A day spent musicking...

Other than a trip to Patisserie Florentin for Breakfast (the above snap was taken as we made our way to the car), an early evening shop at Tesco, watching this afternoon's episode of "Enterprise" on the video, the highlights of today's English Football on Match of the Day 2 and an episode of US comedy show "Arrested Development", I spent all day today working on.....music!

Firstly, I listened back to the CD I assembled yesterday by CBQ and Edward Spark - five tracks, 61 minutes. With hindsight, it's disappointing. I need to put more work in to it...

Here's Edward Spark's opinion:-

"Have listened to the CBQ/ES stuff now and here are my first impressions...

-- I'm still reasonably happy with the musical elements of each track, but I think it could be fuller in places. There are some parts of the music I don't like anymore and think are a bit cheesy. I'm hoping to twist your arm for me to re-do the music in Cubase, then bring it along to yours where we can work on each track to make them sound better constructed around the vocals i.e. verse, bridge, chorus. What do you think? Perhaps some keyboards to go along with the guitars?

-- I like a lot of the words from your vocals, yes ok there are areas where it could be better, but on the whole very cool. My only observation is that in these recordings the vocals seem detached from the music... not part of the song... they don't feel part of the song? D'you know what I mean?"

I have agreed we need to start again..

So that's back to the drawing board with that one....

Then I worked on the new CBQ Soundscapes album, putting together a "less obtrusive" version of the CD I compiled back in August. I took out all the solo stuff played over the top of the long loops and just left the loops....

This sounds good...

I then found I couldn't transfer the work I'd done into a wav.file so had to go into another programme and work it all out again...

Which was very frustrating....

Eventually I managed to burn a CD and gave it a listen...

It sounds good....

This could turn out to be a 2CD set....

Finally, I turned my attention to "Deeperdown", the new song-based CBQ CD which I've now been working on for two years (although if you added up the actual time I've spent writing and recording within that period, it's probably more like four weeks all told!!)....

What I was doing today was taking three different recordings of each song and synching them up together to give a quasi-wall of sound effect. It's interesting to note that in all three recordings (21 November 2004, 17 July and 21 July 2005) my vocal phrasing is almost identical around 90% of the time...

This was a long and laborious task but one I thought worthwhile doing...at the end I burned a CD of the results - a couple of the tracks are too quiet and need to be boosted somewhat...

I am bursting with ideas as to how to take this project forward...

I have not discounted totally re-recording absolutely everything, which may well take me into 2006...

We'll see.

So, I spent practically all day today working on my music but I didn't touch an instrument or sing a note.....