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!

Fun Machine

Three objectives for this song. First, to see how well my Tascam could be used to double as a mic for tracks on Reaper. I think it did a pretty good job. All the music on the song was recorded on the Tascam, and then the files were transferred to my laptop and put together in a Reaper project. There's some obvious background noise going on, but that's intentional. I chose to record several of the tracks while my washing machine was rumbling away right behind me. And, in fact, I could easily have eliminated the noise using a gate and a bit of EQ.

The second objective was to include all of my musical Christmas presents. That too was achieved. They're all on there in one form or another.

Finally, I wanted to connect A Message from the Bourgeoisie with my EDM Rough Cut because although they sound like chalk and cheese, they actually grew out of the same idea. That will become clearer once I get further on with the EDM piece. For now it should be obvious that they share the same chord structure and instrumental melody.

Finally, on a nerdy tech note, the recording allowed me to try out Reaper's adjustable playback speed. The initial tempo was set by the pattern I built on the Stylophone beat box (the bass, plus a few odd bleeps) and it was a bit too slow. I could've just altered the project tempo on Reaper and it would have squeezed all the audio files in the correct ratio while keeping the original pitch. But it was easier and more interesting to slightly increase the playback speed; that replicates the effect of speeding up a tape or record player: the pitch increases as well as the tempo. This time it was just used to give the song a bit more impetus, but I could definitely have more radical fun with it in the future.

Getting Tooled Up, Part Two

My Christmas wish-list was an absurd collection of musical instruments and equipment, ranging from hi-tech gadgets to children's toys. Here's what my family kindly provided me with:

Clarinet

I love the clarinet for various reasons. It has a warm, expressive tone which is far more interesting and engaging than more attention-grabbing instruments such as the sax. It's also a beautiful artefact, with its mix of wood tubing and intricate metal keys, levers and stops. Mine is a “beginner's” model, which basically means it's (relatively) cheap and difficult to play. The lower notes in particular are nearly impossible straight out of the box. I suspect, however, that a few hundred hours of play will (a) improve the accuracy of my fingering and (b) break in the instrument itself. In any case, fighting against the medium is an integral part of my project: finding ways to get interesting music out of unpromising sources.

Anyway, here's Monty Sunshine playing at a level I'll never, ever, ever be able to match.

Stylophone

The first mass-market synth with a cheap and nasty tone. Basically a children's toy, though I'm not sure what sort of child would want to play with it these days. So it's a retro-toy, reeking of nostalgia for an outmoded future. I wonder what it sounds like through a few effects?

Stylophone Beat Box

The stylophone marches bravely into the 1980s with this charmingly basic drum and bass machine. You can build up complex loops with it, but there's no quantizing or even a metronome, so it's fiendishly difficult to get everything in time. Most of what you end up with sounds horrible, but occasionally it's interesting even if it's not what you intended. And therein lies its appeal: it's like the machine has a mind of its own.

German Market Percussion Section

Three simple percussion instruments bought at the Christmas German market in Milton Keynes. The mini-tambourine is usefully portable. The thing with plastic balls on it makes a sound like a pair of maracas, only softer. The third instrument has hollowed-out nut shells tied to it. I've no idea what it's called or exactly how you're meant to play it, but it makes an unusual clacking sound.

Melodica

A pleasingly simple cross between a harmonica and an accordion, I've already found it useful for working out chord progressions and simple melodies. Again, it tends to be known as a children's instrument, though it was widely used in 70's dub reggae and Steve Reich used it as the basis for his 1966 tape loop experiment, “Melodica”.