Cork Nights - Demo

I decided I'd make public the original demo for Cork Nights. It went through so many iterations that some may like to hear what it began like. I can't remember in what order I recorded the tracks to this. I think it was just the backing piano and melody on the first night and then bass and drums the following day.

Bare in mind this is very very rough, and was only meant as a sketch to keep the ideas in my head, so it doesn't sound very pretty. It holds together fairly well to begin with, but then it all goes badly out of sync.

• Cork Nights - Demo.mp3

I had always planned to put a piano part in the final version but it never got done.

To keep with the idea of this being a "sketch", I took Donncha's original photo and messed about with it. I shifted the hue map, added a brush stroke layer and carved away at this till I got a type of painting look I wanted. I hope he doesn't mind :)

My First Interactions With Reason 1.0

Wrist by Josh

These are the first recordings I made using a demo of Reason 1.0 back in 2000/2001. I messed around with Reason while bored at work. I had no keyboard so I made extensive use of Matrix modules (and the "random pattern" feature) along with pitch wheels on the Subtractor synth. There was no way to save or bounce a mix with the demo so I used Windows Recorder to record while I dickied about live. Oh and what made it even more fun; everything had to be done in 15 minutes because after that Reason would shut down and you'd have to start over again.

The sad thing is, 8 years on and I wouldn't be surprised if people thought these were my best efforts lol

• Reason 1.0 Example 5

The chances are, you the reader will at most only listen to five seconds of one (if any at all) so I'm putting number five first as the best one on show. Its a bubbly trippy trancey ambienty thing (stick on enough genres and people might end up agreeing with something).

• Reason 1.0 Example 2

This is second best (best being a loose musical term).

• Reason 1.0 Example 4

Love that syncopated ReDrum programming lol

• Reason 1.0 Example 3

Always reminded me of a priest giving a sermon at a rave.

• Reason 1.0 Example 1

Ironically, I started off using Reason in a completely live setting. Everything was triggered and manipulated in real time. The thought of doing anything live like that now doesn't exist in my mind. Ableton Live scares the pants off me!

MUSE - Butt Plug Baby

What did poor old Matt Bellamy do to deserve all this lol While I was working on Document 8 I took a break and figured out the main hook from Plug In Baby by MUSE. A few moments of messing and this is the result. All played by hand but heavily quantised.

The title is just an obvious pun on the original. I did have great fun coming up with the cover art. Bellamy has a great expression on his face, such gleefulness almost as if to say: "Butt Mellamy reporting for service!"

Its only a minute long so it won't waste a lot of your life.

Butt Plug Baby.mp3

And this is what its meant to sound like. Plug In Baby as performed on their new HAARP dvd. I'm still waiting for play.com to deliver a copy to me. Bastards!



Don't forget my other bottom related Muse title, "Supermassive Black Hump". A mashup between MUSE and the Black Eyed Peas. I still honestly prefer it to the original Supermassive Black Hole, as do a few others.



Supermassive Black Hole.mp3

[Update 28.02.09] Looks like photobucket deleted my cover art. Talk about extreme censorship. A butt plug is offensive now apparently.

Jon Lord's Bourée

There were a few moments over Christmas where I sat in front of a keyboard just noodling away, this was one of those times. Don't you just hate it when people say "Oh I just threw this together quickly, forgive the mistakes", well I say it all the time cos its true, especially in this case. It was literally arranged and recorded in 20 minutes, although the little edits here and there afterwards did add to the overal time.

There are a few changes from the original (the "stabbing" coda inspired from live versions). Roughly its structured: intro-ABACA-outro The B part has doubled in size just cos... The C part is completely bluff, theres no sense of harmony going on anywhere between the violin and piano lol. The outro jam is just a sloppy end. Theres a hint of Child In Time there too.

What else... Created in Reason 3.0 and I think this is the first piece, composed by someone else, that I've published. As always with these quick pieces, each track was recorded just once, and it either worked or it didn't. A lot of the backing is made up from looping phrases. Even if I was brilliant, I could never be as good as the original composer, so maybe you might like to buy his version :)

[Jon Lord - Bourée.mp3]

[UPDATE 10.04.09] This file seems to be getting downloaded a lot. I'm worried that it's because it's so crap and someone might have linked to it on a forum or something and everyones laughing at it. Cool, I love making people laugh :)

Studying the Notes

Exams are coming up soon so im busy studying. I've used a text to speech program to convert my notes to mp3 files so I can study while I wash the dishes, or in this case, messing around with music.

I was listening to the notes and decided I wanted to spice things up a bit. I just hit the record button snd see what resulted. Unfortunately, I forgot to bypass the eq insert on the master out so, while it sounded ok to me, the actual recording was getting over done and as a result theres some nasty dropoff in the level of the vocals due to the limiters kicking in. Plus the snythetic voice does a lot of clicking. Ah well, its only for fun anyway.

It's starts off well, gets a bit lost, then goes a bit psy/goa like. And with the end, I just turned everything to 11.

Song here

Oh and if anyone has a problem downloading this file could they let me know in a comment thanks; I've heard mixed feedback about the reliability of where I host these files.