Hey folks, first off Merry Christmas to you all! Big hugs and all that It’s actually Christmas day as I write this but I realised 2008 was drawing to an end and I wanted to post another track before that happened. It was last Christmas I started this blog in the hope of posting a new song every couple of weeks, I also hoped it would spur me to do more music and make time for it in general but to be honest I’ve fallen a little short. I’ve managed to post about an average of one track a month which isn’t too bad and I’m still hopelessly in love with music no matter what else I might do, writing, podcasting, programming or picking my nose. It dominates my thoughts.

Neil Young back in the 60's

So here it is, my final track of the year for you. It’s actually a little live acoustic cover of “Rocking In A Free World” by Neil Young. I’ve mentioned my love of Neil Young on this blog before but this song has always stuck out to me, the lyrics are amazing I think, political and hard hitting in some parts but ultimately uplifting. “Just one more kid that’ll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool!” is a refrain that always lodged itself in my brain. To be honest with you this isn’t a polished recording, it’s just a live jam thrown together off the cuff with one mic and my trusty acoustic guitar. I recorded it one day when I set up to record a session of demos for new songs I had, I think this came out by accident just as a warm up. I certainly never intended to release it but as I listen back now through those recordings again, this is the track I always come back to. It has something, I dunno what, I don’t even know if it’s good. It is what it is.

You can hear as I sing it I can’t help doing a bit of a Neil Young impression with the accent and all, this wasn’t deliberate but it kind of works. I also love the live version of the song Pearl Jam always do, another one of my favourite bands. So at times you can hear I’m veering unconsciously between Neil Young and Eddie Vedder impressions in the same verse I even saw Neil Young play this at Reading Festival back in 95 with Pearl Jam as his backing band, Eddie wasn’t with them that day but man it still rocked. The ultimate performance of that tune for me I’d have to say. This is just my little attempt at that, I hope you enjoy it.

Have a great holiday season and I wish you all the best for 2009 as well, I’ll be back with more music, more stupid master plans I’ll only get halfway through and plenty of other stuff. So I’ll see you on the other side. Take care of yourselves now.

All the best

Dan

 

 Sonic Real Estate - Rocking In A Free World (acoustic jam) [2:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hey folks, been a while since my last update and things have been hectic as ever but I’m back with something a little different for you this time. It’s a theme tune I wrote for my cousin’s new podcast. He’s just started a podcast with a friend which is very loosely about tea and the title of the show is “Fancy A Brew”. On listening to the first episode I noticed they had no theme music, it was sometime around then that this funny little ditty appeared and lodged itself in my brain. I had to get it out so decided to record and send it to the guys on the off chance they might find a use for it.

It’s only very short and it’s meant to be a bit funny and memorable as an intro for the show. It has a bit of a bluesy or ragtime feel to it I think and I attempted to sing a bit like Noel Coward for the full “I say, we’re British and we drink tea old boy” effect The instrumentation and recording process were not particularly exciting or exotic, it was just performed live in my studio on the acoustic guitar and all recorded with one mic. I often do separate guitar and vocal tracks even on demos but this was all just one mic in the room and I think it works pretty well, this was the first take and ended up being the best in my opinion.

It’s only short at 35ish seconds but I wanted share it with all of you as I found it quite amusing and fun to record, the whole thing came out of nowhere but then I suppose the best things always do. You can check out the podcast here if you’re interested and I hope you enjoy the song. As always comments and constructive criticism are more than welcome so feel free to post any thoughts about the tune you may have.

I hope to be back with some new music for you before Christmas so till then take care of yourselves and I’ll see you very soon

Dan

 

 Sonic Real Estate - Fancy A Brew (podcast theme) [0:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

…shame cos we never made any hehehe Hey folks, I’m back on a boiling hot day here. I’m even wearing shorts so avert your eyes. I’m struggling to find the motivation to write this in the heat but I realised I’ve neglected you all a bit lately, I’m sorry. It’s about time I posted another track, so here it is.

It’s another one by my old band Kagnee called In It 4 Tha Money. As crazy and chaotic as ever this is a very short tune at only 1:34, short but sweet you might say. I really like it though, it was always one of my favourites in our live set. The song is actually pretty political and contains lots of little references to look out for, a lot of our stuff did. Our guitarist Spenner was a really good artist and he designed some fake Kagnee money for us to promote the track with. You can see an example below:

We got loads of this printed in different colours and threw it around at gigs, I’m sure the cleaners loved us for that the next day but it was a lot of fun. I even tried to pay for a round of drinks with one of these and the bar man really wasn’t very impressed, it was just a bit of fun though, it’s not like I actually thought he was going to accept it, I mean LOOK AT IT! Master forgers we were not, mad bastards would be closer to the mark but we had a good time and I think even the odd person who saw us did too. I emphasize the ODD in that sentence.

So that’s about it for today, it’s too damn hot for any long and meaningful anecdotes sorry. My brain is fried, so have a listen to the track I hope you enjoy it and I hope it’s sunny where you are too. I’m off to buy an ice cream or something… I wonder if they take Kagnee money? Hmm

Dan

 

 Kagnee - In It 4 Tha Money [1:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Howdy one and all, I’m back with another track. It’s something of an “oldy” this time but if I may be permitted to say so, also I think a “goody”. Another song I recorded as part of my Shed Music project which you can read about in earlier posts. This was on the album “A Trip To The Where? House?” that we produced in 2001.

It’s called “Special?!” and it’s a classic piece of Shed Music really, mixing crazy electronic sounds with more traditional organic instruments and funny speech samples from a film. I had some fun experimenting with a little program which allowed you to take any audio file and use it to scratch with like it was a vinyl record. I can’t remember the name of it but man I loved that little program. You may know this already but I’m a huge hip-hop fan, isn’t every slightly middle class white kid? I love all kinds of music of course as I’ve said before but when I hear a break beat kicking off it warms my heart. I’m not really into a lot the modern mainstream rappers you hear now like 50 Cent, Ja Rule and whoever else is cool this month, those idiots couldn’t rhyme their way out a paper bag compared to true MCs like KRS One, Big Daddy Kane, The Furious Five, Zulu Nation, Public Enemy, The Wu-Tang Clan and Jurassic 5. I could go on and on with that list but I’ve leave it there as this is getting way off topic. I’ve always wanted to be able to do great things with turntables like DJ Shadow, Mixmaster Mike or Grandmaster Flash for example. I even bought a set of turntables years ago that are still sat in the cupboard gathering dust. I had a quick go but I’m not sure I’ve got it, give me a guitar and I’m fine, I guess I’ll just have to leave the scratching to others. On this track you will hear my attempts at scratching with the speech samples that come in from time to time. It kind of works in the context of the track but if you’ve heard DJ Shadow or Cut Chemist believe me you won’t be impressed.

This was recorded some time in 2001. I started with the drum loop, the acoustic guitar picking and the synth line and then built up the track from there. My studio revolved around an 8 track Fostex hard disk recorder in those days and I would tend to come up with a rhythm track on the computer then record it out to 2 tracks on the recorder, leaving me 6 spare tracks to put guitars, vocals or whatever else I wanted over the top. Looking back these days with my hi tech computer based studio where I can cut and change things around at any time and use as many tracks as I want, I kind of miss the simpler times because I think it forced me to be more creative with production. It wasn’t so easy, you had to work to solve problems and sometimes lateral thinking throws up things you didn’t expect. Maybe that’s just the mists of time making it look better than it really was to me now, I was probably sat there pulling my hair out (I still had some then) and screaming “if only I had one more spare track I could do this!!!” Anyway, I’m digressing again sorry. So instrumentation wise you will be able to hear: some drums programmed on an old 808 style drum machine, a synth riff from the 303, some acoustic guitar picking, my electric bass, a distorted guitar played with a slide and the funny little talking samples going in and out. It makes a surprisingly full sound.

I think it works well and listening to it now I still like this track, maybe it’s wrong of me to say that since I produced it but it’s the truth. It’s not half bad Listen out for the slide guitar parts, I had great fun with that. I didn’t have a proper bottleneck slide to use at the time so I had to use the back of my old Zippo cigarette lighter, how rock and roll is that? I got my electro acoustic Yamaha out, plugged it through my Marshall amp and just played that sucka, it gives quite a distinctive sound and I’ve not done it in a while, I think I should after hearing this.

It’s quite a simple track and I can’t tell you what inspired it, there aren’t really any lyrics as such other than the lines that I sampled. “She’s very special… well I’m sure she is special if you picked her out of the whole bunch”. Maybe it’s the closest I ever got to a Shed love song who knows… maybe I was just bored and I thought the words sounded funny, it doesn’t really matter now. Just listen to the track and see what you think, I really hope you enjoy it. If you do leave me a comment here and let me know someone’s listening… and also feed my ego a bit ha ha

Till next time, word to ya mutha blood hehehe

Dan

 

 Sonic Real Estate - Special?! [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hey folks, sorry it’s been a while. Anyway, I do have something brand new for you to listen to, it’s a theme tune I made recently for my friends Sheryl & Ken’s new show GeekSpeak TV. They’re gonna be doing the show as a video podcast I think but I’m not sure of all the details at the moment.

I met Sheryl almost a year ago now when I joined Jaiku.com, a little microblogging / social networking site. She was one of the first people I got talking to on there and I’ve made a lot of good friends through the site since, some I’ve even met in real life, yes that’s right in person, I never would have expected all the cool things that have come out of it but it’s been amazing. We have quite a cosy little community over there which is great fun to be a part of. Sheryl started doing a podcast a while back which became pretty popular and soon she was hanging out with the stars such as Leo Laporte, a popular technology broadcaster. Prompting much repetition of the phrase “I knew her before she was famous” from me. The show was called The Gabby Geek and I offered to make some theme music for it. Sheryl seemed pretty happy with the resulting tune and I was happy to make some good use of my studio, I was even a guest on the very first episode of the show which was great fun.

So when Sheryl asked me about making some music for the new video show she’s doing with Ken, I was only too happy to don my cape and swing to the rescue… well I agreed to do it anyway, I wear the cape most of the time but that’s another story. Making theme music for films, TV and radio has long been an ambition of mine although it’s not something I can honestly say I’ve done much of to date. I’ve mainly focused on my bands and little solo projects over the years musically, I’d like to think this could be a new direction for me but we’ll see. So if by some chance Ridley Scott is reading this… giz a job, I could do that

The track itself turned out very well and I’m happy with it. The original brief was Euro Pop I seem to remember and it’s fair to say I deviated a little from that. Writing something to someone else’s specifications is still quite new to me but I think I’m getting the hang of it, it’s quite liberating actually to have a direction laid out for you already when starting a track. I did a couple of demos before Christmas which were quite Euro Pop themed but when I came back to do the final track last week I just couldn’t get this guitar riff out of my head, it kept rolling round in my brain with the words Geek Speak TV over the top. I worked it out on the guitar, set up a drum loop and within an hour or so I had the basis of the track. I tried to make it a bit more techy sounding with some interesting synths and so on but if I’m honest it’s really just a rock tune. Once I got the guitar out there was no going back and now it’s less Euro Pop and more AC/DC attempts Euro Pop, I think it works though and luckily Sheryl & Ken seem very pleased which is the main thing.

The only thing I think I would change about this now is the drums, I used a loop to get the track up and running quickly and build around but it sounds a little too mechanical and sanitised for the feel of the track I think. It could use some fills and subtle changes. Ideally I’d have a drum kit set up and just play along to the track but as I’ve said before I don’t have the money or space for that at the moment (sigh)… Seriously Ridley, call me mate!

The instrumentation is pretty basic really, 2 guitars, bass, drums, synths and vocals, that’s all there is to it. I did use some effects to fill out the sound on the guitar and vocals though. I patched the vocal through a guitar amp and messed about with it a little to blend it in. I’ll have to remember that trick for the future. It’s a pretty short track and I expect the guys will fade it out quickly after the singing finishes, that’s the idea. I left all the extra guitar twiddling stuff in there because I thought it would give them some room to play and besides, if I’m honest I was having way too much fun noodling away to cut it out now.

I hope you like the track, can’t wait to see what the guys do with it. Not bad for a days work hey? It was a lot of fun to make. Hopefully I’ll have some other new tunes for you to hear very soon, thanks for listening,

Bye 4 now,

Dan

 

 Sonic Real Estate - GeekSpeak TV Theme [2:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download