmore’s amazing “Sol Invictus”, which quickly became one of my favourite midwinter songs ever. I’ve also previously posted about one of my favourite choirs, Scala, who do gorgeous choral versions of popular music.

But it seems pretty obvious that the love of choral music, and the years spent either singing in or conducting choirs, would have some effect on the kind of music that I write. That certainly does seem to be the case, listening back to the mixes. I realised that I have 10-part harmony at one point in one of the songs, and there’s a definite choral feel to that particular song. However, it’s definitely a different thing to be layering up different vocal lines with your own voice, and working with a choir. Maybe I’ll put together a little choral group to sing live with me so I can really get those vocal textures live that are on the record.

Inspiration: Joni Mitchell

This is one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, and I stumbled across this live version from 1970 on youtube today while searching out more performances from this BBC In Concert series.

The entire concert is collected here, if you fancy losing yourself to some wonderful live solo performances from a talented songwriter on the cusp of the greatest period of her career. This would have been in the period just after Ladies Of The Canyon, while writing songs that would appear on Blue.

There’s a great early version of “All I Want” in that show too, while it was still being written, which I recommend checking out, if only to compare it to the version that is so well known and loved on the album. In fact, that song was the reason for a spur of the moment road trip across the country one year for me. My ex was visiting, and we went for a hangover breakfast with a friend, and afterwards, this song came on in my CD player in the car, and we decided that my ex wouldn’t get a bus back to Cork, but that we’d all just keep on driving and listening to my Joni CDs and sing along. Now, every time I hear that riff starting on the dulcimer, I think of the road to Cork, and it makes me smile a lot.

Death of a hard drive

Never the most enjoyable experience, but that is indeed what happened, and my backups weren’t as often as they should have been, so I’ve lost a bucket load of stuff, and I’m currently filling my lovely empty new hard disc up again. I had a lovely moment when the first album I added to my iTunes was the mixes of my own record. That was rather deadly, I gotta say.

But I’ve kinda made a half assed attempt at putting my iTunes music collection back together, as I’ve realised how little I listen to music on my computer anymore. I stick on Lyric FM, or play a vinyl record these days more than finding something on iTunes. I listen to CDs in my car, so for the last year or so, iTunes has been a way to do up mix CDs for the car, and that’s about it. I don’t think I’ll attempt to have the huge bloated music library I used to have, but instead, I’m gonna use this rebirth of my computer to be a bit more careful about what music I have on there, and maybe I’ll find myself actually listening to music on my computer again if I have to hit the skip button less often and value the music that I put on there more too.

This iMac has previously had a dead logic board within the first few weeks of me buying it, and was already named Jean Grey as a result of its miraculous rise from the dead that time. I guess the name is still pretty apt. I had a desktop of Jean as Phoenix for a long time. I guess it’s time I went with that again, or is that tempting fate?

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