The Purple Christmas Pudding Clause

We recorded a Christmas Carol 'In The Bleak Midwinter' over the last few days whenever we got the chance. It's a favourite carol of Rachel's and one I also love. 

http://youtu.be/DY6bsqO2IvE 

Rachel recorded the vocals in one take and where I would normally be looking to make sure that we had the right take with the tuning accurate etc, it was such a lovely authentic and uneffected vocal that I decided that we had to keep it. 

She was busy baking mince pies when I called her over to record the vocals.

This is our recording studo, which is basically our dinning table with a bit of equipment. We are still using the iphone to record and make videos on. Of course it has massive limitations to record like this but it means that we record in a relaxed way and I can then edit and mix from anywhere. 

Christmas Track!

When I was a kid growing up in Liverpool, my sister used to belong to the Beatles fan club. It was totally magical to me and I couldn't believe that she had actually seen them in concert at the Liverpool Empire.

Every Christmas the Beatles used to record something for the fan club and it was posted to my sister. It was usually a little bit of music and some talking but no matter what the content I remember it felt very special and as though they personally knew us somehow.

So we thought that it might be a good idea to carry on this tradition. We are recording a Christmas track over the next few days. All I'm saying here is that its a carol that was originally a poem and then set to music by Gustav Holst.

Alchemy Fun And Fab

I had such fun last night using the Alchemy App for iphone. It's basically a multi timbral  synth with loops, fx and a 4 track sequencer. In addition it does some fabulous things though. Firstly anything that you program, volume, pitch, compression, fx ...... can be recorded with the instrument. So you can build up very complex sounds. You also have the function that you can see on the photo below. This is where there are a number of pre set versions of the sounds with different cut off fequencys, attacks, FX etc and you can move from one to the other either using a touch screen or by tilting. It even let's you calibrate the tilt! Guess how much this all costs? Well it's free actually?  

  You have to pay for upgrades that will allow you to save to other apps and give your more loops and stuff but there is plenty in the free version to keep you busy. It's also accepted by Garageband as an inter app so that you can record it into a track of your song. I just get the tempo to match that of the song I want it to record into and then place Garageband in record, press play on the Alchemy and edit the result. 

Some Apps We Use

The Purple Pudding Clause When I Can't Sleep Iphone Demo

Recording Demos

David Singing Backing Vocals

So I Guess No One Is Going To Help Me Up

The Joe Meek

Rainy Monday Vocals & Piano

We recorded some vocals and piano last night for the Pascal Pinon track. I'd never recorded vocals before on the iphone. We have a very cheap SM58 copy which I put through the Joe Meek Vocal Compressor and EQ thing before going into Garageband. The Joe Meek is amazing and something I used extensively when I was producing,  Its always a strange moment for me when you put vocals on the track. All of the overdubs that you have worked hard on get put totally into perspective as the vocals become the dominant thing. It takes a while to get them to sit in the track but Rachel did fantastically and sang in a knew, unexpected and great way.

We also put some live piano on that isn't quite right but has some good ideas amongst the doodling. Rachel was preparing food so there's some nice ambient clattering of dishes going on! I then put an idea down with the Midid Synth app which sounds right sonically but needs some refining.

What we did on Sunday.

Pascal Pinon

Rachel, David and I are all big fans of Pascal Pinon pascalpinon.com/‎. They are twin Sisters from Iceland and look far too young to be creating such beautiful and sophisticated music.

We decided yesterday to record one of the tracks from their fabulous album called 'When I Can't Sleep' I particularly love that track because of an experience I had listening to it travelling on a train. My father has recently died and I was experiencing a double sense of loss as my mother also died 13 years ago and the emotions from loosing her came up for me as well. Listening to that track and looking at the sun going down I suddenly got an experience of absolute bliss and a real sense that they were watching me and sending me their love. Music has always been the thing - like I'm sure it is for most people-that can move me beyond anything. I remember as a kid bursting into tears every time a choir or an orchestra started performing. I also clearly remember leaping up and down on the sofa when I was 7 years old ecstatic with un-repressable joy the first time I heard 'Telstar' by the Tornados.

So we were a bit nervous about covering this song yesterday and had decided that to do a straight cover made little sense. So for what it's worth we did our own interpretation. We started by Rachel and David working out the chords. I'm rubbish doing this! We then sat and worked out some parts before I went to the iphone and began building a backing track. First Mo Tuckerish  drums followed by distorted and hugely reverbed guitar to provide a layer for picky guitar, played by Rachel. Then later in the day David put down a fantastic bass line. He's only twelve but says to me 'no Dad I want to do it again because the groove wasn't right'!

So tonight Rachel is going to record a live piano and then we going to work on the vocals.

Great for creative projects but pretty lousy as a phone.

I was thinking when Rachel and I started to look at recording an album, how with such a busy life we could make that happen. I travel often up and down to London and started to look into how I could do some composing and recording on the train. I longed for an Ipad as I'd been impressed with the quality of the recording Damon had done on it but couldn't justify the expense along with all of our other commitments so started to look into how to record some demos on my iphone. I'd fiddled around with making music on my iphone previously but now I wanted to find some programs that had more options and were more flexible.

I'm completely stunned by what's available and we've managed to make some high quality demos which will I'm sure include performances that will be on the album. Its also great to get away from that 'right lets go. Are you ready? Now we are going to record'  thing that happens in the studio and often inhibits a natural performance. So the process has been me playing around with ideas and constructing a backing track which we then add guitars to at home. We will then take these demos and transfer them to something better (to be decided) and add and subtract programming and live performance.

So here is a list of apps that we have used and all very cheap!:
Garageband- we use this for multi tracking, recording live performances by plugging straight into the iphone and processing through one of their amp pre-sets. You are now able to record on 16 different tracks and bounce them all together and start again as long as you have enough memory and don't need to make calls!  It has some great and very usable sounds as well though.
Nano Studio- unbelievably great synth pre-sets and programming capabilities. I very rarely sequence on this as I get tide up with the detail and that slows my creative juices down. To get performances onto Garageband I use:
Audiobus- this links lots of music apps together plus effects if you want. However the latest ios7 upgrade lets you do a certain amount of this within garageband.

Akai iMPC- rediculously great sequencer with an audio copy facility that enables sequences to be copied to Garageband
Rhythm- all the old greats TB 3, DR 8, FM-3 all together
Alchemy- a very powerful but odd synth.
Midi Synth- great pre-sets and programability
Manetron 2- very out of tune in places but sounds great in a track and all of the best old Mellotron sounds.

I will be adding to this I'm sure and I have ditched a lot of great apps that I just couldn't work with for one reason or another.