Strings Attached

First of all, an equipment update. Last Saturday I got myself down to Argos and bought a 1TB external hard drive and a £15 ukulele. You can see what a high class operation I'm running here.

 I bought the uke with a slightly heavy heart; let's face it, in recent years folkies, hipsters and Frank Skinner have dragged its reputation to an all-time low. But I wanted a string instrument and at least it's not a guitar. Moreover, the one I bought (made by the good people at Martin Smith) is so cheap and nasty that it's virtually impossible to play in a customary "when I'm cleaning windows" kind of way. The struggle to get anything even vaguely musical out of it led to a song (about which more below), and that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for: being forced by the limitations of your equipment to use your imagination.

Then yesterday, while out shopping, I decided to take advantage of the current mild spell and walk over to Express Music on Binley Road. I hadn't been in there since 2002 when I spent £3,000 (in cash!) on a digital portastudio, a mic, a keyboard and a bunch of guitars. It's a great shop if you have an unlimited money supply. This time my splurge was rather more modest: an £80 condenser mic and an £80 Stagg 3/4 violin.

The mic will come into its own when I finally get round to buying an audio interface (I'll probably order it from Amazon this week). As for the violin, I've never played one before in my life, but - hey! - it's only got four strings. How hard can it be? Also, I've now joined the ranks of people who own a little box of rosin, which pleases me more than it should.

Anyway, I bought the violin, at least in part, because I thought it might sound good on the ukulele-based track I started recording last weekend. I finished it this morning, and it's ended up as a kind of mystic hillbilly number called Here We Are. (Music historians take note: "Mystic Hillbilly" is a genre which I hereby claim as my own invention.)

All the tracks were recorded on my Tascam and transferred to Reaper for processing. The kick drum is me banging on an empty Amazon box with a wooden spoon. The snare is the sound of my oven door being slammed shut (I used EQ to take out all the lower frequencies). The "harmonica" is actually my melodica with added distortion. The bass is my Stylophone dropped an octave. I used Reaper's pitch-shifting effect to add a couple of harmonies to the vocal. A harmony has also been added to the violin part (which is doubled). The accordion loop in the middle eight is a busker I recorded in Coventry town centre (I gave him 50p, which probably makes me a Paul Simon-esque exploiter of poor musicians, except that he's gotten 50p more out of the track than I have). It's slowed down and the pitch has been raised a little to make it fit. You can hear a "clean" version of his playing in the outro. The chatter at the start was recorded in the Earl of Mercier in Coventry.

Enjoy!