October 2015: Recording a Christmas Song and gigging with The Miner Birds

I always like to talk about how I develop as a musician on my blog. Thankfully, the opportunities to do so just keep on coming:

October heralded my first recording project for a long time, and it was a Christmas song of all things! The song was written by Mark Hunter and is called See His Light Is Shining. There’s been a lot of Christmas songs over the years, some good, some bad, some of which I wrote, and I have to say that this one’s actually quite good. It’s very much ‘worship music,’ but there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s nice to hear a Christmas song about Christmas!

So what am I doing on the record? Backing vocals on the chorus, as it happens. As far as I can tell, the idea was to have a ‘choir’-like harmony section on the chorus sections, and so my singing teacher Vie who is in contact with Mark got a few people together, (there were about 9 of us in the end,) and I did the lower part with two other ladies, though we recorded our parts separately. This was an experience for me, because it’s the first time I’ve recorded my vocals since I’ve really been able to sing. I was therefore a lot more disciplined about it than I have been in the past. When I’ve recorded things with Sam Draisey, for example, I’d do one take of the vocals, think that it was probably as good as it was going to get and leave it at that. But with more at stake this time than just my pride, and with a relatively unknown (to me!) producer and engineer at the helm who probably take themselves quite seriously, I had to be ready to say: “No, I can do that better, can we go for another take?” I haven’t heard the result yet, but I’m told Mark is pleased and there’s talk of getting this on a compilation album to be sold in America.

I hope they forgive my cynicism when I say that I’ll believe that when I see it. I’m not being funny but I’ve heard of a lot of musicians being burned by over-promises. If nothing else, it was a great experience for me, and I really enjoyed doing it. So thanks to Vie, Mark and Chris for involving me in that, and also well done to the other ladies singing on it as well (I was the only male voice.)

My #viewfromthestage at the Miner Birds gig.

The other significant development for this month is that I have started playing in a trio called The Miner Birds. The name of the group refers specifically to the two decidedly ‘Black Country’ girls who sing, Nicole and Roz; if you’re reading this from overseas and don’t know the connotations, ‘Bird’ is a colloquial and rather crude word for ‘girl’ or ‘woman,’ and the Black Country area of the UK that we grew up in was so named for its industry and mines, now a forgotten past. As far as I know, neither Nic nor Roz have worked down a mine!

What kind of music is it? Well, it’s somewhere in the middle of Country, Folk and Pop with me doing the guitars and the girls doing vocal harmonies together. They’ve already sang at the wedding of one of their friends, and they appreciate having a live guitarist with them. I’m much easier to work with than backing tracks, apparently! We did one gig at the Newhampton Inn on the last full weekend of October, and I’d love to take it in to the mid-long term. While some acoustic artists and groups are very good indeed, doing a group based on vocal harmonies is not something I see too often these days and I think that’s a great angle to come from.

We haven’t done anything since, but The Miner Birds is something I hope I can take in to the future, so I should probably get in touch with them quite soon. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing open mics and writing when it’s convenient; there’s also the possibility of another full band on the horizon so I’ll let you know about that. Take care!

November Gigs

Once again I find myself behind in my blogs, and I've got a whole months worth of gigs to talk about and another two to go. Trying to blog them all individually would of course be more work than fun, apart from anything else some of it was weeks ago and I literally can't remember what happened, so I'm just going to give a quick run down of each one:

5/11/11: The Royal Oak, Amblecote: Another Prickly gig, thanks to Joy for booking me for this one! My guitar actually doesn't sound too bad through an amp. Didn't play so well, unfortunately. I think probably I was distracted with the thought of the fireworks display that I was going to afterwards, and I was on first which would never be my, ahem, 'first' choice. It wasn't bad... but by no stretch of the imagination was it my best one. I said to Amy afterwards, I think I was mistaken in my assumtion that I can play a reasonable show (I did Katies a couple of weeks before,) not play my guitar for a week and a half and expect to be able to play just as good a show when I get it out again. Something to remember for the future, though it will be a while before my next scheduled acoustic gig.

6/11/11: 82s at Just Kroozin Fundraising Event, Four Ashes: Nearly forgot about this one! This was the time where we were trying out our new bass player West. He seems to fit the bill OK and having the keyboards there does fill out the sound quite a bit. We played OK, as ever I did make some mistakes but I was rather more concerned about being upstaged by Almost Easy who were on before! Terrific fundrasing event to raise money for research into Lukemeia, so I was glad to have been a part of it, though it was freezing cold!

12/11/11: The Wharf Bar, Walsall: Regular readers of my blog will know that it is a rare time indeed when I speak kindly of The Wharf Bar. There's never usually anyone there, the whole place smells of sick (which comes from the canal, by the way; it's not actually their fault) and the only people to watch me tend to be the other bands who are either leaving the venue or counting down the minutes until it's their turn to go on. Quite often, the best I can say about it is that at least they do still book me for gigs. So imagine how pleased I was when not only were the modest audience actually listening to me and, as they told me afterwards, enjoying it, but I actually found myself enjoying it as well! That was certainly the best I'd ever played at the Wharf Bar, I've got another one there on the 10th so I'm actually looking forward to it. That's almost unheard of!

16/11/11: 82s: Cover Band Showcase in Cannock: We have - not a deal - but a good working relationship with some booking agents in the area, who invited us to play this showcase to several booking agents who may or may not want us for gigs in the future. We got all our big guns out, which were Word Up, Trick Me and Sound of the Underground. Quite far removed from what we orignally put the band together to do, and I think there is a concern that it's not representative of the set, so you may see some changes with this in the future.

22/11/11 Recording Christmas Song with Sam Draisey: Sam's putting together another Christmas album of original material and I went up today to record mine. I hadn't rehearsed it nearly enough and I know it, the guitar took a few goes, but my vocals I did pretty much in one take. I don't know whether I like the song or not; it's hardly full of Chirstmas Cheer and lyrically it's very lazy, there isn't a single line I haven't copied off someone, not least of whom myself! Still, it will hopefully work for the album, and it will be interesting to see what the other guys come up with this time.

So, there you have it! Aki Maera's first gig is coming up next Wednesday, which will be... interesting. See you all there!

18/10/2011 Recording: Bitterness EP

I think this is going to be my 'gig' for the week. Now that I've spent this evening not doing anything at all it feels like a bit of a cop-out, but the fact of the matter is that the only night this week where I can hit an open/jam night is tomorrow, and I need to be up very early on Thursday.

Still, enough of that, on with the recording! I was as surprised by this as anyone when Sam Draisey messaged me on Facebook yesterday asking me if we were still on for recording tomorrow; I thought we'd pushed it back 'til November but I figured what the hell; I didn't think there was much to be gained from not doing it today. So I arrived at Sams this morning and we began:

The 5 songs I wanted to put on this CD were Bitterness, Get Out Of My Head, Girl's Names, Storm from the North and We Will Survive. I'd changed my guitar strings, and after a not-so-quick scramble to get another sound card plugged in to the computer (the one Sam was using was crackling for some reason) we went on with the recording. I was surprised at how many times I managed to mess up the most basic things like chords, and I also noticed something that I've heard a lot about in studio write-ups about how the 2nd or 3rd take is about as good as it usually gets; any after that and you stop concentrating and start messing things up. That was the case with me, though thankfully it didn't come up too often, and it wasn't too hard to 'drop in' on the bits where I'd really got it wrong. My playing was OK, not the best I've ever played, Bitterness in particular I've played more accurately live before than I managed on the CD, but it did what I needed it to do. Perhaps, if I'd had a week in a studio, I'd have gone for more accuracy, but to be honest my gig write-ups are festooned with admissions of mistakes, so leaving them in was actually probably a better representation of the artist it showcases!

Then it was time to record the vocals. I haven't got the most inspiring voice in the world and I know it, and I suspect that if I were to play back that Jack's Legacy demo I did way back in early 2006 I would find that nothing's really changed about it. But at least if I'm doing my own thing then it's on my own terms! I actually became more and more comfortable with it as it went on, when I managed to convince myself that it's OK to get in to it, close your eyes and pretend that there's nothing else in the world but you and the song. Once I'd broken that barrier, it was plain sailing, and I even managed to do some songs in one take. As ever, with more time I'd have gone in to a bit more depth, but for what came of it, this was as good as it was ever going to get.

It was nice working with Sam as the atmosphere was far more relaxed. You book a studio for a certain number of hours and you know that the clock is ticking from the moment you enter the studio, and that puts a lot of pressure on you to get it right, especially when you're working with an engineer that you've never met and has no idea what you want to sound like. Whereas I've known Sam for a year now and he knows what game I play with the acoustic guitar, he knows what I like to sound like, and also he's not far from home either so we could take as long as we needed. If I did need to come back and do something on another day, then that option was there. It made for an atmosphere far more conducive to a good performance out of me.

I won't be posting the songs up on the internet yet because a mixing error caused the first half a second of Bitterness to be chopped off, Sam's going to sort that out and send me the file, other than that it sounds every bit as good as I have a right to expect for what it is. It's something I should have done a long time ago and I'm glad I've finally done it as I can get this round to promoters now and hopefully get a few more gigs. I might even try and make a bit of money out of it if I can!

See y'all next time