The Sun Always Shines on TV

I was extremely late to the party with this song, only hearing it for the first time ever in March 2018 (The radio was seldom on in my childhood house) and I fell in love with the track.

Two years later at the start of lockdown I was trawling through YouTube and found the isolated Morten Harket vocals. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to unofficially team up with such a great singer (whether he wanted to or not) and decided to try my own version of the accompaniment. And this is it. Best listened to on headphones.

The track is the first to be mastered on my new DAW and took about 3 months, which seems long but was not helped by the new iMac arriving over a month late, increased parental duties caused by lockdown and learning how to use Logic Pro. Also I started subscribing to Roland Cloud which is a MASSIVE library, yet amazing value for money. Another post on that later but for now I will say this track includes among others a Roland D50, Juno 106, TB-303, an Emulator II and a Korg M1 – all classic 80’s synths!

If you’ve found this page by chance and you happen to know me back in the 1980’s or 90’s, then this track is dedicated to you!

Literally, a blast from the past!

Doesn’t rain but it pours

We have recently had a heatwave in London and along with the great weather comes other extremes, namely thunderstorms. Having not posted much of late, I thought I’d try and win favour back from my readers with a freebie. Here is a royalty free clip (not for resale) of it raining heavily to add to your sound library. Wow I hear you cry, but that’s not all! At 31 secs into the clip there is also a cracking piece of thunder (literally)! It happened right above my head and I thought the distortion would be too great, but it’s actually turned out nice. Download file here

What Time Is On Their Minds?

Been on holiday and, having spent all my savings on Pro Tools have naturally spent my time trying to get to grips with it (who needs to get away like I did this time last year)

I’ve always thought the KLF’s “What Time Is Love?” sounds rather like Lloyd Webber’s “Heaven On Their Minds” so have used this opportunity to let the two clash! Vocals are Jerome Pradon’s taken off YouTube. I’m very pleased with the result of this experiment, not least Pro Tools elastic sound editor which allows you to stretch samples to fit the beat. Marvellous. Other samples used here are Wanda Dee’s infamous sample from “To The Bone”, Mantronix’s “King of the Beats” (also used on Snaps classic “The Power”), Shed Seven’s “Disco Down” and more from Jesus Christ Superstar as well as Apple and ProTools samples and instruments.

Also worth a mention here is a great site I’ve found called Who Sampled – here you can find the sources of most samples from Kanye West to FatBoySlim. Very interesting AND educational!

Pro Tools

Have been playing with the 30 day demo for Pro Tools. Alas, all good things must come to an end. I do hope to raise the cash to buy this or if anyone’s feeling generous they’re welcome to buy it for me. It costs about £500, but compared to Logic, Cubase and Garageband, it’s worth every penny.
Here are two little clips done with the software. (Quite pleased with the second one, might develop it when I get said software)

Dream House!

In the mid-nineties, central Europe was gripped by the biggest thing in music since Michael Cretu’s “Enigma” stormed the charts in 1990. Swiss-born Robert Miles released “Children” – a style of music that would later become known as Dreamhouse/Trance. It was to be played in clubs and caverns all over Europe for the next 35 years and would later prove popular with fitness instructors, DIY superstores and speeding motorists.

I would now like to present “La Twilight Serenissima” – my own humble tribute to this, often deliberately forgotten, genre of music. This track was originally intended to be a cheesy underscore for a magic trick.

Mr Rock n Remix

This clip shows my recent experiment with a Vocoder. It basically takes an input such a vocal wave and sends it through the modulator of a synthesiser. Then when you play a chord on the synth, the input can be heard mixed with the chord that your playing on the synth. On a monotone level it can produce a robotic sound. Speak live through the mic/modulator input and you can get that robot to say anything.

It works very well with chords too as you’ll see here. I’ve used Lynsey Parkin’s sampled vocals that were used on Mr DeJa Vu which feature in Episode 3 of Insomnia.

The first part demonstrates (albeit not very subtle) how you an use this to thicken vocals. In the second part of this tune, you can see I’ve changed the chords away from the original tune altogether and it still works.
And here’s another experiment, a remix of the remix of the….

If you’ve not yet watched Insomnia – Episode 3 then this is the original