Talented Bantams

Thanks! Yes, hindsight says we should have had one of our mates record the set on a good cellphone, or even a ghetto blaster (remember those? that dates me/us!), never mind what the organisers were going to do. Oh well...

The three of us (bass-drums-vox) are all old enough to have experienced the prog-rock era, or at least the latter part of it, so perhaps no wonder that some elements come in, even though we really came of age with the punk movement and its aftermath. I dare say the end result will have more tips of the hat though to a host of late-70s early-80s bands (e.g. Joy Division, Bauhaus, early Cure, Foxx-era Ultravox) as those are at least my greatest influences.

Just back from another evening of knocking songs into shape. Some are easy, others not so much -- we all know the one we were working on last needs some tweaks, but no one has yet had any inspiration. Hopefully a week of thinking about it will lead to a breakthrough. Individual bits are fine, but the whole is like stale beer...

RCB

 

It's actually amazing how good modern smartphones are at sound recording. I use an app called Easy Voice Recorder which records sound files as WAVs(!) and the quality is astonishing.

I was at Bradford Uni from 1980-84, so during the era you are referring to. I saw many bands live at Bradford Uni, including New Order and U2 on their first tours, the Bunnymen, Wah Heat, Teardrop Explodes, The Cure, the Au Pairs, Gang of Four (fantastic!) and no doubt others of that ilk that I've forgotten about. I went late to uni - I was 24 when I moved up from Essex - so I'd already had my musically formative teenage years. I really enjoyed all those early 80s bands at the time but, for me, they haven't aged as well as the classic 60s/70s stuff I grew up with. For example, I loved Echo & the Bunnymen's first two albums at the time, but when I play them now they sound quite flat and dated. But play me Led Zep IV, Argus, Fragile or Disraeli Gears and they all still sound fantastic to my ears. I still love Gang of Four though. And a lot of the early punk stuff like the Clash, Pistols, Damned etc.

Inspiration is a funny thing, isn't it? You never know, someone will probably be noodling around at your next rehearsal, play something that sparks your interest and you'll be off and running. The fascination of music.

 

Thanks for the kind words. Try giving it a listen through headphones or a Bluetooth speaker - it'll sound much better.
Yes, I didn't do the lead vocal or the drum programming, but the bass, guitars and all the production, mixing etc, as well as the video, is me. It started with our band's singer sending me his vocal and acoustic guitar tracks. I then built it all up from there. I dumped the guide acoustic and layered it up with, IIRC, about ten guitar tracks, although some of those are duplicates panned left & right. The riffage and solo is on a Les Paul and the funky rhythm bit before the stops is on a Strat. What I like to think of as the Gilmouresque slide at the end is on a Fret King superstrat, set up with heavy strings for slide. I made the bottleneck from the neck of a Mateus Rose wine bottle; the wine may be shite but the thick glass bottles are perfect for making bottleneck slides! Not a lot of people know that
TBH I don't have a clue about mastering. I have a Waves Audio plugin called CLA Mixdown. Once I've got the mix as good as I can, I slap that plugin on the master output bus and play around with it until it sounds better.
I must admit I was pretty pleased with that project because it was the first time I'd properly used Cubase for anything other than tinkering about.

I'm appallingly slow at using Cubase and there are so many shortcuts and functions that I don't understand or even know about. But I'm retired, with plenty of time on my hands, so speed doesn't really matter. The current project is taking forever. It's seven minutes long and there are eight guitar tracks which I'm having to ruthlessly edit all over the place so they don't clash with each other and turn it all to mush. But I love doing it. It perfectly suits the obsessive perfectionist side of my nature.

I completely agree about Ringo. Master of playing what is necessary for the song. The others called him a metronome, his timing is so good. To think that for a time he was widely regarded as not very good - ' he's not even the best drummer in The Beatles' etc. Listen to Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows or, indeed, Come Together, and tell me he's not a master.

 

I've definitely heard of them. 90s band? I don't think I've ever heard them though. Why did you ask?

 

One of the biggest challenges is what they call gainstaging - ie keeping all the track stems at a reasonable level so that their combined volume doesn't tip everything into the red. However much I tell the others to record stuff at -15db they keep sending me massively loud recordings which I then have to reduce with the pre-gain tool before I can start getting a feasible balance of all the instruments.
Oh, and sending me stereo tracks instead of mono. Gaaah!

 

I must look into that app -- sounds like something we could put to very good use.

Yes, I suppose the half-decade or so from one's mid-teens onwards do play an outsize role in one's musical development -- certainly they did for me. I went into them without really any preferred genre and came out of them certain that my place was amongst the various splinters of the punk explosion. I'd love to get the band to cover 'Not Great Men' or 'Damaged Goods,' but for an audience over here they're probably too obscure.

Agree about inspiration. As you say, we'll just keep at it and eventually the right solution will arrive.

The Lorries started around 80/1 and went on for about a decade; their fifth and last LP came out in 91 but by then only the singer/guitarist Chris Reed remained of the 'classic' lineup. The same surname appears in both bands, and though not rare it isn't at Smith- or Jones-level popularity. Thus I wondered if there might be a connexion.

RCB

 

I never saw them play but... I used to play Sunday League footy with Mark Sweeney the Lorries' original vocalist.

 

Talented is pushing it, but I used to do a bit of concert photography a few years ago.

https://www.thesleepingshaman.com/live-reviews/church-of-misery-sedulus-pist-academy-3-manchester-28-07-2014/

 

Well, Dave (the drummer) and I have suffered for our art, now it's the guitarist's turn!

Two weekends' worth of hard work, and we have the drum and bass tracks recorded (14 songs), along with scratch vocals, for our CD. Our sound/recording engineer is now going to wave his magic wand over the tracks, send them to me, and then Dave and I get to put on our sound/recording engineer hats and oversee the rest of the recording. It was so nice recording the foundations with a first-rate engineer; all we had to do was worry about our performances, and he always knew just what to say to get us back in line whenever we strayed.

It's still going to take a while, but tangible progress at last. I must say the songs sound good even in this stripped-down form, and have they ever changed since I recorded the demos a few years ago. Indeed one song changed dramatically at rehearsal on Wednesday, to be recorded in that new form on Saturday. Finally inspiration struck regarding the song's form. Only took a few years... like about 40! (The singer and I first played a version of that song at the last gig of one of our previous bands back in 1985).

What amazes me is that someone took a photo of us rehearsing for that 1985 gig and last year posted it on a Facebook page (Steelore) devoted to Hamilton bands. Our then-guitarist's wife added explanatory comments, and setlists. Of the originals, I recognise three, two because they are, in greatly altered form, on this CD we are recording now, and one because I have it on a tape we made for a local radio station. The other originals? Not a clue. Don't recognise the titles, have no idea what the lyrics were or how the music sounded, even though I must have written the music for most of them. Funny how some things stay in the mind but not others.

RCB

 

Be good to hear some of your results when you’ve finished them.

 

It will still take many months -- real life keeps getting in the way of art -- but when I have something to share I shall do so. I expect there will be a band website coming as well, once we are closer to a finished product, with snippets at least of the songs.

RCB.

 

Drummer here as well. Played on the pub scene for 14 years, but not since 2015. Don’t have time for it anymore but enjoyed it while it lasted.

 

Nice to see another musical Bantam appear. Hopefully there will come a time when you will be able to get back into playing more.

So we have the essentials for a BT house band! A bit different, too, given the two-drummer line-up. Two guitarists, at least one of whom also sings, and a bassist complete the essentials, and as bonuses we have a photographer to document the inevitable rise to greatness, and someone who's good at parking to drive the van with all the gear. Now, to round out the sound: any keyboardists / horn players / violinists / backing vocalists out there?

RCB