Uncomplimentary

Ah. Here we are then. A preview of the new single. 

Look! I've made a picture sleeve. That looks like New York or something. 

Happy Christmas, dear reader. Have a listen here, it will make you smile.

Restored, Repackaged, Re-released

A few years ago, KTCL Radio, Denver's "Adventure University" show DJ, Alf Kremer, made the extraordinary decision to make a video for my Bikini Test Failure song, "Missing A Gene".

The result is one of the finest and most moving independent music videos in this entire Business of Show. I kid you not.

If you missed it first time around, don't despair, it's been restored and I'm relaunching it here on Bikini Test Failure's own YouTube Channel.

Somehow, he persuaded a dozen Colorado bands and singers to learn and perform my song, then cut together a masterpiece. I still can't believe it actually happened but I'm eternally glad and grateful that it did.

Tonight, a few days before Christmas 2019, I'm busy mixing my FIRST new BTF song in NINE years. I'll post a link to a preview version this week, then I'll hopefully have a real, personal-dream-come-true, musical story to tell when I release the real thing in January.

Meanwhile, thanks again Alf!

Release A Single?! How Does THAT Work These Days…?

It’s nearly time. I’ve learned to sing again. I’ve learned to use Waves’ Vocal Tune in a subtle enough way that nobody notices. I’ve learned to use Logic Pro X’s mixing desk, I’ve bought half of Abbey Road’s old gear and made it all work. I’ve found a few holes in my arrangement and added a couple of nice bits of discordant weirdness. I’ve got my ears in - it’s time to mix!

By this point, I’ve been running a monitor mix for so long that the song will virtually mix itself. So, just before it does, it’s time to start looking ahead. Or back…

In 2002, ahead of my first BTF album, I made a four-song EP, then a two-song single, both released on CD, physically distributed to a thousand radio stations in the US & UK over several weeks. Along the way, I recorded a further six or seven songs and at the beginning of 2003 was ready to produce and manufacture my debut BTF album on CD.

I approached all my radio station fans again, promoted new songs from the album and kept the whole thing rolling along for the next six months. Physical distribution deals followed (ripped-off, on two continents!), radio interviews and live solo sessions.

A month after all my promo and radioplay had died away, the music world changed and for the first time, an independent label like mine was finally able to make its music directly available on iTunes, Sony, Amazon and all those good places. Too late to help sell the album, but after the two-year process I’d been through to this point, it bode well for the future.

I’d generated enough interest and goodwill to carry me through to the second album, eventually released in similar fashion, CD, radio, sessions, in 2010. This time, I’d learned lessons and streamlined the process; targeted mailouts to radio stations, no more carpet-bombing, no wasting hundreds of copies on distribution to stores which were disappearing in droves - anyone, anywhere could now buy a copy online, easily, from a few dozen places, including directly from me. But honestly, why would you? The music world had shifted again: THIS time, the album was available from Day One, for free, on… SPOTIFY!

Forward-wind to now; new studio, new attitude, same old Bikini Test Failure and the first couple of new songs, nearly ready to go. I’m still excited - as excited as I ever was. (I’m just not sure why any more).

BUT how DO you release a song nowadays? Wait until you have produced a dozen, then manufacture a CD? (Well, I suppose you can…). Or do you just pay the $9.95 and upload your single, solitary song to your digital distributor (CDBaby in my case) and minutes later watch it pop up on your Spotify page? I presume radio promo now consists of emailing a download link. Then a follow-up email, “Hear it? Like it? Gonna play it?”

Then what? Send out a couple of tweets with a new bit of banner artwork, make a half-arsed video that no-one will watch?

Well, that’s seems to be the done thing… …wish me luck!

Those Who Can, Do…

Those who can’t, watch (endless!) tutorials.

Apple’s Logic has within its virtual walls everything my old, “physical” studio ever had. When I consider the recent Old Days of multiple sync’d-up harddisk recorders, taking twenty-minutes to boot-up everything, longer if one wasn’t talking to the others that day, I’m instantly ashamed I didn’t make this leap into the 21st Century earlier.

Exactly NINE years ago, I was mastering my second (and still latest) album, designing the sleeve and beginning my US radio campaign. Nine years on, a beautifully empty summer ahead and only music (and a bit of tree-pruning) to fill it and now, mid-September, I feel I’ve turned a corner.

But if you’d have asked in July what I’d got planned, “sinking up to my neck in software” wouldn’t have been in my top ten answers.

The shift from recording to mixing has given me the feeling that, like “The Matrix” film, the Logic-world I’d lived in until now was merely a pleasant-looking sham, designed to keep me passively content, whereas the grimy, real business was going on deep beneath the surface.

I found myself lost and adrift, aware of the power of my new setup but overwhelmed by options and unable to get an exciting-sounding rough mix going, quickly, the way I once would. 

So, against the best advice of Jason Timothy in his splendid book “The Mental Game Of Electronic Music Production”, I typed “Logic Pro X” and any combination of “mix/edit/EQ/compression/bass/drums/vocals/plugins” into Google and promptly disappeared, for days, into a swamp of tutorials, YouTube channels and adverts.

As I read and watched countless well-meaning “youngsters” tell me how THEY do it, I became aware of the tail-wagging-the-dog, Emperor’s-New-Clothes-nature of some of these new technologies and saw the disproportionate effort put into attempting to add interest, clarity or excitement to a dull melody or uninspired performance which didn’t deserve it. Back in the day, no doubt suffering from Gear Lust, we’d say the answer was a new piece of pro kit, (which we’d never be able to afford). Today, it’s “a cheap new plugin”!

Ohh the plugins. What a wonderful bundle of joy they are. Scratching itches you never knew you had. There’s a sale, you say? I’ll take the lot!

Eventually when my own “logic” prevailed, I did what I always do: I simplified, I limited my choices and put a small, finite, definite frame around my otherwise infinite options.

Specifically, I recreated my old studio, “in-the-box”. I want THAT compressor and THIS delay and so on. If you want your drums to go through an Abbey Road desk channel strip, great! But don’t go putting an SSL on the vocals and a Neve on the bass, JUST because you can…

I created a template, with compressors, EQs, sends, reverbs and delays all in place, drums bussed, instruments sorted. This “mix” template will of course become my new “recording” template too. In my old studio I’d make mixing decisions from the start of recording and now, as then, I’ll stop worrying, see sense and start using my ears.

Left A Bit, Right A Bit

Been having a great time this week, away on a very relaxing job trip, mainly spent being vaguely technical in the shadows, watching executives talk themselves successful in a windowless conference room underneath The Home of Rugby, Twickenham Stadium, just to the leafy left of London. Thankfully, tired sporting analogies were for once, not crowbarred into every presentation; so absent, in fact, was any reference to our location, that we may as well have been in a business park, on a bypass, near Nuneaton.

It’s been a long week, but my days have been so simple and the hours so short, that following a daily, brief jog along the Thames riverbank path at Richmond, I’ve spent some wonderfully profitable evenings, wrestling with a knotty production problem…

Ever since last year, when I upgraded my Blague Central Studio gear, from 40 tracks of late-90s dedicated hard-disk recorders, to the largest, whizziest Mac I could afford, plus a tableful of control surfaces (to salve my 80s-pop-kid-soul’s desire for the analogue), I’ve had that awkward feeling; the one that creeps up the back of your neck and lets you know you’ve missed something, you’re ignoring something that needs attention before sooner or later, it bites you.

It was this:

I have two BTF albums’ worth of song multitracks, stored on increasingly obsolete backup media with no direct access to them.

These songs form the bedrock of my identity and existence as Bikini Test Failure, yet beyond the stereo mixes on the albums, they are, to stretch a metaphor, a closed book.

I’ve not missed many, but more than one TAXI.com sync. offer in the past year has requested instrumental mixes of my type of music.

I’ve NO idea why, it seems ridiculous now, but this was something I singularly failed to do back then. Not one song.

Rule number 37: ALWAYS run an instrumental mix!

Coupled with my personal 50th anniversary season’s medium-term plan (for timescale, read: “before I die”) to take BTF out live, preferably solo, preferably at festivals, (rather than a return to the likes of Manchester’s Roadhouse), it’s clear I’ll need additional “backing tracks” of some kind. Of course this too requires access to the innards of those recordings.

So I spent a couple of weeks last month, collating the media: Zip Disk, CDR and wait-for-it, DAT tape backups (I had to buy a DAT machine again - a fabulous Tascam DA-20 on Ebay for £80GBP) and transferring them, song track by song track, into Logic.

Then the REAL problem started; because these tracks were originally across three playback machines (lately sold) and now I’m transferring them to the Mac sometimes eight at a time, sometimes singly… THEY ARE NO LONGER SYNCHED-UP!!

40 tracks of audio per song, all the same tempo, but all now starting at slightly different points in the timeline. Worse, having been originally recorded using a click, I now find that the clock speed of my 1990s Mac differs from that of the new one, EVERSO SLIGHTLY! Enough to require an 89 BPM recording to be played back at 89.05 BPM. Tiny, but throwing any track out by half-way through. 

It feels anathema these days to be lining up digitally recorded audio tracks by eye and ear, using trial and error, but after MUCH thought and experimentation, it seems this is my only option, in order to recreate playable, original multitrack masters.

The GOOD news is: it works. What’s more, the results are very pleasing. Look! Listen!

And wish me luck with the rest.

Kneel and Buzz

If you’re anything like me, (enjoying as I am, my own personal 50th Anniversary Season), you’ll be more than aware of the current 50th anniversaries of famous Beatles moments, which have been coming thick and fast these past couple of months. I have indulged and spent $300 on the super-deluxe, reissued, remixed, remastered “White” album (complete with FIFTY unreleased outtakes) but sadly have had neither the time nor resource to follow Mark Lewisohn’s example who at 50 years to the moment, day-by-day throughout January, listened to the 97 hours of Twickenham and Apple Building Nagra reel-to-reel tape recordings, made by their Get Back Sessions film crew. (His conclusion on this period: “Finally I know how it was – and how I’ve been wrong in all my past writings. We’ve ALL had it wrong”).

Instead, I got my own, ground-to-a-halt recording ball rolling again, drafting in my trombonist-cousin Alan, he of first-album song, “Millions” fame. On the last day of January 2019, he came to the marvellous Blague Central Studio and in short order, delivered umpteen takes of a handful of parts I’d written for song numbers 1 (“Uncomplimentary”) and 2 (“Fleecing The Easily Pleased”) then, after a family catchup chat over a staunch cafetiere-ful, added a couple of delightful free solos.

Given that he’s a seasoned, big-band Jazzer, a sight-reader, used to turning up and playing live after minimal or no rehearsals, I shouldn’t be so amazed, but it was both a joy and relief that it went so well, especially after my extreme preparation for his visit, churning out a couple of dozen sheets of good-old printed “dots” music score, as well as taking the time to learn the parts myself, the better to talk them through, should it be needed. 

(Back-in-the-day, both as a studio engineer and a paying client, I’ve had to cut sessions short when either I or fellow musicians needed to go away and learn/practise tunes we were supposed to be recording).

Despite the prep. and my new, ready-to-go studio setup (here, Neumann U87 mic. via TL Audio valve compressor and Focusrite Scarlett box, recorded in Logic) I still took a moment to notice how shocked and delighted I was at the ease and speed take after take could be racked up, decisions made, new tracks & parts selected and loose ends tied-up.

This was the first time I’d heard any of these melodies live-in-the-room; music that for over a year (since I wrote the songs) had existed exclusively in my head. The buzz was palpable; that elusive Studio Magic had returned after a long absence.

I was kneeling on the floor, below the mixing desk, so that between takes I could adjust both the mic. stand position and the TL Audio’s input gain and it occurred to me around this time, how splendid it would be to capture some footage of this Magic, as it happened, for promo video/photo/design purposes.

50 years ago this month, as the Beatles shrugged off the final tracks that would eventually mulch into the Let It Be album, on the other side of Earth, Neil and Edwin were training hard for the upcoming Apollo 11 trip. Once on the lunar surface, they planned to swap the Hasselblad stills camera between them, each taking their own, pre-planned photos. Whilst there would be many, now-classic shots of Buzz, Neil would appear in only one or two, by accident. This is my favourite.

Crouching down there, quickly flipping between REC, STOP and “Add new track”, I was not about to interrupt the mood of the session by suddenly whipping out the iPhone and snapping away. I understood this was a moment simply to be enjoyed and not necessarily captured. I’m guessing Neil wasn’t too bothered either.

Are We Having A Good Time, Yet?

As the end of 2018 plummets through us, I’m not about to admit defeat in the year’s New Big Plan, despite my atrocious lack of progress; I’ve spent the last three months mainly on the road but with the help of Logic, bluetooth headphones, the little Akai keyboard, my Abbey Road shop-purchased notebook and my latest 50th Birthday guitar treat, the Jamstik+, I've muddled on and made some new music.

The Jamstik+ along with its app. is primarily a guitar learning tool but of course, it also works as a novel MIDI controller when plugged into Logic. It’s no substitute for the real thing BUT for a poorly-keyboard-playing guitarist like me, I’ve found it’s perfect for speedily throwing down interesting chords, using a piano patch for example, with none of the thinking-time using a keyboard would cause me.

The result of this imposed hotel demo time is another batch of embryonic songs: 40-odd newly minted sketches, based on the usual phone whistles, hums, rhyming couplets and occasional fully-realised music & lyrics. As usual, they will mulch down into single figures and the best will add to or even replace those on the current Hit List, in line to be recorded as “Album #3”. More fruit for the eventual fruitcake.

Incidentally, “Album #3” was provisionally named after one of Stewie Griffin’s least favourite words: “Irregardless”. Sadly, unlike the band name and my previous album titles, “Irregardless” isn’t a Googlewhack (look it up!) so I’ll relax for now and let another one bubble-up.

At the beginning of the year Song 1 hit an early, brass-based impasse; I’d decided to learn both instruments well enough to play a few little riffs instead of using samples. After a fashion, I could make a reasonable stab at the job, but nowhere near as well as I needed to without the proverbial 10,000 hours’ effort. The use of samples-only grates too much with my (invented and often arbitrary) recording “rules” so, after much faffing, I’ve emailed my jazz- and big band-veteran cousin Alan. He’s the guy who added trombone magic to Millions and Smoke Yourself Thinner. I’ll let you know how it goes. It feels like a breakthrough.

Home again for the Holidays and my (real) 50th Birthday guitar (Gretsch Country Gentleman) is pleading with me to re-record all the big frrrang-y 1950s sounds I’d done earlier in the year, but that way madness lies; its time will come. Likewise my wonderful new Electroharmonix octaver toy, POG2, set up in a feedback loop with the Line 6 delay gives me a take on the Eno/Eventide classic “Shimmer” sound. It is screaming to be poured over everything I’ve recorded so far, but NO! I’ll stay strong. Keep moving forward and don't look back. Happy New 2019.