Neil, Tamira and Sandra - Live @ Mollys 10th Sept.

Wednesday night after a fruitful writing session, Fraser and I decided that a celebratory pint of the black stuff(no… not Bovril) was in order. We headed down to Mollys where Matty asked if I could put a “band” together due to a last minute cancellation. At such last minute notice it turned out that both Fraser AND Eric Clapton were busy, so I put a call in to Sandra and Tamira and we agreed that Tamira would handle the first set with a little back up from me and then Sandra and I would do the rest of the night to allow Tamira to get home for work the next morning.

Friday night means little pressure to invite people, which means no posters and not a lot of Facebook action. I focused on trying to scratch together enough songs to get through 3 45 minute sets. Sandra and Tamira are both match fit due to travels and holidays that involved lots of guitar playing, but with flu’s going round and the need to pull out some crowd pleasers, I felt enough pressure to keep the adrenalin flowing.

Tamira and I started with “These boots are made for walking” as a sure fire well known song that we wouldn’t mess up:

Audio here

We then continued with Blue Suede Shoes, Sex on Fire and Blitzkrieg Bop, before play Use Somebody herself and then We introduced Sandra for a duet on Last Kiss. By this point Tamira’s cold was starting to play havoc with her voice, so we finished her stint with Randy.

Barely 30 minutes in, and one player out due to injury… I could see I was going to have to sing a lot more than I’d planned to.  I got up and sang, All along the watchtower as my goto for easy songs that I can sing. We still hadn’t had much feedback from what had become a pretty packed bar, so I took the mood down a little and did Wonderful Tonight and Wind Cries Mary, and then closed the set with Fat Bottomed Girls.

audio here

Set 1 was now out the way, but the bar was now absolutely packed and things were getting very hot and sweaty on the stage. I was beginning to feel real pressure to fill a set with crowd pleasers and not have to resort to Pearl Jam B-sides.

I started set 2 by having Sandra let her hair down a little with Yer Blues, but other than a few glances at the wonder that is Sandra, the bar still didn’t show us much love. Big Yellow taxi followed this, and then the crowd finally started to sing along when Karolina came up to play Lola with me(I never thought of Lola as that popular.) Since Karolina was on stage, we ‘knocked out’ Knockin on heaven’s door and then Sandra came and sang a version of Little Wing.

Audio here

I then let Sandra finish the set – safe in the knowledge that we only had one set to go. She managed to rouse the crowd with some Bobby McGee.

For Set three I started again……..

……….then Sandra played a little more. By this time, the bar was getting quieter, and people could hear us a little better, so we got a little self-indulgent and played a version of Seasons by Chris Cornell , before finishing the show with Thank You and We are the Champions.

All in all it was a good night and I’m happy with how it went, but without other guests to rely on it was quite stressful hoping that we’d not run out of songs and that I’d not have to inflict my singing voice on the Friday night crowd too much. 

Open Mike @ Mollys - August 2010

For the second month in a row, the Open Mike has been so busy that we’ve been turning people away from the stage. Everyone who has ever hosted the Open mike was there last night - Fraser, Sandra, Tamira and Javier. It’s just a shame that the night was such a success that we didn’t get to play more together cos I really enjoy jamming with all those guys. Fortunately we had some great talent on the stage and I got to listen for once.

 Fraser and I opened with yet more Queen(Fat Bottomed girls)

…then Tamira joined us for Boots are made for walking and Blue Suede Shoes. Craig Coe then played for his second month in a row(He must have enjoyed last month):

He did a good job of fitting in the with out vision of the Open Mike night, not only does he get extra points for continuing the Queen theme, but he managed to put together 2 impromptu pairings, firstly with Sandra on Nobodies wife by Anouk, and then with Fraser and I on Somebody to love. 

We than had some new comers: Andy and Mike from Cheshire who performed some very nice harmonies despite the ropey onstage sound:

After that Marco, Javier, Fraser and I jammed out a few songs with Mandolin, 2 guitars and Bass which was a lot of fun. For the remainder of the night; Lee Clark wowed everyone with his self penned numbers; Amsterdam “weel kent face” Cindy Peress classed up the place; Sandra showed us that a month on the road keeps your music skills at maximum potency and Fraser and Tamira fired out some gems that they had been sneakily practicing on the side.

To close the show, the extremely able Giovanni and James played us out with Fraser supporting on Bass and vocals. Thanks to everyone that came along, musicians, listeners, hecklers and drinkers alike. Does anyone have any ideas for next month? A theme? Suggested Covers?

Writing Writing Writing

Karolina's in Greece, and despite my best intentions I haven't managed to use the "alone time" to get on with some writing. No matter how much I achieve, the ability to sit down and put my lyrical, rhythmic and harmonic thoughts into a 3-5 minute unit escapes me. I am very good and I enjoy co-writing, I am able to turn a good song into a great song through giving someone some constructive criticism and suggesting different chords melodies etc. but clearly I over think my own efforts.

To this end, I’m trying to be really methodical about writing. I constantly write down lyric snippets, chords snippets, etc. but I’m now trying to put them together base on themes. Essentially I´m writing 12 songs at the same time… I never make it easy on myself. We’ll see how it goes.

CD´s on CD Baby

I sent 5 CD's for Sandra and 5 CD's for Tamira to CDbaby. You can now buy physical CD's at the links below:

The Cd's are available for $9.99, of this the artist gets $4 I think. It cost me roughly a dollar a piece to send the Cd's so financially it's not a great distribution method, but as with everything I do, it's a bit of an experiment and we'll see how things work out. 

Open Mike July with N.F.S.

We had a great Open Mike last night. I think we've now being doing them for a year, and it was Fraser, Sandra and I for the first time in while definitely the first time this year. As usual we were ably assisted by Javier and several other friends. So many people wanted a spot on the stage that we were turning people away. Andy from the Stun was there so there is a write up and photos here.

Anatomy of a heart - Finished

After a long long weekend of listening to final mixes and
correcting last minute errors, we’ve finally finished Tamira’s CD.
It was a much more ambitious effort than Sandra’s CD’s. We
included drums, electric guitars, additional musicians and duets.
With every track I do, I get more confident and learn a little
more about the process of recording, mixing and mastering, but
since we agreed it was finished, I’ve been scared to listen in
case it’s shit. I’ll check it out in a week or so.

You can listen to the album below:

Day 9 - recording with Tamira

Tamira came round tonight with Kevin O'Donoghue, for what should hopefully be the penultimate recording session. I was quite apprehensive about Kevin coming round; he has a lot of experience in recording studios and I'm not quite sure of what his opinion was of our little set up, it turned in to a good relaxing eveing anyway. He sang some backing vocals on one of Tamira's songs and they sounded amazing. He was a phenominally quick worker... quickly learning the tracks and coming up with vocal lines for it.

Day 8 - recording with Tamira

The artwork is finalised and we're just adding the finishing touches. I'm trying to call as many of the tracks close to final as possible, but every track seems to need one or two little things rerecorded.

Tamira - Anatomy of a heart - Artwork.

We submitted the artwork to the printers today:

 

Mixing the drums

After a few days off to go and see Pearl jam, it's back to work on music. I had a treat to come back to -our drum recordings. It's always good fun mixing drums cos you add Eq and variious subtle effects to each track bit by bit and the sound just keeps on getting better. I'm happy with how the drum tracks turned out. You can hear that it's a pretty beaten up drum kit, and the room could have been better, but providing the durms don't need to be super high in the mix, I think it sounds pretty good.

Day 6 - recording with Tamira - Drums!!!

Despite advice against it from almost eveyrone I mentioned it to, I decided that since Tamira can play the drums we should take a go at putting drums on at least some of the tracks. Drums are notoriously difficult to record have them sound good, but in line with the "lo-fi/let's just do what we can" nature of all my music endeavours we decided to rent a studio for 3 hours at Melody line and see what we could get out of a beaten up old drum kit. 

Tamira kept it simple didn't make any mistakes and we managed to reocrd her drumming 2 takes on 4 of the tracks.... who knows what it will sound like mixed. 

 

 

 

 

Day 5 - recording with Tamira

We continued sorting vocals and adding extra guitar parts and then took some photos for the album cover. Kenneth Clarke is going to do it again. Let's see what he comes up with. 

Day 4 - recording with Tamira

Today we tried to tackle a few of Tamira's harder songs. She's very adventurous with her songwriting and she gives herself a real challenge in the vocal melodies she writes. A capo will help with some of them but the range between the verse and the chorus on a lot of her songs will really be a bitch to get perfect in a recording.

Mixing Hugh Burke

Months ago on a drunken friday afternoon, I recorded Sandra and Hugh Burke playing a few songs each. Hugh is leaving Amsterdam, so I finally had an excuse to mix a few snippets that I had of him playing and sent him to him. They sounded lovely!!

day 3 - Recording with Tamira.

we had a pretty good session - going over lots of the songs, and adding various extra bits and pieces.

Recording Lee Clark - Day 1

Today I started recording som songs for a mate called Lee Clark. We're not quite sure what we want yet, he asked for a 3 song demo, but we might go for the full bhuna. We put down about 7 rough takes so that I have an idea about the sound of his voice and his guitar. He's a fast worker. I was pretty happy with the results.

Adding Guitars to Tamira's tracks

I started recoring additional guitars for tamira songs. I start with Onverwacht bericht - her only dutch song. I want it out the way, cos I struggle to listen to the dutch singing over and over again when I'm mixing it.... then I chose Shut up and Kiss me cos I really like that one and I didn't want to sicken myself when we'd just started.

day 2 - Recording with Tamira

We re-recorded several of the original rough takes where the structure wasn't correct.

Trying to be creative on a Monday evening :-(

I finished off most of the open Mike mixing... and then tried to put down the makings of a song idea that came out during the Jam Session... lazy-arse-itis got the better of me and before I knew it I;d ran out of time.

Sorting... mixing... tidying..

I had a day of sorting out audio.. the session with Tamira... the open mike... the Jam at melody line.... today I could have saved about 3 hours if I had double the RAM I had... I'm not much of a technology junkie, but if I had the room, I'd have a new computer by now.

Day 1 - recording with Tamira

Fresh off my recent recording prowess that I developed with the help of Sandra, I'm going to record Tamira. Day 1 was spent getting a rough recording of each of her songs so that I can have a listen and work out what to do with them.

Starting as we mean to go on....

In an attempt to start as we mean to go on. Fraser Javier and I went Jam Studios(MUZYQ was booked) to make some noise. I forgot how much of a slog it was to carry guitars and cables to the studio

Wi' (not) Jammin'

After 6 months of oscillating between playing rockstar and playing grumpy-organiser-man - the Coco's Jam Sessions are no more. It seems that the Jam Session was the only night that was a guaranteed success, and the bar is going to replace it's stage with a DJ booth.

It was a great experience while it lasted, and I learned a lot, but there is a part of me is glad for a break. As the nerves and worry of managing to get through the night with unknown musicians gave way, it became an organizational chore. How do we plug in 3 guitars in with 2 guitar cables? How long do you give the drunk guy a shot on the drums before you ask him politely to leave? How do you explain to the Reggae enthusiasts that reggae sounds terrible if their timing is terrible? And also is all this shit your responsibility?

Through the Jam Sessions I have met loads of new musicians and contacts and built a lot of confidence in playing and even singing. Thank you to everyone that put up with it and thank you to everyone that participate; we did ourselves proud. Onwards and upwards to the next adventure.

Tamira and Neil - Live @ Mollys

With Sandra off on an Iberian adventure, I needed some help for this Month's Open Mike. Tamira willingly obliged. Preferably we would have had more time to practice, but I got held back with finishing Sandra's album. It's interesting how the mood changes when you add something else to the mix. We were able to rely on stuff we had prepared from the jam Session’s a little, and they were tried and tested so we knew that we could knock them out no problem with Stephen and Javier as well:

We did an excellent version of These Boots were made for walking… we had monitor issues on Crazy train, and we had chord-forgetation problems on Paranoid by Black Sabbath.. then I sang a few of my regulars…

and then Kevin took the stage for a set:


He’s a human juke box with much more capacity to entertain a crowd than I have.
After that – we had a first for the Open Mike’s at Mollys – a guy got up to give some poetry readings:

In times gone past, I’d like to think that poetry sat side by side with music in Irish bars… but alas times have changed and he was faced with a tough audience… still he gave a good ten minutes of various poems that he had come across on his travels, before I got up again and sang Lola by the kinks cos Katy had requested it.
Tamira sang some of her own songs, then I did some… then Kevin finished us off.. It was one of the better open mikes - - a good packed bar and a happy crowd.





Audio from the show here and here

Art work and packaging

We've not had the luxury of time during this project. Sandra and I messed around with recording for a long time, but we needed the deadline of her going on a trip to really get our arses in gear. As a result we're working to the last minute, so for printing of CD's and artwork, we can't take advantage of the myriad of offers out there that will pakcage up your stuff. After spending a lot of google-time and even telephone time talking to companies about costs lead times etc. I realised that I was trying to rush job 500 CD's when there is no way Sandra was going to travel round Europe carrying 500 Cd's in cases with her. I decided 100 Cd's we're burnable by hand and then focused on the art work. 

As always the art work is by kenneth for www.keep-it-creative.com It's excellent being in the position to offer him "professional"  projects, cos normally I'm badgering him for last minute changes to open mike posters etc. 

The art work is based on Sandra's guitar. We had "creative differences" as to how it should look. Kenneth and I wanted simplicity, Sandra wanted complexity. After long video conferences on skype,  we eventually settled on this:

We had solved the issue of CD burning, but we still needed album covers/cases. For this we opted for bulk printer drukland.nl. They had a 3 day delivery and it all looked good. I didn't read the small print though and by 3 in drukland counting is 12 in normal counting. Great prices, great online service, great product variety. DO NOT use if you are in a hurry. In an attempt to run my music endeavours like a business I didn't lay down and take it and after 40 emails back and forward in a mixture of Dutch and English that contained such temporal gems as "Friday IS 3 working days after Monday. Sir!"  I have 10% off my next order. The drawback is that Sandra left Amsterdam with spindle of 100 CD's and the covers are in the post to Madrid where she'll pick them up.

Other than an afternoon loading a CD drive and an afternoon folding and pasting covers, 625 CD's cost:

625 blank CD's - EUR187.50(These are off the high street and could be much cheaper)

625 album covers - EUR178(www.drukland.nl)

Price per CD -  58 euro cents...

If we charge my recording, engineering and mixing time, the price obviously goes up and then you have Kenneth's graphic design time... but 58 cents is a lot less than it used to cost me to make copies of CD's with covers...

Mastering the Mastering

Some of the tracks for Sandra's album have ben last minute specials, but I'm not ready to do the mastering.

Mastering is super deluxe highly specialist process of preparing a track for public consumption. We're strapped for cash and time, so I'm doing it on a pair of hifi speakers in a living room using Garageband, some free plugins and Audacity.

Sandra's tracks are pretty simple, there are no drums and usually very few instruments taking up space on the track, so I think I get away with my meagre setup. It's also a home/lo-fi recording so I don't think it benefits from unrealistic reverb and a lot of effects. I mix the track down and separate the stereo and non-stereo material so that I have two tracks. Then with each of these tracks I do a little light peak limiting, normalisation and multiband compressing until I'm quite happy with the signal. I give the stereo file a little bit of stereo enhancement. This I do in audacity, cos I can see the wave better etc. Then they both go back into garageband and I mix them together, maybe adding some more compression across the track or some really light EQ. I found a really nice plugin called Pro-Q from fabfilter. It costs, but I used he 30 day free trial. You can see what oyu are doing and drag a tight band filter across the EQ spectrum till you find a sweets pot and then mess around with the Q setting till you add some subtlety.

Once I've got it sounding good, I take it back into audacity to top and tail it, sort any clips and then max out the volume as much as I can while retaining some dynamics.

While there is no doubt that a professional would do a better job if I paid him a grand or so, I think the process has been a great learning experience, and the results fit the bill given the lo-fi nature of the project.

Jesus has risen!!!

Thanks to Ascension/Hemelvaart, I have 2 days off to make a 4 day weekend to catch up on all things Sandra. I made an interesting version of “raise your sunshine” from an old isolated vocal track that was lying around. I pulled another 2 tracks from a really early session I did with Sandra, my mixing of her guitar has got better though and I was surprised how good I was able to make the tracks sound. 5 down 7 to go.

Progress is slowing though; It’s starting to feel quite daunting to get this all finished in the next week before Sandra leaves. What was previously a lot of fun is now starting to feel a little like creativity on demand. As I probably suspected if I was honest with myself, my ambition will have to be curtailed a little, and if I have a decent track, I don’t have time to experiment with 20 different ways of doing an additional guitar. At the end of the day if the room I’m recording, mixing and mastering in isn’t up to much then I shouldn't be too perfectionist about what we can achieve.

Another late night Jam.

Tomorrow is a public holiday in the Netherlands so the Jam session is packed. We have Aron Levin of the Heaters from Cincinnati warming up for his show on Saturday and various other people that don’t need to work tomorrow. Sefi is going back to Israel so it’s the last time we’ll see him for a while.

Sick and still working...

I spent the night puking ... so I've taken the day off to drink green tea and experiment with Mastering. The tracks don't need to much mastering but I can't decide whether to bring the peaks up with audaity and add some basic compression or whether to use a mastering plugin like Ozone... my sick body seems to be too tired to be able to tell, but I'm going to plough through some basic tasks so that there is more material there when I'm ready to use it.

More recording.....

The whole weekend has been spent recording extra parts and testing out rough mixes.... Sunday Afternoon Tamira and Stephen came round to practice a few songs for the open mike and they got the debut listening of "Burn out"

Friday off for recording

I could get used to these 3 day weeks... May this year is going to be my month of recording, mixing and learning to do a basic master of home recorded tracks. We finalised the "Born with a Tail" and "Burn out" recordings and I put together a rough mix. I added some cello to "burn out" which us a cheap way of making everyone love the song/mix.... but I think I can get away with doing it to at least one of the album tracks and it sounds pretty good... 2 down 10 to go.

Liberation Jam

Sandra is leaving at the end of the month. Her departure has finally given us a deadline to work towards for finishing her CD. We´re aiming for 8 studio tracks and 4 live tracks, so Wednesday was spent recording bits and pieces of vocals and assembling some rough mixes of the tracks. We also recorded guitar for "better to burn out than fade away" and "born with a tail". 

Afterwards we headed down to the mine for the Wednesday Jam Session. it was eally well attended:

 

Sandra brought down several friends including Pierre Corneille who took the first videos from our Jam Sessions:

Easter weekend

Quite a weekend. We surprised Karolina with an Easter visit from Kenneth. 

On Saturday I performed my first ever DJ set for the Grunge night in the mine. I really enjoyed it, but I have a new found respect for anyone that can do it properly for a living. It´s one of those jobs where you're never really that busy, but you never really stop either. I played a pretty decent selection of grunge, while knowing that anything I put on from Ten or Nevermind will get a massive cheer from the crowd. I suppose that sums up whatever grunge is for most people. 

Would I do it again.... yeah I suppose I would... but with the work involved, I'd have to either get paid or gaurantee like minded music tastes in the audience. 

We recovered from our late nights and hangover by having the best Easter Sunday since they stopped being rated by how many chocalte eggs you got. 

Karolina and I cooked up a storm and had an open house... this will definately be an annual thing....

Quiet Queen's Day

Queen´s Day is a strange day in Amsterdam. It is the biggest party of the year, so having "done" about 5 Queen´s days it is an event similar to a Scottish Hogmannay where you spend the majority of the day feeling like you should be having more fun than you are... trying not to get drunk too quickly.... and wishing that if the music has to be so loud could we at least limit it to one source. A few years ago, I decided I´d seen enough orange people drunk on Heinekin for a life time and vowed that I would use the bank holiday to get away for the weekend. This year, however, I wasn´t organised enough and I´m just back from a weekend away, so I decided to use the time to catch up on a backlog of music work. While the country looked like this:

I was sitting behind a pair of speakers being productive.... 

Karolina's birthday jam

It's been a busy week with a trip to Scotland for my birthday, straight back to an open mike night and  now a Jam night for Karolina's birthday:

Sandra's last Open Mike for a while

NFS is no more... first fraser got too busy with Coco's Mine, and now Sandra has to give up the open mike nights for the summer to go travelling. We had a great last night with Sandra.

Late night Jammin'

I had today off to go to Scotland for the weekend and Fraser had to take a flight early this morning, so we swapped roles and I did a late one at the Jam Session. It was fun seeing what happens after I leave for once. It tailed off towards 2am and then once all the local bars closed, it got busy again until about 4am... it was a great night and I didn't stop playing... It feels good to wake up with tired fingers.

The perfect Saturday

Today might have been my favourite day of the year so far.... except for our Easter Sunday.

The day started badly with finance problems fuelled by false requests for municipality taxes. Sandra soon brightened the gloom and doom by arriving with breakfast… so we has one of those breakfasts that lasts until lunch time. Sausages eggs, bread, fresh fruit, veg…. and South Park… with the sun blaring in through the window.

Oops…. This is a music blog.

We dragged ourselves from the Breakfast table about 1pm(told you), we then headed for Dam Square, where some film makers were recording footage of Sandra busking for a youtube magazine show that is starting…

 

from there the film makers joined our entourage of happy wanderers and we headed to Amstelveld where Sandra has been asked to play at wedding:

The wedding was at Café Nel, and the plan was to play for 30-45 minutes. We had prepared a set of songs and I expected it to be a fairly relaxed affair. Once the guest started to arrive, I was feeling pretty underdressed:

We played a great set sitting in the sun with the wedding party all very happy and the children perplexed by the multi-coloured musician that had graced their party:

We walked back from Amstelveld with “music earned” money in our pockets on a lovely day, so spirits were high. We found Tamira and Hanan and decided that white wine and Greek food was the perfect solution for the lovely day. Sandra serenaded people(and Lincoln Continentals) along the way…

We closed the night about 3 am with a burger after a night in the mine with Anna and Coco.