So musically speaking...

This last three minutes of music start with the most intensely worked-on minute of the album, (which in the end is OK but not thoroughly impressive considering the work). It is a musical cube, with notes at the vertices (corners)

Oh come on! What kind of spellchecker is this that doesn't recognise "vertices" (or "spellchecker" or "recognise" for that matter)??

So up/down is pitch, left/right is stereo left/right and in/out is volume. The notes are cheated to be an f7 chord. Then there are some transitions, where the note slides from one vertex to another (using a guitar slide to slide the pitch (these are electric guitar notes), and cubase post-production to move the notes in stereo space and volume). There are 21 ways of sliding notes along the edges of the cube from one vertex to an adjacent one without any notes colliding with other notes coming the other way, and I used 18 of them. This was the whole process:

• work out what notes to use and what stereo spacing and volumes were reasonable
• draw lots of diagrams of cubes to work out the transition
• using the diagrams write out the sequences of notes to be played on the guitar, 8 tracks in all showing slides and held notes (it would have been pointless to use musical dots as I cannot sight read to play)
• Play and record the tracks (with copious editing to get it right)
• Trawl through the tracks applying the right pan and volume transitions in the right places

As you might imagine this took HOURS. The result - interesting, but needed drums and bass added to make it seem more like music.

So for the last two minutes I went in a more musical direction, showing positive change by a never-ending but always changing set of chords. Starting with F, Faug, F6, F7, then onto Bb for the same sequence, going up a fourth each time (OK so eventually it cycles round). This started with one acoustic guitar picking, then as it works up the strings and the fretboard another starts lower, and another and so on in a barber-pole effect that has a maximum of I think 6 guitars happening. Add some interesting and sporadic drums and the whole thing is interesting, beautiful (in my opinion) and uplifting. Now it just needed a solo line - but in a moment of inspiration - inspired by the fact that the guitars cover a large part of the tone spectrum and , any soloing in the same note areas would struggle to lift above that - the solo is on the bass, beneath all the guitars.

I don't often enough make use of the fact that bass is my strongest instrument.

I love the end result.

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The gleaming of the cube

The last three minutes of the music is done. 14 months it has taken, and this is just phase 1. Phases 2 (listening and tweaking) and 3 (mastering) are not very interesting to blog about but I might as well do so anyway, to give you, the probably-non-existant reader the full picture.

This last section has a very personal picture behind it. This section is about what happens spiritually to someone after they make that step of becoming a Christian. There have been books and books written about this, and the theological word is "sanctification" - the process of change.

At one time I worried about this change. Change is never easy and when it is yourself that is changing it's even harder, even when the change is for the better. At this particular time in my life I was struggling with identity issues anyway, and was wondering if this process of change would mean I would stop being really me.

Then I had a picture.

Some Christians talk about "having a picture" as a spiritual experience, I don't know if this was that kind of experience, it was a moment of clarity and understanding that revolved around an image in my mind's eye. The image was of a metal cube, which was dented and battered and tarnished, and the understanding was that this is how I was, but that how I was INTENDED to be was a shining, straight cube. The process of change in fact was not of losing what I was but of gaining what I should be - becoming more me rather than less me.

It's 1 in the morning and I had intended to write about the music, but my son is awake and fussing so that will have to happen another time.

turn, turn, turn

Well 6 minutes of music still to create before I start the refining process. And here we are at sub-section 3.3.2: and this is inspired by the moment of repentance and the turning around and opening up that this involves.

As a start the crying track continues, but nicely at the start of this section the calming down happens, there is Mummy's gentle voice soothing the situation

And under this a quiet piano sound, a slow 6/8 beat with chords C and Fm repeated. Then the bassline on the piano, which goes down then up. This is a bassline I found about a year ago, and thought it might be nice for a "turning around" section, given that it turns from down to up to down again. This piano is deliberately using a pretty rubbish piano sound (I happen to have a really bad piano rompler) it's in tune but there's no stereo, and the sound is very compressed in the middle of the tone band. Added to that it is deliberately programmed so that is it lifeless and dull. Deliberate dullness is a risky strategy for a recording but there is a point.

There is a point where there is a breaking sound (created with a complex mix of cymbals, gongs and a breaking glass sound) and the music breaks through - introducing drums (brushed snare) and thick deep bass (using my Fender bass) and a MUCH better acoustic piano sound. This is all about that moment when one wakes up spiritually, it's like what giving up smoking does to your sense of taste, except this is to your spiritual senses.

Anyway, this 2-chord trick continues for the rest of the section, with solos first by an acoustic guitar, then an electric. These solos are the bits that took a long time, and my fret fingers now hurt. I've used no tricks but some interesting effect processing. I've worked hard to make it simple but hopefully effective.

So now, just 3 minutes left. What do do? Hmmmm....

Not nice

It is with a mild but deep sadness that I blog right now. I'm not sure that it counts as "suffering for my art" but this is a deliberately induced sadness.

You see, I have been recording the next section. I'm getting pretty close to the end of the first pass, and I'm back in track 3 "Spirit". After the three sections on the trinity, and the three sections on the temptations common to man, the last three sections are about a human spiritual journey, inspired in part by "A Pilgrim's Progress" but mostly by my own spiritual journey and that of countless Christians around the world and throughout the ages. Phase 1: lost in sin.

Sin is not a very popular word these days, but it's a very evocative shorthand for broken, dysfunctional behaviour and for the inner brokenness which can make this behaviour so compellingly hard to stop, even when one wants to. Sin is born of pain and leads to pain, and is typified in many ways by chaos.

And so this section is deliberately attempting to evoke that brokenness and pain, and is deliberately disturbing, atonal, arhythmic, difficult to listen to. Random sounds and failed takes from previous sections are fed through a series distorting and bizarre effects, with little apparent reason or pattern. It starts with a deliberately discordant chord, Fsus2bmajor7/E and doesn't get much better.

It also breaks the immutable pattern of sections in that is it only 2 minutes long. This is deliberate for two reasons: 3 minutes of this is too much to listen to, but also pragmatically if you have 3 27-minute track the total time is 81mins. The max for a CD is 80 mins...

The other thing that is broken, is the solo-ness of the project. I have had a little help here - mostly from my son Sammy, but a little from my wife. A few months ago while he was having a disturbed evening, and was being left for 5 minutes to see if he could settle himself, I whipped out a microphone and recorded his crying. This also has been processed somewhat, but it is undeniably the crying of a child, and it is the repeated listening to this that has induced my sadness. It's bad enough that we are wired to respond to any child crying, but doubly so because he is mine - that crying voice gently tears me inside.

Well I did deliberately want this to be disturbing.

Quite nicely, I also ended up recording my wife going into him and speaking soothingly, and him calming down in response. This is beautifully timed at two minutes (pure accident) and so I will carry this process into the next section.

frantic strumming and nimble fingers

this post covers the last three music-making sessions, all on this last section of the "mind" track - tack 2 on the new album. As we left the scene last time, we had drums and a guide tune part.

To this I added bass, using my old Fender bass (hitting and shaking it until the buzzing stopped - I have a loose wire somewhere). It was nice to use it again in an un-processed way, it has a nice rich, deep thick bass sound, which on it's own sounds a bit dull, but with the fast folky stuff is just a really nice solid underpinning. I may find myself re-discovering the beauties of this venerable instrument.

Added to that then was the guitar parts - acoustic strumming, one for each ear and mostly done in single long takes (very little editing needed). The tempo gets pretty brutal towards the end and I got into a nice focussed mindstate where I didn't need to think - just to strum and move my chord hand as fast as possible between positions. Very fast. I got aching muscles and sore fingers in the process, but it felt really good. It also sounds pretty good, although the attention is not particularly on it.

I've been blogging this for over a year, so I don't always remember what I've said before, and there's no way I'm going to dredge back over all that stuff just to check if I've already said that I'm learning about listener focus - one of the keys to interesting music is to always give the listener something specific to listen to. In songs this is usually the singer, or solo instruments at points. The rest is there to support that focus, but you pretty much always need a focus, and the stuff that is out of focus doesn't need to be as interesting, just right and good. it can be but it doesn't need to be. In this sections I find I am never really listening to the guitars as I listen through. It needs them there.

And so back to the tunes, which is what this is all about. I have now finished, and it has taken a long, long time. Almost all of the bit of tune are played by me on a keyboard, rather than programmed. I want this to feel very much like the real instruments. And here is what I try to do: although I am not really playing Aolean pipes, I am using a sampler and a keyboard, I am remembering the nuances that pipes use for expression and trying to use those. Similarly with the accordion - I can play one a bit (and have done in public). This isn't a real accordion it's the sampler again, but again I'm remembering what you do - what are the special things about an accordion, and trying to play that way.

Anyway, after lots and lots of takes, I feel like my keyboard fingers have been stretched to the limit of my ability, and yes there has been some editing (mostly tidying up -getting rid of accidental notes, very occasional moving the notes to be better in time, occasional volume changes on individual notes, but about 95% was untouched), and yes I recorded it at a slower speed than it is in the final thing (easier on the fingers, but harder to get the expression feeling right) and the final thing is pretty much done now - maybe it comes to a halt a leeetle too abruptly, I'll have to listen to it a few times and see if I get used to it.

Giz a choon

I have finally started the last sub-section of track 2. This group of 3 sub-sections is all about music, so far we have had rhythm, then harmony, and now it's melody's turn.

As I hinted previously, I have a plan going into this sub-section, in fact it's one of the most prescribed sub-sections I've ever had. I need some melodies: I have some suitable ones already written.

I'm in a ceilidh band, which if you don't know is for communal folk dancing, a bit like American Line Dancing, but not in a line. A bit like old English courtly dances but faster, wilder and much more fun. I'm in this band with lots of very lovely people and so a few times a year we get together and play (broadly speaking) celtic folk for the revellers to revel to.

Sometime in the last year we did a ceilidh for some good friends, and I had a reasonably mad idea: I decided we should have a brand new dance created for the couple, and to go with it brand new tunes. And then I decided we would do the dance first thing after the food break, and the band would see the tunes for the first time at the beginning of the food break.

Except for my mother-in-law who is in the band, she got involved with the tunes before-hand because I needed someone who could write music to write them out. Also she co-wrote one of them.

So this section is the three tunes, each one twice. The first tune is called "washing up" and was written as I looked out of the kitchen window while washing up. This is the one that starts with the chords from Pachabel's canon.

The third one is called "deep blue sea" because it's the tune to a song that I wrote to sing when looking for something - and partly to amuse Sammy when he was a baby, although it would probably amuse him more now.

The second one was co-written by my mother-in-law and was specifically written to plug the gap between the other two and provide a contrast. We struggled for a name for it and eventually decided that between the washing up and the deep blue sea there was... Seaton Sluice. This is a place on the north-east coast locally famous for being the sewage outflow, and so evocatively named! In fact it's a really nice place with a beautiful harbour and a couple of miles of great beach with nice dunes and impressively free parking. It's also where the picture was taken for the album art for "11 Bells", my first album. Anyway, there seems to be a Northumbrian tradition of naming tunes after places. It also has the distinction of being the only ceilidh tune I know with a major7 chord in the accompanyment.

Ceilidh tunes are intended for dancing and often (almost always in fact) follow a formula. Each tune has two parts (part A and part b), each of which is 8 bars long - just right for 1 or 2 figures of dancing. Part A is played twice, then Part B is played twice. Once through the tune is once through the dance. The whole tune is then usually repeated, and so playing a "set" of three tunes, each one twice is exactly 6 times through the dance, which is usually about right.

this give me a problem, because I want to keep the drums going through from the harmony section (remember they started back in the rhythm section, actually the beat started before that in the chemistry section) The beat is at a handy 120 bpm. 3 32-bar tunes, each played twice comes to a total of 96 bars. 3 minutes of 120bpm is exactly 90 bars. It's too long.

Which is why it speeds up through the section, this is to make it fit.

So far I have copied drum patterns from the harmony section, recorded all the tunes on one hand on an organ for guide purposes (tricky as some of the tunes go quite fast, but I cheated and sped them up) and have started the process of altering the drums to make them more appropriate to the tunes.

The normal way of working for me, and for almost everybody who has an inkling of knowing what they are doing with multitrack recording, is to start from the drums and bass, any other rhythm (guitars, etc). build up to harmony filling (keebs, etc) and finish with the thing that's meant to grab the interest, the singing or the solo instrument. This time, the tunes are in charge, which is why I want the tunes in for all the process, the nuances of the rhythms in the tunes should be supported by the accompaniment, and this is in fact the way good ceilidh music is built - from the tune down.

After the harpsichord...

...comes the the string quarter playing Pachabel's canon. Well OK almost Pachabel's Canon - just the same chord sequence but as block chords rather than all the fabulous counterpoint. And almost a string quartet too - each sound is really an ensemble sound. This is all about having a chord sequence - and this is a pretty famous sequence. Also it very neatly moves into the next section, as the first melody I'm going to use there has the same (almost) chord sequence.

The drums prevail and the strings play the sequence one. Acoustic guitar and electric bass join and it's played again. Then twice at double sequence speed (each chord takes half as long). Increasingly the feel becomes bouncy and the strings are phased out. Over the whole thing is floated an electric guitar doing vague pentatonic noodling.

The guitar is worth talking about. I tend to use a lot of classic "crunchy" guitar sounds when soloing - I'm quite a fan of that distortion. However, I have been looking for a satisfying "clean" sound, something a little like the classic Santana sound would do me - compressed and sustained and clean. I think I have finally found it in this. Also I had an interesting moment. Sometimes when I want a line (often I can hear in my head what I want) but it seems too fast for me to play reliably, I play at half speed and double speed it up. Well this time I had such a line, and when I tried to double it up it just sounded...wrong. My trickery was unhelpful. So I tried several ways of playing it and eventually found one, and learned it and did it at normal speed. I did use a bizarre little technique though (never used this before but will again) - I was playing high up the neck, and to stop open strings ringing and getting in the way, I draped a jumper over the lower part of the neck to act as damping. Now I think I need to invent the damping capo - it would be really useful.

I have been having lots of problems with cubase in this project - something keeps causing to go into an "unstable state" and it invites me to save out under a different name. Anyway I seem to have finally taken all the individual ideas and aggregated them into one nice track.