Just when you thought it was safe… I’m back. It’s been a busy couple of weeks but I finally have a new track for you all to check out. I say new track but really it’s another older track I revitalised. It’s called The Oystercatcher’s Escape which to be honest sounds like a bit of a pretencious title to me now but there is a story behind it. I’ll reveal that later on

It’s another track I recorded while in France and I’ve marked it as a demo version because there’s a few things I’m not happy with. Mainly it’s the drums, I had to program them and they sound too precise or mechanical I think. It’s a pretty jazzy/blues tune or maybe that should be bluesy/jazz who knows Anyway, it needs a more free flowing syncopated drum style I think and if only I had a drum kit, about 10 extra microphones, stands and a lot of space, I’d play it myself but for now the computer drums will have to do. I wrote the song over 10 years ago now on my battered old acoustic and I have a strange relationship with it. Sometimes I like it and we get along but at other times I think it’s a bit too cheezy and I don’t like it, I tend to be my harshest critic.

(The Bay at Polzeath, click to enlarge)

The reason it’s called the Oystercatcher’s Escape is not because of some profound and deep meaning, it’s actually more of pun than anything. For a number of years I went on summer surfing holidays with my family in Polzeath, Cornwall. We used to stay in a pub called The Oystercatcher up on the hill above the bay, lovely place and I had some great times there. I used to go out on my surfboard for 7 or 8 hours at a time and a few times the life guards had to come out and check I was still there, I haven’t been in years but someday I’ll get back there. I used to sit out on the fire escape of the pub watching the sun go down over the water and play my guitar, that’s where I wrote this song. So it had to be called The Oystercatcher’s Escape

Hope you like the track, let me know what you think

Dan

 

 Sonic Real Estate - Oystercatcher's Escape (demo) [3:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hey folks, another one of my solo tracks this time and again it’s something a little different. The track is called Take Me Home, it’s quite an old tune really. I wrote it back in my music college days about 10 years ago. This version was recorded a year or two ago in France.

It started off with the little piano intro and kind of grew from there. They used to have a lovely old Steinway piano in the college I attended and I would often sneak into the concert hall to play on it like a naughty school kid. A piano is something I’ve always wanted to own and I hope that one day I’ll get to have one in my house. For now I’ll have to make do with electronic ones.

We did have a piano in our house at one time when I was younger. It was an old upright that my dad got from a family friend who did household removals. I’ll never forget the immortal sight of watching my dad cutting the banister off the stairs so we could get the piano into the house. He stuck it back on later but it was pretty funny, like something from one of those old silent movies, a gang of blokes trying push this piano up some stairs As for the piano itself, sadly what we didn’t realise was it hadn’t been tunes for about 80 years and it was pretty much knackered. We got an expert out to tune it but he said the tuning pegs had corroded and it couldn’t be done. We got it a bit more in tune but it was never quite right, somehow I think it added to the charm of the thing… even if you needed ear plugs to listen to it.

My dad always says it was the most expensive free piano ever

Anyway, back to the song. It was originally meant for just piano and vocal but when I recorded this I couldn’t find a decent piano sound I liked on any of my synths. I decided to use an electric piano instead, it’s a Fender Rhodes type tone. I programmed an electronic beat to give the tune a little momentum and I even used a heartbeat sample as part of the rhythm so listen out for that. Finally I added some other classic 80’s sounding synth pads, a bit of acoustic guitar and it was done.

It’s a little different sound to normal for me, very electronic but I like it and I think it works pretty well. Let me know what you think.

Hope you like it

Dan

 

 Sonic Real Estate - Take Me home [4:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hey folks, I’ve got a new track for you to have a listen to. It’s another one from my old band Kagnee this time and another one we recorded in that barn near Wigan, if you’ve read the earlier post that will make sense.

As you’d expect if you’ve heard any other Kagnee stuff in the past, it’s a chaotic and crazy tune but still funky and even at times… whisper it quietly… melodic. This version is taken from a 6 track Ep we recorded in 2004 titled Logic Bomb. I can’t really remember how we wrote this tune which is not surprising. We did write a hell of a lot of tunes and although I’m biased I think there were a lot of decent ones in there. We must have written over 100 songs in about 2 years which isn’t bad going, god knows how many more we wrote and forgot as well. It was a bit of a standing joke that every time we went into our practice room we’d usually write a new song, then spend most of our time sitting around smoking and playing darts but not much time actually practising anything we’d done before, that’s probably why were so chaotic hehehe

As for the tune itself it all came about from the bass line I wrote, you can hear that in the intro and then we all took turns singing or more likely shouting a verse over it. It’s probably one of the best things we ever did if I’m honest, I love the funky rhythms, overall energy and crazy lyrics. We might have been a bit mad but we could all play to high level too… just not always at the same time

The intrumentation is pretty simple on this one: I played bass and sang the first verse, Ste played drums and sang the 2nd verse, Spenner played guitar and sang the last verse and then Dave played keyboards. It was basically all done live with the guitar, bass and drums recorded in one go. Then vocals, lead guitar and keyboards were overdubbed later. We recorded about 6 songs in 4 hours from start to finish so I guess somewhere amongst all that smoking, playing darts, laughing and messing about we must have practiced a bit too

(Click the images to enlarge… go on you know you want to)

Hope you enjoy it,

Dan

 

 Kagnee - Ropey [3:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download