One new and one oldish tune

Two more collaboration tunes for you.

The first is an oldish one Arryth
This is a rock song that unfortunately (In My Opinion) seems to have been forgotten about, or dropped, or something, but anyways I really enjoyed playing on it and am quite proud of the bass line I came up with (hence the reason it's up here) and I also really like the vocal performance - all in all I actually dig this tune a lot.

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Next up is something completely different to the above,
No Name Bossa is a smooth as silk latin jazz thing.
This tune really needs an upright (double) bass to do it justice, which I don't unfortunately have, so I did the best I could on my fretless, the other collaborators seem to like it anyways so here it is.

I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be regarding latin rhythms, but hearing the above I couldn't resist. This I find is the beauty about collaborating you can try stuff out and get knowledgeable feedback and crits pretty quickly, that is apart from the fun of making music, being able to change genre at will and "meeting" other musicians online.

I should mention this on all the posts I guess, but most of the tunes I post here are work in progress and not yet considered finished - unless stated otherwise

Passing Passion - another collaboration

Hmm, I seem to be getting a bit more busy on this blog - guess it's all well and good.
Anyways, I got myself involved in another collaboration on Kompoz called Passing Passion.

This is a bit of a pop/funk/jazz tune a la Incognito
Anyways here's how the tune stands ATM

Hope you enjoy

Two more Collaboration tunes.

I've been a little active on kompoz.com lately and laid down two "audition" tracks.

The first is with the fretless on a tune called
Zachary (You're Coming Home)
It had acoustic guitar and vocals to start with so here's my take

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The second is called
My Way Back To You
and is described as "80's style synth rock, ala Duran Duran, Missing Persons, Kajagoogoo." so as a complete change of style I dug out the fretted ... here's my take.

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Both of these are work in progress I'll try to remember to post updates if anything significant happens to them

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Keep Me Away From You (two versions)

First update for the year and it's only January :)
Sometimes when I have the time I join in a jam on the internet, known as a collaboration.
Anyways, every now and then as song gets "published" which basically means that that tune is now declared finished.
This recently happened with Keep Me Away From You (solo vocal version) which is a fork of Keep Me Away From You by Danny Milligan and was originally conceived as a duet.

The original tune

was published last year but dazzle fly, the female vocalist, liked it so much she decided to do her own solo version, so here it is.

Anyways, both versions have the same music, tho' I think I prefer the solo version.
I was kinda hoping for a re-mix as a bit of a timing issue crept in somewhere as the bass isn't quite as tight as I played it, especially near the beginning, and this (timing issue) was carried over into this project .... oh well, 'tis a small thing, tho' it irks me ... but on the whole I'm pretty proud it, and I guess most won't hear what I am, so excuses aside here it is.

Here are the links once again.
Keep Me Away From You (solo vocal version)
Keep Me Away From You (original version).

Any comments are welcome :)

Dodgy Diagonal D-flat Ditty

Dodgy Diagonal D-flat Ditty

Ok, this post follows on from the last I'm just seeing how SoundCloud shares things directly.... 2 posts in one day ..... amazing :)

Anyways, this is just a fretless workout, should be technically called a C# Locrian thingy but that doesn't illiterate as well.... anyways enjoy. Hmmm, the preview doesn't seem to include the player, so here you are ... the fancy one :)

A few more tunes

Here are a few more tunes I've been playing with. as well as just getting something up on SoundCloud. Firstly a couple more with Mood Indigo both of which are guitar and piano tho' we are working at more bass and piano pieces ... stay tuned :)

Summer Song by Mood indigo

Low C Boogie by Mood indigo

Mood Indigo

Yep, I've been a little busy lately ... unlike this blog :) but anyways Muriel (my wife) and I have been working at getting a jazzy duo together, we should have done this looong ago, but hey we're doing it now.

It's pretty interesting as she is from a classical background and reads really well while learning to improvise and I'm from a blues/funk background, can jam 'till the cows come home, but have to work hard at getting my reading up to scratch.
Anyways between us we are getting a rather a unique sound together, and it is evolving quickly which is very nice - no backing tracks, drum machine etc. just electric piano & guitar or fretless bass.

So if you'd like to hear what we sound like, book us for a gig in Cape Town (South Africa) or whatever, you'll find all our info on our new website Mood Indigo.

Clearing a little Confusion :) hopefully

Another rare blog update has been kinda forced on me ;)

As a musician I've always had a problem with being tied down to any one particular band or genre.

A band I play in was recently asked to play at a street party and whilst the party went REALLY well I came to realize that there's the possibility of my assuming the wrong band for an event :)

So to clear up any potential future confusion (and hopefully NOT come across as an ego-freak) here's a bit of a break down of my current musical projects...

Tip of Africa : An afro/fusion type project playing only original material

SHA : A blues/rock type project playing mostly original material but also a few covers (eg. Muddy Waters, Hendricks etc.)

Acoustic Art : A piano/guitar duo playing mostly light ambient music.

Three very different to each other gigging projects hence the potential confusion when "my band" is asked to play. :)

To add to the mix I also get involved in various collaborations both locally and internationally. These are just recordings for the sake of it.

Her Slave

Just a quickie :)

Well SHA one of the bands i play in entered a Music competition recently ... (we came 4th ;) ).

Anyways one of our fans, Mike Berry took this vid, so this is just a little post to put it up there.





My wife Muriel on keyboards, my bro-in-law Clive on guitar and vox and my good buddy Craig on drums, and me on bass of course :) .

Enjoy

A little study in E Flat

Ok, I'm back with a study just before X-mass.

This is in Eflat Major (as the title says :) and has three main parts.

1) A bit of "clawhammer" with the Right Hand to start with.
2) A "tapping" section
3) Lastly finishing off with harmonics.

This is still a work in progress, and that's my excuse for some of the rough edges on the mp3 example that you can find here.

Eflat Major study mp3




pdf is here

Tone wise I have VERY old strings on ... not my fault I can't seem to get D'Addario EXL165 bass strings anywhere in Cape Town for some reason (quite miffed) and this is what I use ... any donations welcome :) .

I use a GT-PRO into REAPER, the latter I've mentioned before, and I'm still blown by what it can do ... everything I need so far and more besides, for the GT-PRO I tweaked a patch I found somewhere on the net GT_Pro-Jazz.mid GT_Pro-Jazz.gtl and kicked off the delay.



There are a few gotchas in this piece.

Section 1) I use my RH index, middle and thumb for all but the string skipping section where I use my ring finger instead of my middle.

Section 2) Apart from where it goes down to B it's a "Victor Wooten" type pattern that recurs in major and minor arpeggios.

Section 3) I really struggled and failed with my software to notate this nicely, so you'll just have to do the best you can listening to the mp3.
The first harmonics can be natural at the 5th fret ...or... fretted at 5 and pinched at 24 which you need to do anyways for the others (ie. fret at 6 and pinch at 25) the high harmonics are pinched near around 32 or so ... near my neck pickup, you'll just have to find it for yourself. The LAST harmonic may be resolved easily by fretting the G# and pinching the high note ... or in a more flashy manner, reach over with your RH and a) tune up the string : b) grab the string behind the fretted note and bend (it's surprising how FAR you have to bend it for a semi-tone)

If anyone reads, and can make sense of this, have fun with it, comments appreciated.

A coupla tunes

Hi again,
After the (by now usual) long silence - been a bit (real world) busy in the meantime, here are a couple of tunes I've been working on.

The Elephant Song I did with Hugh Coutts, a really cool songwriter, he played guitars and sang, in a few different keys :) before we settled here.
He recorded the guitar and vocal tracks at home then brought them to me, I added and mixed the rest with a bit of backwards and forwards in between.
I'm more of an engineer than a producer when it comes to recording so I took it to a good buddy of mine Pete Stanford who then added a few deft touches, whilst giving me a lesson in things audio, thanks Pete, and here it is, comments welcome.

Looking Back (at you) I did with Lamecia who I used to play with back in the late '90s, her voice always impressed me, but we lost touch for years, then we connected again (via FaceBook), she said she has some songs, so I said lets do it.
This is one of quite a few songs, but The BarleyCorn was having a song-writing competition and as this was the one nearest completion we entered it. Again any comments welcome.

Just in-case the above links to the tunes don't work properly, you should be able to find them here.
http://www.reverbnation.com/hhhza


'till I next add something ...

Reaper

Hi again,
Just thought I'd share my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

Well mostly the software, I'm totally converted to REAPER as my main editor.
It's fast - no long boot up and snappy when editing.
It's tiny - less than 6Mb, the size of an mp3 and it has a demo song included.
It's amazing - remarkable programing skills here with a vibrant, caring community and forum.
It's cheap

I use it both in WinXP when I need all the bells and whistles plugins and rewire, but it's really comfortable in Linux using wine-ASIO (see this thread ) which is the setup I use for my live recordings at The Barleycorn.
With REAPER's keyboard shortcuts and a CLI (Command Line Interface) I don't need a mouse to get around.

Been a LONG time

Well it's been a long time since I updated this blog, kinda like a diary when you're busy you haven't the time to write it down.
So ... the desk is working fine and I'm recording The Barleycorn every Monday as well as playing there a couple of times.
My original band (we do some Hendrix/Muddy Waters etc. covers as well) SHA (Sherwood, Haylett, Angilley) is practising more regularly.

This is our video of Quirky



You can hear more SHA songs on reverbnation.com as well as some studio (Gello) stuff.

We jammed some at the guitarists birthday (Clive Haylett) here is a clip with his son Arlo playing accoustic.



I am also working in a cover / corporate band called July Crisis for which there is a Facebook video of our first gig but I've no idea how to embed it, no doubt more gigs and vids will follow.

I also have a couple of ideas for tunes which I will put up here as soon as I have time to lay them down.

That's about it for now, will try and keep this more up-to-date but no promises.

...up and running again

Following on from my previous post re "shit happens ...", owing to the money collected from the benefit, and a top up from my studio partner we have another VS1880 (which saves having to learn new stuff), and I'm getting a second hand laptop soon, so we're back at the Barleycorn as well as being able to record bands live again.

Almost up to speed re the gear stolen (also bought a car) fortunately it's a buyers market ATM, but altogether a hefty dent to the finances.

Anyways ... life goes on ... and it's not looking too bad :)

I'll try to start putting music up here again soon ... 'till then.

Shit happens but life goes on.

Yep, again there's a long pause between blogs, I guess that's just the way it is.

Anyways, this isn't really a musical entry, just a note to myself and any who read this that a few weeks ago I was robbed at gunpoint of my car, recording gear (Roland VS1880 / IBM T43 Laptop) plus mics, leads etc. wallet (R120.00) and cellphone (contacts backed up to laptop :( ), but I didn't get a scratch other than going through the emotions, so as the title says - Shit happens but life goes on.

This happened on my way to recording the Barleycorn Sessions a folksy kinda get together every Monday evening round the corner from where I live.

These guys are amazing, they really appreciated what we were doing (recording the seperate tracks for a remix if wanted and a live mp3 for the artists) so they held a benefit gig to help recoup some of our losses... wow I've never had a benefit gig before and was really touched, about R3000 was raised which won't cover much but was a really sweet thought.

Anyways I'm back to researching what's out there that can record about 8tracks at once, so far the pick of the current bunch seems to be the Yamaha AW1600, and perhaps a netbook for the mp3's.
Will get back one day to let any who read this know how things worked out, any suggestions would be really appreciated.

'till next time .....

oct 08 67 2

Recently I was looking at one of the other music collaboration sites, I've explored
kompoz.com, they do have a better gadget to share your music with, it's still not ideal but here it is.




Notice that the title of this tune is a date, the originator of this tune "themeeksheep" is way prolific and has a bunch of tunes on kompoz just waiting to be finished off with a few takers here and there so I have my doubts that this will see much more action but IMO it's a nice groove and I had fun playing guitar all over it. (click on the gadget to go to the project page, from there you should find my guitar mix... I did say it wasn't yet ideal (for me - yet) )

Do it

OK, this is a new song, rather nice, but what is stumping me is that I cant seem to embed/include the rss from other sites into the body of this blog ... WTF.
Adding the whole page is clumsy, there's got to be an easier way.

I eventually found Google Gadgets...
http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/

which allows you to add gadgets to your web site, they don't show in preview of blogger being script based but then blogger and google know about each other so maybe thats why ... anyways after much anguish on my part it works..... so.



New song, new mission, lets see what happens.

For You

Mid Feb and my first post of the year ... very slack ... but I have an excuse and a plan,
I've been pretty busy collaborating on indaba.com but they don't yet have a widget that I can plant here.
If anyone could let me know how to embed RSS into here I would be grateful for that to, but until then I just figure I will iframe the whole page if that works ... so ....

Recently one of the collaborations I was working on finished (was "published") so here it is




My first published indaba tune ... hope you enjoy it.

Last tunes for the year

Hi again,

Please click here to listen to tunes.

This is probably my last post for the year, been quite productive even if this blog does not really reflect it ... other than by its absence of entries.

Anyways I'm quite impressed with reverbnations management tools, so I've created my own hhh profile


The couple of songs in there to get it going were recorded mostly just to have fun and learn some tools at the studio - hence Gello.
Gello Studios

Elliot doing most of the sequencing and keys, John doing vox, his son Matt on lead guitar, myself on bass and rhythm and Matts Gfriend doing fem vox.

Online Music Collaborations

Hey again,
Just an update, I've been looking at doing collaborative stuff over the internet recently, and it's quite exciting what's out there at the moment. Here are a few I've found :


Indabamusic:
This is kinda close to my heart as indaba means "discuss" in ndebele/zulu so it has a african feel to it right away ... I mean this in a good way :) ... anyways it seems more geared toward remixing ... several competitions with Name artists 3eb, K-OS, etc. but regular musos are very welcome ... I've seen Vernon Ried, (from Living Color ... one of my favourite bands) wicked!
Anyways here's my profile
http://www.indabamusic.com/people/714866974
Basically you have what are called sessions, you can preview whatever the owner feels is a good example of the song, if you like it and are signed up you can then download whatever is available to work on, bring that into your own DAW (Digital Audio Workstation ... Cubase Reaper GarageBand Pro-Tools etc.) and submit an audition, once accepted the rest of the tracks / mixes are then unlocked for you to contribute further.
There is a limit on how much you can download per month (this is very african) you can pay for more.
It also has a shout box to allow members of the session to communicate nicely.

Kompoz
This site took me a little longer to figure out, also a very vibrant community, also running remix competitions (eg. Rudy Sarzo - Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourn)
It has quite a bit more AJAX (web2 technology) which IMO is a double edged sword, anyways they have various projects which again you can preview, but once you're logged in you can download any available track (ie - no audition) to start with it's best to get the lot as they are zipped together along with license notes (Creative Commons).
Once you are in the detail of a project you can preview any of the tracks uploaded so far, and for each track there is a play, download and comment count, there is also a recent activity box and a forum dealing with the project.
Again you're expected to do your own thing with the track on your own DAW but there is a sync track they recommend you use to keep things together ... seems to work nicely except that they use a sine wave, I've since made my own (version1..0) using a square wave pulsing A440 @120BPM, this should [being square] match up much easier.
http://www.backstage.co.za/gareth/data/blog/sync-01.mp3
One other nice thing is that they've incorporated google maps so you can see where the other members are from.
Anyways here's my profile:http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/profile.member?memberId=7895

Riffworld

This was the first collaboration tool I looked at, but then I was searching for collaborative music software as opposed to a site, so this is a 98MB download before you get started, the T4 is free, but they >>really<< want you to buy the full version, it's tied in somehow with the Line6 POD, which I don't have, but it does give an indication of quality.
Anyways, first you download the software (PC or Mac ) and register on the site ( I'm at http://www.riffworld.com/Members/hiphophippie) then fire it up. Basically it's a simplish DAW that works around phrases, (riffcasts) as these are short and centrally stored in it's own format it can be near realtime with your riffcast appearing to all logged into that session pretty soon, this (riffcast) can then be looped, mixed whatever with results being available to all quite quickly.
This does however have a SERIOUS BUG unfortunately, in that you can't save the raw data, you can export the mix, but the riffs are kept online. (as far as I can work out)

On all the sites the folks are friendly (so far), encouraging and range in style and competency so you can find your own level and learn from all around.
Creative Commons seems to be the license of choice when there's one to choose.