Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Blood and Roses

Not dead - just busy.

Let's see now - miserable bastard songs. This is a great song from The Smithereens. Click on the title to hear my version.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Life gets Better...again

This is more what I had in mind. GPs original is great but it is very jaunty.

This is just guitar (no BIAB at all this time) and vocal.

Life gets better

New idea...

A lot of uptempo songs are really sad bastard singer songwriter fodder. I'm going to recover the misery from some songs. First cab off the rank is Graham Parker's Life Gets Better.

This try is almost all BIAB with just a little guitar riff on a real guitar. I've taken an axe to my voice with doubling and compression. I don't think it works but it's an attempt.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Just Another Nervous Breakdown

This is getting silly now. It seems when approaching sophisticated muscianship I resort to Gumby style music. This another attempt at a song from Breakfast in America that wasn't finished before the deadline for Coverville.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Take the Long Way Home

This is a bit of a joke, too. I was trying to see how noisy I could get BIAB and then added brainless grungy guitar and keyboards. Supertramp minus subtlety and a singing voice. However, my fourteen year old son who hates everything I record on principle, thought it was better than usual because it didn't sound much like me. Bonus points for picking that the different mixes of the backing rack are recorded twice slightly out of sync rather than just tweaked later. I used to do this with two reel to reels in the old days - the horror.

Lord is it Mine

Well that didn't work.

I tried to do this properly. There's no BIAB here just 6 string, 12 string, bass and ukelele. Unfortunately I couldn't stay even close to in tune this time so I gave up. My wife Robyn had a go with a different arrangement for Coverville. The only thing that survived in her version was the little uke riff.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

The Logical Song

Ok this is really a terrific song from "Breakfast in America."

My only beef is that the instrumental at the end suggests that the singer has escaped from the restricted world he describes. My version suggests he did not. I wanted it mechanical and stripped back for the most part, but there is a tubular bells alert on this track.

I was trying for Gary Numan synths at one point but wound them back to a much smaller part. I'm trying to talk the song which means I probably do a bit of a Shatner.

Click the title to hear the result.