There’s been a lot of it about. Musicians, that is, unable to play live during lockdown, finding other ways to express themselves. During the recent hiatus I have become very keen on home recording, and some of the results are available commercially (you can browse them here). Much of this is done all on my own, tout seul, and, what’s more, in the absence of others. An exception has been this, a collaboration between me and an old friend, Mr A. T. of Bracknell.
This. Recently.
At least twenty years ago, A. T. and I were in the same band, both together, at once, simultaneously and at the same time. As someone once said, much water has been passed since then. A. T. has since turned professional, teaches guitar, and plays guitar and drums in a variety of outfits notably the Voodoo Sheiks. It was the Voodoo Sheiks that got Adrian (that’s his name) and I back together.
Like me, Adrian had started to explore home recording and had asked a number of his friends to send bits and pieces to his ongoing Blues Alliance collaboration (you can hear an example here). Adrian also asked me to contribute keyboards to the Voodoo Sheik’s single, Norm (now available through Apple Music). One thing led to another, and, what with my finding a songwriting hot streak and a need for a guitarist better than me [that’ll be any guitarist at all, then – Ed] to turn my ideas into reality, Adrian was only too happy to oblige. The result has been our collaboration G&T and our album Ice & A Slice, now available on Apple Music.
Ice and a Slice is a 9-track, 56-minute album that owes quite a lot to our formative years listening to rock in the 70s and 80s. There are some more-or-less obvious nods to Deep Purple (Indigo), Pink Floyd (Lorem Ipsum), Status Quo (Red), Jeff Beck (Silver Lining), and Joe Satriani (Bunky Flooze). I’d come up with backing tracks in my home studio Flabbey Road, email them to Adrian, who’d send back loads of separate guitar tracks done in ProSonus. I’d mix them all into GarageBand, duplicating, splitting and harmonising as I went. I think at one point there were 22 separate guitar tracks in my 80s-stadium-rock-power-ballad Slow Burn, though in my West-Coast style jangly choral pop tune Was That You? I lost count of the number of vocal tracks once they’d passed 30.
Adrian and I had so much fun with G&T that we might be back for a second round. Watch this space.
MUSOS’ CORNER: For this recording, I’d do the backing track on Garageband 11 and email a rough mix to Adrian.
He’d then add the guitar parts, zip them up for easy emailing and send them to me. I’d unpack them, paste each guitar part into its own track in Garageband, and get mixing.
Adrian’s guitars were (in no particular order, as they say on all the game shows) a Fender Telecaster; two Fender Stratocasters; a PRS Custom 24; a Gibson SG, and an Ernie Ball Musicman. All were played through a Mesa Boogie Mk5:25 amplifier and from that, a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface and into ProSonus Studio 1 Professional 4.5.
All the bass and drums and a few of the keyboard sounds come from GarageBand 11. Apart from that, the keyboards used were a Yamaha Clavinova CLP800 (mainly for piano, but there’s a cathedral organ at the end of Lorem Ipsum); and a Crumar Mojo 61 (Hammond organ, Rhodes piano and clavinet).
The rest came from apps on my iPad Mk2 played either from the iPad itself or from a M-Audio Keystation 49 Mk3. The apps included a Minimoog Model D, ARP Odyssey, Korg iMS20, Oberheim OBXd, Solina string ensemble, Mellotron XL, Tal-U-No-LX (basically, a Roland Juno 60) and Magellan2 synth. All non-Garageband, non-guitar sounds, including vocals (recorded with a no-name dynamic microphone) went through a Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer and into the computer. Monitoring was through a Behringer Xenyx 302 mixer into Beyer Dynamic headphones.
