Peace Terms
This is inspired by a TV program I came across regarding the artist Brian Catling who I had never heard of before to be honest. He is an interesting man who I suppose would be termed a performance artist. Anyway I recorded some of the scenes I found interesting on my phone and put them into the Reaper DAW. So this time I was completely starting from the visual side of things. For instance, the drums are basic but initially had sounds that I didn’t think suited. I wanted to keep it very sparse and using the kick & cymbal I though gave it a kind of jazzy vibe that maybe went with the age the visuals are set in. The guys that I have been following in #Jamuary also inspired me and I splashed out on a new bit of gear which is the Behringer Crave. My thinking was I might be able to hook it up to my ancient Pro-One (with knackered keyboard) and get them to work together. Managed it using the gate out on the Crave. I could run a sequence on the Crave and another on the Pro-One which (I think) are tight enough together. This makes up the part where the blokes ‘kidnap’ someone and take him in a car. Early days with that idea but want to dig a little deeper in that area. Anyway, hope I don’t get another tug from the BBC for using these scraps of film. 🙂 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_C…
City Tension
Another sound experiment here. I taped a fella who was on his phone sitting on the train near me. It’s not something I would usually do at all but I’ve been looking out for different ideas to use for #jamuary. The man was as good as gold but a little bit, shall we say, eccentric. So any way, I decided to attempt to create the track only using sounds from the brief recording and nothing else. But I felt (when done) that I needed an instrument just to kind of glue it together. So there is the one synth line doing the pulse/drone thingy. The man was a little bit stressed in his conversation about how he was feeling and the whole thing I’ve put together is trying to put across a kind of tension that can exist in a big city. The visual side comes from a book I’ve been given lately about a certain type of architecture (Brutalism) found in London. I just took photos of the images in the book. Lots of them had the black side bars when I put them in the editor and I used the option to remove the bars which had the side effect of blowing up the photos and cropping in a strange (not good) way which normally I wouldn’t want. But it kind of worked for me here and having short durations on the photos displayed seems to add to the overall tense/menacing feel I tried to achieve.
C No Evil
The seed of this was planted while waiting for a bus. There was a poster on the bus shelter of a spooky face/mask which was advertising a film called ‘The Black Phone.’ Took a photo of it and later searched for some similar images online and liked the old fashioned joker looking face and the skeletons on horses. The photo is of actor Conrad Veidt in a 1928 film called ‘The Man Who Laughs’ which is credited as an influence on the creation of the Joker.
I already had a snippet of sound which was another experiment of the Crave gated to the Pro-One. This came into my head to use as I thought it had a bit of a sinister feel about it and could match the images and it then became the overall music to hang other bits onto. I chopped it down to a shorter length than the original six minutes or so I had as I thought it dragged on a bit in its original form. (Although the textures modulating and evolving against each other were interesting in themselves).
The third main part to get the overall mood was to be film pinched from a ‘World At War’ documentary episode regarding Japan. I didn’t want actual fighting but just to concentrate on people and their actions in conflict. This didn’t go to plan as I wasn’t allowed to upload it to YouTube as it was copyright claimed by the BBC. I quite accept that they have the right to do this but I think it’s a shame when someone is just repurposing a small bit of footage to create something new. Anyway, I’ve put a link to my original version below if interested to see.
The title sprung from the blindfolded American airmen in the original version (and a pun on the music key) which led me to adding the three wise monkeys’ image. Funny how things are related as I then learnt that the monkey’s and the phrase “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” are actually of Japanese origin. I like to try out something a little different doing these bits and ‘rewired’ Ableton Live (Lite) to Reaper so that I could run a couple of loops in Live which sync’d with Reaper. The advantage of this is that you have access to the Ableton built in instruments and clips etc. The final small touch was a little bit of effected guitar in a couple of places.
Another enjoyable journey where I’ve learnt a bit more about things and not necessarily always music related. I know people can bang on about this but the process is the main reason for doing this and not particularly the end product. To be lost in my musical world whenever I can without thought of anything else is a great escape!
Link to original version with BBC footage:- https://jah.click/foxtrot/
A Summer’s Day Long Gone
Hound Dog Taylor was a blues musician that I heard about when I first really got into music of all sorts. I love the raw electric sound of his style of playing. I came across a YouTube video of one of his shows and the quality of the images wasn’t that great. I found that interesting in itself and spliced together the dodgiest bits and put sort of TV interference down the sides to kind of glue it all together.
I decided to create the sounds just using guitar (apart from the drum box plugin) as I wanted to kind of honour the original instrument used. I didn’t want to do a blues type thing as that’s not what I’m about (at the moment 🙂). I’m enjoying experimenting with stuff and wanted to do a sort of ambient piece and treated myself to an Ebow to try to get some droned sounds on guitar. Don’t think I hashed it up too bad for a first attempt at using it.
Why “A Summers’ Day Long Gone”? I’ve had the chord progression (such as it is) knocking about for ages and that’s the title I gave it in my head, not sure why but it just suited. It fits with this because that 1973 Hound Dog show is long gone but all those people were there in the moment and it has echoed down the years and has impacted me enough to do something with it.
Funnily enough, there was a happy accident where I ended up with a sound that reminded me of the Tardis in Dr Who (which I watched on TV as a kid) and it was another strand to the years passing and kind of musically travelling about in time.
It is something I have being thinking about a lot lately. We don’t really have many precious moments in our lives and it’s only when that time has moved on that we realise how great (yet fleeting) those moments are. So make the most of every day the sun shines 🙂
I have linked below to the actual video where I nicked the bits out of and also a favourite Hound Dog track appropriately called ‘The Sun Is Shining’.
Hound Dog Taylor – Live 1973 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdXds…
The Sun Is Shining – https://youtu.be/PuSOcoaSScs
Distant City
I had been inspired to try and attempt to carry out the #jamuary2022 challenge after hearing about it on Brian Funk’s Music Production podcast. The aim is to post a piece of music everyday during January.
I didn’t expect to produce anything earth-shattering but did it to hopefully force myself to attempt something musical each day of January 2022. The hardest part for me is just turning up and actually doing something so my goal with this exercise was to end up with something to show for each day of the month.
I wanted to try and do some sort of visual with each piece of music too. So that was definitely a steep learning curve for me as I had barely scratched the surface of any software that I could use for both music and video.
I had no specific idea for the piece on 1st of January 2022 and started with a ‘clean slate’. I decided for some reason to try and film London which can be seen in the distance from my back garden. Didn’t want anything too long and filmed a couple of minutes.
I had grand plans of making the music tie in with various cuts on the video but that would have taken me a month of Sundays! So I just composed something that I felt fitted with the mood of the video, which I found foreboding due to the images chosen. To be honest, I had spent rather a lot of time on putting the video together and I needed to cut my losses as I still had to sort out getting it online. Decided a slowed-down vocal phrase and some strings would suffice for this piece!
I created the Memory Bug channel on YouTube and uploaded it. There was a bit of faffing about creating the channel but I muddled through, sorry I can’t be more specific.
So day one was done and I actually managed to complete the 31 days, all of which can be viewed on the YouTube channel I created.