Recording an album

I thought I'd give an insight into the recording of Mr. So & So's new album 'Truths, Lies & Half Lies'. We have really been writing this album for the last 3 years but it's only more recently, given the success of the Pledge Music campaign, that we have started to collate all our songs and get them out of the rough sketches and into the final piece that will make it's way into your ears. Within the band we have four writers Shaun, Andy, Stu and myself and we all get to submit music to the band, as I have mentioned in an earlier blog though I'm not entirely sure how the selection process works but it appears that the best tunes stick with us in rehearsals. It's the same principle when I write a riff, if I still remember it the following day then it's worth keeping, if not it simply gets forgotten.

Next up is arranging and unless there are already lyrics written, this where they are generally conceived. Arranging is my favourite part as this is where a track becomes smoother and refined, the decisions such as how many verses, how long the bridge section should be, what kind of textures are going over the bones of the track...these are all made at this stage and then over time the arrangement matures and becomes its own entity.

Recording the next album will be different than all of our previous albums as in the past we block booked a studio for say 3 weeks to track everything and then a short while later we book a studio again for the album to be mixed. This has changed, partly due to geography, partly funding and also fitting it all into our busy adult lives. To record the drums (always the first to go down) we have booked 4 days in a studio in the north west, then we will be recording the bass at one our homes, the same for the keyboards, vocals and parts of the guitar though for some of the guitar sounds we really need to crank up the volume of the amps in order to get the best tone so we may use a studio for a day or two. This is all possible as our secret sixth member, Al, who engineers all the bands recordings has a great selection of microphones and pre-amps plus we use Pro-Tools so it's on either my computer or Al's. The mixing will be done by Al at home as he can take his time with the mix and, like the tracking, we aren't worried about running over time and not being able to afford the studio time to finish the album at all (this VERY nearly happened with Sugarstealer).

Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing and it grabs you when you least expect it and in a lot of cases that it happens to me, I'm normally on the train, driving the car or walking somewhere....not always when I have a guitar with me. I suppose that travelling must inspire me...never thought about that until now. When I need it most inspiration disappears, like moments when I'm recording a guitar solo and get red light fever it's amazing or when the middle section in a song dosen't work and I need to conjure one up really quickly, all my brain says is 'Just play E over and over again'.

In order to be inspired, and I just speak from my own experiences, I need to be totally calm and without any worry, in most cases getting bogged down by money, work, band politics etc. In the rare moments when I do get to relax on my own, inspiration comes flooding over me in waves like as if I have a back log, a kind of bottle neck of inspiration and I can write half a dozen really good riffs in half an hour. The really good part of this flood is the joy of realising that I've not lost the ability to be creative, writers block is horrible and it's really crushing the longer it goes on and I can only imagine how hard it is for someone as complicated as Thom Yorke who is also under pressure to be great all the time.

People inspire me, people I love and people who I don't, if someone impresses me with an act of compassion or  if someone is just downright disrespectful to me or someone else there is something in those moments that trigger enough emotion to open the 'creative' door as well. If you know me personally you know that I'm sunny side up and will always try to look for the best in people but occasionally I meet someone who is really beyond salvation and even these people inspire me to write the darker tunes....People I love make me write tunes and songs with good grooves and major key riffs. If you listen to classic albums such as 'Rumours', 'Dark Side of The Moon', 'Abbey Road', they are emotively very powerful and they carry the vibe of what was happening around the artists.

Castles Made of Sand

When I started playing the guitar way back in 1977, like anyone my age and beyond, I had lofty aspirations of becoming a guitar hero in a rock band even then (I dreamt of playing guitar for Suzi Quatro....), then I found Van Halen and Led Zeppelin and these two bands honed my ambition to the point were it would be wrong if I didn't get the chance to be a rock star. To a certain degree I think I managed to slightly pop my name above the thousands of guitar players with the same aspirations, we can't all be Slash can we! Mr. So & So has been the vehicle that my playing has travelled in and I'm thoroughly enjoying it too, I have total freedom in the band, we all do and for that I'm honestly grateful.

So & So has been successful at winning people over when they get the chance to listen to our music but fresh opportunities these days are becoming increasingly rare. We have been blessed with help from the likes of Steve Rothery from Marillion who is a fan and friend of the band and helps us out a lot, getting this kind of help is priceless and has meant the band has more reason to exist than just our love of playing and writing music. Beyond that, it's difficult to get to support some bands just because of the money involved in logistics and in some cases like U2, Radiohead or equally big acts you have to buy onto the tour, it makes sense as its a great way for a support band to raise their profile and sell product but the fees are eye watering, certainly not within the reach of the bands I know personally. It would cost thousands to support say Alanis Morrisette in the UK for just three dates and that's before you've even considered transport, hotels, fuel, food etc.

I'm 41 now and as much as the musical career bus hasn't stopped running yet, it's a lot less regular now. It's Elbow who give me the greatest hope, similarly REM who we're given their break after years of doing what they do, I wrote a song a few years ago called 'Born 20 years to late' and the title sums it up.

I'll be honest though, despite the fact that I've never been able to make playing the guitar my primary income, it's never put me off. As I've grown older, realism has taken over and I think I'm now back to adoring playing rather than desperately trying to be in the biggest band in the world.

Today's listening: Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys!

A Day In The Life

I've just had a long weekend, a really good weekend but long. Mr. So & So had a gig with Also Eden on Friday at The Peel in London. It was a good gig and we all enjoyed it, sold some CD's and caught up with some friends too and the audience enjoyed themselves.

I had booked Friday off work for the gig, given the travelling. It started at 8am as I wanted to see my wife before she went to work and also I needed to change the strings on my Strat, I was teaching the night before so left it till the morning. Charlotte was picking Shaun up at 10:30 to meet at my house and we would then get in my car and meet Stu at motorway services, Andy lives down south so he made his own way there. I had to use my smaller rig as I was carrying Shaun's bass rig too as well as the merch (CD's and T-Shirts). They arrived at mine just before 11, we loaded up and made our way down the M6. We had a coffee break when we met Stu at the services and Shaun transferred to Stu's car so each driver had company. We arrived in London at around 3 o'clock and then had the usual wrestle with the traffic in the busiest city in the country. The clutch on my car slipped and for about ten minutes it looked like I would be clutchless for the rest of the journey, thankfully it re-tightened shortly after. We arrived at the venue at 4 and waited for the sound guy to turn up so we could unload the gear, half of Also Eden had arrived at roughly the same time. The sound guy duly arrived at 5 and we began to fill the venue with cases and bags. The gig was a double header, meaning that technically there's no support band, kind of like a double A-side for those old enough to remember them. We elected to go on first as I was in work the following day, though Shaun and Stu we're gear sharing with Also Eden so they would travel back home after the gig. As is the norm with gigs like this the last band sound check first and Also Eden were up playing at about 6:30 and we sound checked at 7:30 till just before 8.

A very quick change of clothes for us and we were on stage at 8:15, the sound was quite good on stage though I couldn't hear any bass or keyboards. The important thing for any band is that you can hear the drummer and the singer and I could hear both so all good there. We played for an hour, oddly our set was about 10 minutes too long and had to drop 'The Visitor', instead we closed with 'You're Coming Home'.

Next up was the part that is always difficult, getting gear off stage - and quickly, there was a 15 minute change over. Charlotte made her way to the merch desk, she's better at selling CD's than the rest of us, leaving us to remove our gear from the stage. At round about 9:30 I was loaded up and had chance for a quick drink of Coke and a catch up with friends before Charlotte and I started our journey back home.

M3, M25, M40 and then a very welcome coffee at 11:30, I was knackered then and knew that I had another couple of hours at least in front of me, though Chazzer could drive if I got too tired. The Motorway was closed at Walsall so we had an hours detour through the midlands before re-joining the motorway. We arrived back at my house at 3am, Charlotte collected her things while I unpacked my gear back into the house, a quick hot chocolate and then I was in bed at 4 and I was back in work at Toneworld at 10 later that morning.

Growing Up

When I was 18 and met Shaun at Leigh Music College we started a working relationship that was allowed to grow, time and life at that point allowed us to, no mortgage, no other financial commitments or family commitments...just song writing and this was so important to us as growing musicians. We used to 'play' with music in a way that we would try and break it, playing odd chords and weaving hooky melodies through them and then getting adventurous with time signatures, dynamics and instrumentation, if you happen to have a copy of Mr. So & So's first album 'Paraphernalia' there is a track on there called 'The Hypnotic', this is the best example of what we were doing at the time, the deceiving rhythm and really odd chords combined with a great vocal melody make it the track that it is. From the age of 18 through to about 22 we did nothing but write music and it's here that I learned, it's more important to be a good musician than it was to just be a good guitarist.

The significant thing that happened during this period was my good fortune knowing people that had great record collections. In this four year period I was introduced to bands such as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Marillion, Weather Report, XTC, Frank Zappa, Gentle Giant.....the list goes on. I have one rule that I pass onto all of my private pupils, it's the single most important thing that I can tell them, 'Listen to every genre and as much of it as you can'.

The great thing about all the bands I listed is that there was a big back catalogue and as a student it was difficult to buy them all on vinyl, it was even difficult as a student to by some TDK D90's to record the albums onto, this meant that I would spend quality time with each album, studying the inner sleeve like it was some kind of homework. I soaked up the song lyrics, the producer and mix engineers names, even the 'thanks to' list was worth reading as I would then find out bands that were connected, an example of this is 'finding' Steve Vai by listening to 'Them or Us' by Frank Zappa. I thought I wouldn't like any country music (I blame Billy Ray Cyrus for that), but after delving into country rock I found some amazing musicians and bands, Lowell George from Little Feat has become a real favourite of mine. But it was Led Zeppelin that ultimately taught me that genres don't matter, 'When the Levee Breaks' is on the same album as 'The Battle of Evermore' and 'The Immigrant Song' is from the same album as 'Tangerine', rich and varied and in my case, very, very inspiring.

Dismiss genres at your peril as there always something good in there and you will miss out if you shy away from them.

Musical Pioneering

The girl in front of me has her iPod on really loud, so much that even I can hear 'Post Break-Up Sex' by The Vaccines, earlier on in the car park, a girl was dropped off at the train station car park and 'Shadows of the Night' by Pat Benatar was being played really loudly in her mum's car. Taste is one of life's intangibles and there is so much stuff out there - music, art, food, sport, clothing, cars etc. that we are bombarded by it everyday and as much as we are in danger of becoming the society that the film Minority Report predicts, there has also never been a better time to be creative.

Every single piece of music is made from the influence of a previous piece, the '50's rock and roll era is the best example of this and god knows how many varieties of 'Louie Louie' exist or 'Johnny B Goode'. As the world gets communicatively smaller the greater impact different cultures have on us and I would say that one of the single biggest impacts on my musical life has been 'Kashmir' by Led Zeppelin. The cross-over of moroccan string arrangements with an African flavoured drum part and a vocal melody that has blues bends in it, for me is just perfectly mysterious, add into that mix some Crowley-esque, Thelema imagery and you have all the components of music that is creepy and compelling yet gorgeous and powerfully emotive.

The reason that I'm talking about this is partly down to something that I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, 'how do you create music?' Well aside from the technical answer I gave there is also the social aspect too. I came back from Ibiza earlier this year inspired by some of the hypnotic Balearic grooves, so much so that I started to delve into some of what the Ibiza music scene has to offer (apart from the drugs of course). That took me through and beyond Ibiza and into Nero and Skrillex, a few months later and I've got the new Muse album 'The 2nd Law' on and there is the same dubstep sound and groove I heard earlier in the year. Furthermore, I've been listening to John Mayer's latest album 'Born & Raised' with a heavier emphasis on country music and blues music, this in turn has worked it's way into some of my playing, not intentionally, I'm just being inspired by him. The cultural mash up is fantastic and to be honest, without it we wouldn't have System of a Down, Sepultura, Ojos De Brujo, Sigur Ros, Youssou N'dour, The Mars Volta etc. neither would we have Gangnam Style opening the door to more music from the musically unchartered Far East, it's all good stuff and without it music would just go stale.

The big label

All through put my teenage years I wanted a big major label to sign the band that I was in at the time, in fact when I was 15 EMI did actually contact the band that I was in (we were called 'World Peace Machine'). Though it never materialised after a few meetings with a very nice A&R man it did make me wonder if I was almost there, I hadn't even left school and the bass player was only 14. It never happened and for a long time it really ate at me, the 'failed musician' label was dangling over my head for a long long time and it very nearly finished me off as a player and a musician. Mr. So & So is a great band, we've never been worried about that but it's kind of like the King Crimson problem, great band but never really happened after the '70's for them.

Now I'm older I realise that a major label would never touch us unless we had a huge clump of money behind us, making the band a safe bet or if we went viral on the Internet. The sad thing for the big four labels now is that they are struggling to exist, some people revel in this but I think it's really sad, these labels had the capacity to give us The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, U2 et al and support their longevity, now Simon Cowells take on music is different and a 'pop' star needs nothing more than to be blessed with outrageously good looks and a colossal ego. Incidentally I'm not a Simon Cowell hater, if he didn't do it, someone else would....give the people what they want and the loudest voice wins. The disposable pop star era is nearly at an end too and then we are left with the music industry smashed into a million little fragments, each one of these fragments is a band or small label scrambling for the next opportunity to pop their head above the sea of bands around them. There's no doubt that's its an exciting time for bands and there is scope for bands to be successful, just not like it was when ELP or Fleetwood Mac earned more money than they could spend.

In the end, it's the music lover who misses out as I'm sure that there are a handful of bands out there who would blow my mind and be everything I ever wanted in a band, but how do I find them? The scattering makes it hard work and no-one will go through hard work to listen to music. Sadly the big dream record deal died when Fraunhofer created the MP3.