Work in Progress

 Just a quick play with harmonies and trying to get that "megaphone" feel during the second verse. The lead guitar is a quick experimentation with RealStrat  played on the keyboard and fed through Guitar Rig 3

Young Motion Plymouth Ident Theme

This was a short commission to produce a 20 second high energy theme for a video ident for the Young Motion Plymouth site. Simon Wright produced the video and to which I then added the music and effects. Young Motion Plymouth is a schools' film festival held annually across the city.

Click here to see the completed ident.

I Love Dave Angell Instead

Richard Marsh came up with the idea of creating a music video for Dave Angell's retirement party and of course Robbie Williams classic "Angels" was the one we both felt we could do something with. We put the following version together in about 90 minutes as the soundtrack to the film. We treid to engage as many people as we could to lip synch to the track. That film is to follow but until then here is the track. Sequenced in Live7 with a midi backing track and live lead guitar fed through NI Guitar Rig2.

Across the Universe

This has to be my favourite of all the Beatles' songs; the tune is simple and yet the lyrics are the sweetest imagery that ever came out of that decade. Short phrases like "Limitless undying love ..." and "Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox ...." will be remembered in 100 years time in the same way we recall "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.."

So I could never do it justice and probably haven't in this piece. All I wanted to do was to capture the same spirit of that song but in a different way than I had heared it recorded before. Phil Spector's version with sweeping strings on the original lets the song down; David Bowie's version on Young Americans (?) was good. The best I heared was Lennon's own version on the Anthology recordings; just guitars and finger cymbals.

This version gets the words wrong and I swallowed some spit halfway through the second verse and choked a rushed "Nothing's gonna change my world". However I just wanted guitars and simple voices. I recorded two guitars; one in D and the other capoed much higher and placed them on separate tracks. The acoustic bass is from the Proteus sampler as is the roboticised arpeggio. The voices are heavily phased to sound a little trippy and the drums are from ezDrummer's vintage kit using midi phrases direct from the grooves library.

I have discovered that my singing voice is deteriorating as I get older; there was a time when it sounded fairly smooth and rounded but now sounds like a flock of geese farting in the fog. Oh well... adds gritty realism to the piece, I guess.

Dirty Hippy

I had great fun with this.

This piece began as a sequence of Cyclick samples from the "Dirty Hippy" collection, Kit 3. They were such high energy set of loops that I wanted to put a loud, distorted vocal over the top of it. My vocals had to do I'm afraid but I did make it up as I went along. The lyric refers to the name of the sample set and the rather vain hope that I could ever become a free spirit on the road.

"Born to be Mild" I guess ...

However, as a test piece there were some victories but also a very hard piece to get the vocals right. I need to redo them but this will do for now.

On Normandy's Beaches

An attempt at producing incidental music to illustrate a scene for film. Simple improvisation around the chord sequence Am G and F using Miroslav Philharmonik Full Strings and Trumpets with Nexus Dance Synth arpeggios to underpin a little sinister undertone. Wave wash sound effects from the BBC Sound Library Collection plus a spitfire fly-past from a low res sfx found on the web.

My Sweet Valentine

This is a short sequence of Cyclick samples that have been assembled into a series of musical phrases. The intention was to attempt to entwine a love poem between the phrases; perhaps Byron's "She Walks in Beauty". I guess it is far too busy a tune to do that successfully; perhaps it needs to be sung?

Yeah

Series of live acoustic guitar phrases with an Ambient Bass VST voice accompanying. Overlayed with simple vocals using heavy reverb that work around the guitar. Definite possibilities with this piece to change it into a Zero7-esque song. Perhaps some electric piano and drum line?

 Tracks of My Tears

Just one verse shot. Acoustic guitar and a simple drum track using Toonstruck's ezDrummer application lend backing to an ordinary vocal. Recorded and mixed quickly in Ableton Live 6.