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