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.