Playing With My Organ At Christmastime

(Hurrah! There's some proper music in this one - scroll to the end if you're busy!)

Being my 50^th Christmas, I find myself no longer able to conjure up the sort of thrill I would have felt during my first dozen, but I do find subverting the whole thing can be a pleasurable compromise. This was the Christmas Eve scene in Blague Central Studio 2 (The Kitchen). Not much Christmas Dinner being prepared there…

After the last entry’s songwriting breakthrough, on a roll, I polished off another three and so after making quick & scratchy phone demos, (the tune ideas having been jotted down in Logic months ago), we’re almost bang up-to-date; I have no further excuses and it’s time to begin the “proper” recordings. I’ve chosen the second song out of the bag, “Uncomplimentary” to get started.

So here’s my Hammond X5 “Portable” and Leslie 760 cabinet. It’s the same un-portable, bulky beast we carted into and out of basement clubs and rehearsal studios for three years back in the Blunder days. (Here's Andy playing it at the Red Eye, Islington in 1997). It's all set up and ready to go, but after a few years in storage it needed a couple of hours of renovation. A very low-volume output was eventually solved by contact-cleaning the ¼” jack line-in socket – it had stuck open, breaking the circuit – I remembered the same problem with a Carlsbro bass amp years ago (we used to hit it with a hammer). Now, as then, having forgotten to turn the volume pot. down, when finally fixed the resulting volume blast is probably why a few days later I can still hear a Cmaj7 in my right ear.

It’s been the first test of this part of my new recording “system” too – designed to be repeatable and time-saving. With no tie-lines between Studios 1 & 2, instead I use my old 2008 MacBook Pro (recently pepped up with an SSD and maximum RAM) as my “field” recorder. I still have to rip the Focusrite interface box out of the main studio but that done, I can seamlessly add to my Logic master, anywhere I choose.

Almost seamlessly.

After the organ-fix, I’ve set-up stereo Sennheisser ME40s on the Leslie’s top horn and a single AT3525 condenser on the woofer, none so close as to pop with the constant air-blast of the rotating baffles. I’m all set to play. Then I get this:

“This song was recorded on a newer version of Logic, please upgrade.”

And:

“In order to play these sounds please install the latest version of Kontakt.”

New Rule 4:

Save the actual creative activity for another session – do all the prep. first.

Deep breaths, cup of tea, another hour and finally, press “R” for “Record”…

Yes, it would be so much easier to use my Native Instruments Vintage Organs package; they’re astonishingly good. Somehow though, it doesn’t feel “proper” unless it’s got THIS going on in the background. It must be something to do with knowing you're really "moving some air" (and my dancing feet are extra!) You could argue my Kontakt B3 Patch is just as good, more “characterful” than my X5 real thing even, but when was making new music ever about convenience?

Here’s the full intro, Hammond-in-context.

And there, just for a moment, four bars into my first bridge, I get that unbidden, all-consuming RUSH of excitement that’s every bit as thrilling as unwrapping my Sharp RD600 cassette recorder at Christmas, in 1977.

Next time, (next year!) I’ll become a “Perdoocer” and wade into the wilderness of an empty multitrack.

One Small Step

In the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, with the absence of his laxative-ridden pilot, the German colonel (Gert Froebe) is forced to fly his plane for the first time, by reading from the all-important instruction manual. He climbs aboard and famously reads, “Number one: sit down!”

Last time in these pages, I’d finally reached the point of Step 1 of “The New Big Plan”: write and record the first of an infinite string of songs. Obvious and hardly a new idea, but this time around it would be without the safety-net of hiding away inside an album project with an ill-defined future release date. Instead, full-on “hit-single”-emphasis on each individual song production, as if it were the only one I’d ever make.

Easy then.

But it’d now been SEVEN years since I last wrote, let alone recorded a releasable song and to say I was a bit unsure of where to start would be a failure to grasp the height and breadth of the concrete wall which now stood between me and my putting pen to paper and plectrum to string.

I faintly remembered metaphoric construction workers coming round a few days after I packed the last album off to the manufacturers; they tidied away my notes and lyric sheets with a cheery, “You’ll not be needing these again for a while, Squire!” as they started to measure up and lay out foundations in front of me for some kind of giant fortress…

A few weeks into the next couple of years of endless daily promo-activity that followed, emailing radio stations, replying, packing and posting CDs and PR sheets, simultaneously feverishly working-out and practising live acoustic versions of those same-old songs for whatever sessions and performances would come up, I barely noticed nor cared that this ever-growing, steel-reinforced, sheer grey wall now obscured my view of the idyllic valley where I’d previously watched my future new songs gambolling, awaiting my call…

Soon, a few YEARS had gone by. Days had emptied as the album ran its course out in the world and I’d become so deafened by the clamour of all the brilliant new things I could be doing but oh, where to start? And the resultant impulse was to slump, relax and do little; watch a tutorial on setting up a drum page, rather than actually setting up a drum page, do an hour of guitar DVD scales instead of recording an acoustic guitar. (Perhaps writing a blog about not making progress…)

The longer you leave it the harder it gets to start again; you want to carry on from precisely the level you left-off at, not to start again at the bottom. Of course, it soon becomes clear that is exactly what you will have to do.

Scary.

This is where Habit comes in; self-consciously initiated daily habits. Positions of comfort to return to, which help you grasp the opportunity when such an empty day looms.

Amazon-hunting, post-David Byrne, I quickly fell upon two more books. First, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron; a classic of the genre, its award-winning author a successful screenwriter and lecturer on breaking the creative block. I won’t dwell on this one now but suffice to say, two-minutes after a Kindle purchase I was diving into a programme of wonderful ideas and practical instruction, not just for getting yourself into gear, but for living the very Life of an Artist and importantly, suddenly feeling, “Ah, it’s not just me then!” (Read it, it’s excellent.)

That purchase led me directly to Jason Timothy’s massively useful book Music Habits - The Mental Game of Electronic Music Production, this one, directly targeted at the musician/producer. Again within moments, I was reading the page where he cites just such a habit-initiation.

Paraphrasing, he says: use your right brain to organise and create space, to get all your materials ready, to tune a guitar, to sharpen your pencil. Then switch to the left brain to create for even only five or ten minutes, but just show up, do some songwriting, record something, put the work in. Set a timer! Make it easy to win by making it impossible to lose; if the only goal is to turn up and do SOMEthing, it doesn’t matter what, good or bad, then the pressure’s off and in this way you’ll be amazed how quickly real results start to flood in.

So I did - and I was. That day, day one, was my first real songwriting session since 2010. After an initial, “Well, I’ll just do ten minutes”, over the course of the day I ended up putting in an enthusiastic two hours and more. As results appeared and blank sheets of paper filled up with surprisingly good lyrics and new chord sequences I felt that age-old shock-thrill of, “Where did THAT come from?!” followed quickly by its two consequent urges: “Stop now!” (to avoid using up the magic) and “More! More!” (to strike whilst the Muse was at my shoulder).

Hence:

Rule Number 3:

Carry on chasing until you lose the trail. You’ll find it again.

Eventually, having returned to the song six or seven times that day, I left it, late in the evening, astonishingly… finished.

Admittedly, of the 11 demo tunes I had to work on, I'd picked the lowest hanging fruit, the ONLY one that already had a name and an idea for a chorus lyric (“Fleecing TheEasily Pleased” - previously the title of my last BTF album, now demandingits own song!) Even so, the joy of finishing was immeasurable, as was the shift in my psychological landscape. I genuinely hadn’t felt such a sense of musical satisfaction and fulfilment for seven years. I was back on the inside. And it all came so easily in the end. What an idiot!

Next time, what to do now I’ve no longer got a good excuse not to start recording.

So What DO I Do Next?

If a Doctor Who-themed notebook makes an amusing and ironic birthday present for a middle-aged bloke, then what better use to put it to than as a repository for his correspondingly fantastical Teenage Rock Dreams, writ-large for the 21^st Century. In felt-tip.

Last time, I rambled on at length about how my research led me to write the New Big Plan for the future of my Bikini Test Failure music and label, Blague Records, so now maybe I can answer the question:

What DO I do next?

It’s five years since I finished promoting the last Bikini Test Failure album “Fleecing The Easily Pleased” and it was already clear then, that the landscape of my backwater of the music industry was shifting so significantly that any hope of clawing back even a fraction of the money spent on producing and promoting my records was fast-evaporating.

The pivotal, eye-opening moment came in 2012 whilst on a promo visit to a small independent radio station near London, to play some of my tracks, do a live interview and acoustic session on their weekly alternative music show. Five years prior, a similar trip for my debut album "Another Day Another Fat Pile Of Cash" would have netted at least a small pile of royalties; the show’s listeners might have numbered a couple of thousand and when my next quarter’s PRS royalty statement arrived, if that hour-long broadcast had featured three or four of my songs, I might see £5 or £10 from it. But on this occasion in 2012 the DJ enthusiastically informed me we had “at least 121 people” listening at that very moment - a precision he had confidence in, as they had all just texted or logged in to his Facebook Group page and told him so. “I know most of them by name” he said. “They’re very loyal listeners.”

The implications of the breakdown of the traditional model hit me pretty hard; I realised that despite doing everything “right”, synchronised and on-time, I was working a plan that was already five years out-of-date. Until that point, I was still confident that my unique, solo working method was sound and would bear at least some fruit. I had built up a ton of experience producing and manufacturing EPs and albums, releasing them worldwide on disc through CDBaby and digitally on iTunes and its cousins, promoting them directly to indie/alternative radio stations and shows, here in the UK and over there in the US, making occasional forays to these stations, chatting and playing live… and in time I’d hoped a minor flurry of royalty statements would flutter through my front door.

As I drove home, back to the North of England late that night, I had to accept the thirty-something-years-long dream was over. I’d been chasing a tiny piece of the pie since my teens and I’d just discovered there no longer WAS a pie.

Any potential income I may have made was of course, never going to be a major influence on my lifestyle, but its importance in justifying my efforts and vindicating many of the life-choices I made over the decades (often quite detrimental to what your average punter might call, “A Happy Life”), was unrivalled. I was never “only in it for the money”, but I was wise enough to know that it was a very good way of keeping score.

Today, no matter how popular my songs, the audience with whom any popularity rests, no longer pays for any of the music they consume. A click on a BTF song in Spotify nets me 0.01 of a penny - in short, I won’t be retiring to Hawaii any time soon.

So now, I have a new plan. It’s simple, concise, definite.

At the centre is an all-encompassing Life-philosophy for the sort of personal fulfilment that comes from knowing you are doing exactly what you should be doing, achieving the things you wanted to achieve. You are, in my case, living the Artist’s Life. You’re on the radio. You have recorded an album. You’re on Spotify. The record is available around the world. You have learnt that new music scale (mixolydian?), you have learnt that new chord (B-demolished?) and finished writing a new song. Directly acting on ideas, doing the things you’ve always wanted to do, despite there no longer being any prospect of income, let-alone “riches”; that must be the new definition of “success” and should be celebrated. With the gatekeepers removed, the process becomes less about luck or opportunity and more about your own hard work and commitment. ‘Twas ever thus, no?

Time to get on with it…

Step 1:

Never mind recording and producing an album once every Sheffield Flood, for now, it’s ALL about the song.

Write and record single songs. Make every one a stand-alone, epic production. All killer, no filler, like they used to in the ‘60s. “Strawberry Fields” one week, “Georgy Girl” the next.

A constant cycle of individual song releases on digital music services, whether free, subscription, streaming or download, just get ‘em out there and keep ‘em coming. Build a narrative, you’re in it for the long haul.

The current concentration on chasing “sync. money”, (the only source of potential income seemingly untouched by all this change) coupled with a decade of “unpicking” albums on iTunes and Spotify and the like, has created an emphasis on the individual song, perhaps not seen for in decades. Coupled with a YouTube-hosted, self-produced compelling video (for every song!), where once the game was all about the Album as Art Statement, this song+visual Art Item is now the new currency.

And before you jump in, yes, anyone under the age of twenty-five has barely known things to be any other way, which is why I’m leaving discussion about my twenty-six-to-sixty-five-year-old demographic and hey, the VINYL bit of The Plan to a later instalment.

Next time, I’ll scale the writer’s block and hopefully write that awkward first song.