Wheee, I came really close to not having a song together for this week! As of yesterday, I had nothing, and it took a frenzied hour on the train home from work to pull the basic frame of a track together using the new GarageBand app on my iPad. When I got home I hooked up a pair of cheap headphones (with a mic enclosed) and bashed out a guitar line and a vocal. So here is my quickest, least developed Weekly Song go far. I think it worked out kinda well in the circumstances – a bit of wonky singing aside.
The video was shot in the Jubilee Library, Brighton, on World Book Night.
I’m going to write, record and release a song, via Assistant Blog, every single week of 2011. Most will probably be faintly tuneful, slow indie rock, in the manner to which you are probably now accustomed, although I reserve the right to scamper down some blind alleys and post anything that takes my fancy, from found-sound compositions to abstract electronica. Most will be recorded through my mac, using a Zoom recorder, or my old 4 track, and some may be sung into the tinny microphone on my phone or composed on my iPad.
In other words, I’m making no promises for audio quality or aiming for perfection. Barring disaster, however, every song will be produced with a lot of care. Where possible, I’ll pull together a YouTube video for each one, as I think that makes them easier to consume. If anyone would like proper mp3s of them, they should drop me a line. All songs will be on soundcloud, too. I’m going to post them every Friday or Saturday, all being well.
Here’s the first.
It was, rather uniquely for me, composed, recorded and uploaded to the web soley using my iPad – I used four programs; Multitrack DAW, BassLine, DrumTrack8 and ThumbJam. This doesn’t exactly place me at the bleeding end of recording technology, but iPad music is at the earlier stages of its development, so I’m quite proud to have produced a song this way. This is, for the record, my first ever effort at composing with an iPad, which is why it’s a bit ragged. Given more time, I’d probably go back to it – but the point of this exercise is to be productive, so I’m not going to linger. Nevertheless, I think it’s quite a nice song.
When I was recording it I was thinking of small towns, autumnal feeling: twittens and cat’s creeps, overgrown canal-banks, waste paper wafting around. I meant for the song to be slow and wistful – possibly it ended up too slow. But there it is.
"Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right."
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
