Blogs

Last Wed, 7th December, I did the trip to Byron Bay again to work some more with Al Park. We got stuck into the song Lucky, a seven-minute song with a hint of prog rock about it.

Awesome Voices has just had it's first public performance as part of a Byron Bay poetry reading called Dangerously Poetic, held on Saturday 03 December, 2011 at the Byron Bay Community Centre.

There were about 30 - 40 people in the audience and they gave us a tremendous response. We sang five songs, in two brackets. We opened the show with an African number, Masithi Amen, and followed it up with Your Children, the Sweet Honey in the Rock adaption of Kahlil Gibrahn's The Prophet. 

So on Wednesday, 14 November, 2011, I arranged to meet Al Park at Top Cat Studios so we could add the various midi tracks to the orignal studio-created songs. This was an important occasion, bringing the worlds of Al Park's keys and midi work into my tracks, because once they're all in the studio system I'll have a really good idea of how the pieces are to sound together and I'll be able to add or redo any other vocal or guitar parts etc.

This last Wednesday I made the trip to Byron Bay for another session with AL. I was running late as I had to drop three of my instruments into local luthier, Stuart Newman's, workshop where he is going to weave his musical magic.

Got to know my Cakewalk Sonar program a little better tonight and put down an excellent French Horn couple of harmonised midi tracks for Starlight.

Awesome Voices is a brand new choir that I've just started up in my local town of Alstonville. We've had one term so far and the general feeling is that it's awesome! Numbers for the choir have been between 20 - 35 singers, people of all ages! My nine year old daughter Jessica and her friend Harry are regulars, and I've even had my five year old son Ewan singing along as well! The general repertoire I'm working with is a number of community choir style A Cappella arrangements as well as some Gospel style stuff plus one or two of my own arrangements.

Yesterday I had another great sesson with Al Park. We sat down to his PC music station and worked on tightening up the midi string sounds for my song "Sweet Lady Life". After my last session with Al, I had thought that we'd completed this one already, but I got home and discovered that the midi strings were not adequately aligned rhythmically to the original audio file of the song.

Had another great session in the studio with Brad tonight. I booked the studio from 5.00 pm to 11.00 pm and went in with as many instruments as I could carry! I took my new bass, plus my Cort 12-string guitar, a Tanglewood mandolin, a bag of flutes & whistles, etc., plus my old Bas GT-5 guitar effects processor.

I didn't really have much more of a plan than - play a bass line for "One Day Soon" - a thoughtful contemorary piece with a pick-me-up chorus - and have a look at adding some flute parts to "Lucky".

Just back from a recording session at TopCat studio with Brad.We had about six hours and in that time I took in my new bass and re-did the bassline for Starlight - a contemporary/acoustic-rock story-song about a young lady called Sally and her journey away from abuse toward hope. Lot's of guitar in this one, and multi-layered vocals.

Guess what? I bought myself another bass guitar this week as my previous guitar - a Tanglewood 5-string bass - was very old and the action (the height of the strings above the fretboard) was way too high! I tried to adjust the neck truss rod, but there was just no more play in the truss rod available, and so the action remained VERY high (we're talking about 1 full centimetre above the strings! Basically unplayable!)