So I've always rebelled against covers. I played one or two here and there, but guys like Leo Marrichiolio (Frog Leap Studios) on Youtube helped me rethink this. I had this particular song's sheet music in my music book forever. Literally the last 20 years or so. I think I got it while hunting for songs to play when I was still a teenager and learning guitar. I have never seen "The Godfather" till earlier this year, but I did play and learn the song on piano from sheet music, recognised it from radio play most probably, and started singing it here and there while sitting alon with a guitar ... and wow, that is a long sentence.
Anyways, earlier this year I came to the conclusion that this song will do well with a bit of metal/hard-rock treatment .However, when I sing it, I sound like a crooner. So, well, I thought, why not do some crooner metal? Well, that is what came from my efforts over the last couple of months. Tom Jones, you'll thank me when one day you go metal. Or you, Bubleè.
Monday, 31 July 2017
So I wrote this little ditty on acoustic guitar a while back. I have since recorded it and made a little video. It was fun to do this little trickery of playing with myself :).
I have totally become a fan of Deezer. Much like Spotify, only Spotify is not available in my corner of the globe. So, I've also since then noticed how many people actually use Deezer. So, without any further ado, here are my playlists from Deezer for your enjoyment!
Please consider adding one of my songs into your playlists, it really does help to get the word out, and earn a cent or 2 along the way. Literally.
All my releases are now available at Bandcamp with a an instrumental version for each! Jeremiah's complaint is still available absolutely free.
A sale at Bandcamp gives me more than double wat iTunes gives me, and 500x more than a Spotify stream. Literally. Having said that, as long as people are enjoying it, I don't mind how they do it. So go ahead, add me to your Spotify, Google Music or Apple Mussic playlist. Even your Youtube playlists.
The more people listen to the music or watch the videos, the better.
I'm not great at doing cover versions of songs. For many years, I actually did not learn any new covers. As a guitar player I obviously cut my teeth on learning cover songs, and I will not deny that this is vital for learning an instrument. I quickly got tired of it though, and chose just to try and write my own material.
I listen to a huge amount of music, and I'm always learning by listening, but as for simply learning to sing and play songs by other bands, in the past I just couldn't be bothered. And maybe I was a bit insecure and afraid of criticism too. And maybe not that good at learning songs properly. Or executing it. (This is a hugely cathartic blog post!) There is also the way people judge how good of a musician you are based on how well you can copy someone else's song, that frustrates me. If that was true, we would probably never have listened to Bob Dylan.
I have had a bit of an issue with playing covers "exactly so". Carbon copying the original artists, if you may. Steve Hofmeyer, a South African artist, did a cover album of Neil Diamond songs and sold mountains of these things. He certainly has the voice for the material, but the fact that the songs were sung and produced exactly like the originals begs the quesion: why not just buy the original? Nobody sounds more like Neil Diamond than Neil Diamond, surely. I can't argue with CD sales, so obviously there is a need for this type of cover, but I've always looked for artists who interpret songs in new ways.
Take Metallica for example: they pay homage to bands that influenced them by playing at least one cover version per live set, and having brought out an EP and a double album of cover versions, along with tribute projects to Ronnie James Dio, Black Sabbath, Lou Reed (not Lulu, but live versions of "My Sweet Jane") and some more that I can't recall right now. What they do is interpret the songwriter and original artist's vision and effort with their own set of skills and styles.
They even tackled some more commercial pop and rock songs in this medley performed at a MTV-event. There are many other examples, such as their rendition of "Turn the page" by Bob Seger, or "Whiskey in the Jar" by Thin Lizzy, which in turn is actually a cover of an old Irish folk song. In turn, Metallica's catalogue has been covered many times, by so many different people, and often these versions can bring new appreciation for the song. Just listen to anything by Apocalyptica, or Pat Boone 's version of "Enter Sandman" to appreciate how far you can go with covering a metal song.
Nirvana loved the odd cover as the MTV unplugged album shows us. "The man who sold the world" became my favourite song on the album, originally written and performed by David Bowie. And I don't even much care for Bowie's music. So the new "packaging" actually helped me appreciate Bowie more to some degree.
I saw Saron Gas (now known as Seether) cover "How You Remind Me" live, when it was okay for metalheads to like Nickelback. I stage dove on it. I headbanged to it. Don't tell anyone now.
I especially appreciate it if artists can reinterpret songs into completely new genres, or parts of the song, a lick or hook, and almost rewrite the song around that. A client of mine, Loki Rothman, has become an internet hit with his "one man band" covers of well know songs. The fact that he is a prodigy on guitar and does things to strings that should be considered unlawful is part of the draw of this type of cover. And to see him do this live, is quite something. Without creating an alienated version of the song, he re-purposes it, in a matter of speaking. From jazz to pop he puts his own touch on any song. See what I mean below:
Ok, I can probably do a thousand page blog post on songs that different bands covered in their own inimitable way. And that is beautiful, and a huge compliment to the songwriter, me thinks. But, I have to make mention of one last artist, that has become an internet phenomenon: Leo from Frog Leap Studios.
A metal musician, re-purposing pop and more mainstream songs into metal madness has introduced a huge amount of people to heavy music, that normally wouldn't have listened to it. He plays all the instruments bar the odd collaboration with other musicians. Seeing his version of Adele's "Hello" blew my mind wide open. And then Pete Cottrell ripping the hardest solo over the breakdown I have seen in years... I saw the light properly: doing covers can be mad cool.
So I really like the song "Aerials" by System of a Down. I would sing it at top volume in my car on many an occasion. All their quirkiness, creativity and commentary is just perfectly distilled in this tune. I would often wish I could write a song like it. And I still do.
Well, I tried, and I couldn't. I wrote my own songs, and that is great. Inspiration is needed now and again, but I couldn't write my own "Aerials". So, I started jamming it along with them. And I thought, hmmm, some fingerpicking could work...., but I don't do covers...yet. Then I Youtube'd some covers of "Aerials" and the one below showed me that maybe I could bring my own acoustic feel to it. Not like the girl obviously, but do it in line with my own skill-set.
So, I decided to go all in. With my own set of skills. My voice, my playing, my own solo written for the song, and my weird instruments. Below is a pic of some of the things I used.
I really really enjoyed reproducing the song with my own vibes, and here is my effort. Let me know what you think. I'm busy thinking about some more songs that I can cover. Not necessarily in this exact style, but in my own way. Whatever that might be.
I wrote this tune about 19 years ago! Alice in Chains Unplugged was on my player a lot back then. I think that might've influenced the grunge chord progression and slightly demure mood!
It is a song, mainly about Christ and his sacrifice and suffering on our behalf, but now, looking back, I think the metaphors might be stretched and vague in some areas of the song, but it works in the phrasing and that's what I felt then, so I didn't feel like rewriting it. It is what it is.
The acoustic guitar bit is exactly like I wrote it back then, in my flat in Goodwood, Nevside 26, Spencer Street. (My song "My Plek" from Painting with Light is about that flat). As I started recording I wasn't sure if I was gonna go slow, or fast with arrangement, heavy or stripped down, but given electric guitars and time, I will lean to adding more and more guitars, most of the time.
I really really enjoyed writing and playing this solo. I doubt I'll get it exactly right again. It took literally about 50 different takes and I got the final down at something like 2:30am one morning, almost 18 months ago! Yes, this song has taken almost 2 years to record in it entirety.
Up to this morning I was still contemplating re-recording the vocals, and trying to write a better melody, but I feel like this song has existed long enough to warrant no further structural and basic changes.
Anyways, enjoy listening to it, share it with your friends, download it and burn it on discs, make mix-tapes and just go wild.
I've briefly mentioned where the name of the "label", Vortex Afternoon, comes from, but actually, the whole era of electronic music I made in the late 90's, I labelled as "Vortex One". Why "Vortex One"? I couldn't think of a cooler name, or something like that, I suppose. I was 17 when I started.
My brother came home from university one holiday, and on his kick-butt 486 (pre-Pentium days) machine with a Genius sound-card, was a program called "Impulse Tracker"; a mod-tracking programme in the vein of Mod Tracker and later, Windows versions like "Fast Tracker" etc. Some who are in the know might remember "Future Crew", "Enigma" (my brother's name) and a bunch of others, who featured in this underground music scene. You can read about the software, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_Tracker. Come to think of it, he first arrived with Scream Tracker, and I very well might've written and composed my first songs ever, on Scream Tracker. In time - probably a couple of months, we ended up doing our thing on Impulse Tracker, due to it's superior workflow. I still wish modern tracking programs, or midi, could be this easy.
Herewith a screen-shot of Impulse Tracker:
And the pre-cursor of Impulse Tracker, Scream Tracker.
As you can see, it was like staring at The Matrix. However, it's actually deceptively simple, intuitive and quite powerful, once you understand the basics. It's pretty much a drum machine, with more sounds. Some of the music composed then still rivals any of today's uber-electro-compositions in terms of complexity and quality.
Tracking consisted of using sound and instrument samples and programming the notes and effects into a scrolling tab. A bit like midi. The samples in our case were ripped from other peoples .IT files, the native file format in which these compositions were saved. It opened as a project, and you had access to all the bits and bobs in it.
In my case, most of the samples were 8-bit, but some guys were next level and was doing 16-bit. Because of the lack of guitar samples and way to use it, this music gravitated towards dance, and post-rock type styles, highly progressive in some cases. I did manage to record some guitar on a pc-mic and integrated bits into the music, as in "Serious News". That line I was playing around with on my 12-string President, and I ended up recording a single middle-C note from the guitar, and used the program to program the arpeggio I have been playing on the guitar. The quality, understandably, is not fantastic. Nowadays people use effects-pedals to get a guitar sounding that bad, mind you.
But enough about the intricacies of the software we used. Let's talk songs.
I decided to re-edit some old footage I had from 2011, of my song "Hosea Said" from the 2006 "Painting with Light" album. Hopefully it looks a bit better now in full HD!
So, in the spirit of the new endeavour, I thought I'd add, as posts, various different videos regarding my music.
This one is from Crashtacke - Hammerfall. My second ever release from Crashtackle.
I shot everything, by myself, recorded everything, by myself, and programmed the drums, and played and sung everything else... by myself. This is as DIY as it gets, baby. Even released...
You can get this tune on iTunes or direct from CDBaby:
...or just watch it over and over on YouTube!
If you feel like downloading it for free (times are tough and if my tune can make you smile, then have it for free), and promise to tell others about it (read TWITTER, FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, GOOGLE+ AND EVERY OTHER MEANS POSSIBLE), then go here:
