Britain has got talent!

Having been dissapointed with a lot of what I've seen on shows like X Factor, 2 nights ago I was just blown away by one of the acts on Britain's Got Talent.
Flava are a dance troupe from Cornwall. Check this out, and pay particular attention to Simon's comments at the end.


This guy was a bit special, too. Simon got this badly wrong, as you'll see!

The Decade the Music Died

Whilst freelancing, the state of the music business, and the rapid decline in record sales, was never far from my mind. The advancement of technology, in particular the popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing, has put record sales into freefall. The ‘grand old’ recording studios are finding it increasingly difficult to stay open, and anyone looking to build a recording studio and run it as a business venture is, for the most part, about to commit financial suicide.

It was thought, not so many years ago, that ‘reference quality CDs’, i.e., recorded at 96khz as opposed to the current 44.1khz, would be the next big thing – consumers would be listening to music recorded with unprecedented sound quality. The idea has not, as yet, caught on. In fact, interestingly, the opposite has happened. People are now listening to less-than-CD-quality MP3s on computer speakers or tiny headphones or, worse still, on mobile phone hands-free mono speakers! It just doesn’t add up! Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of pounds are spent hiring session musicians, producer, sound engineer, recording facilities (often themselves containing tens / hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of recording equipment) to record a single. This then has to be marketed, again with thousands spent on advertising and PR, artwork and distribution. It gets to iTunes and costs 75p. Lets say, for arguments sake, a song has cost £100k to get to iTunes; by my reckoning (not accounting for royalty cuts, publishing splits, etc) it needs to sell over 130,000 copies to break even! Its got to be bloody good! (As of March 17^th, Duffy’s single ‘Mercy’ has sold 40778 copies, and is so far the most popular single of 2008!) Now, until recently – namely until the boon in popularity of iTunes-type facilities, a single was, in marketing terms, merely a calling card for an album. Album sales were that which generated the big bucks. Nowadays, of course, consumers don’t need to buy the whole album – just the tracks they like. So how is it possible for a record company to financially justify the cost of producing and marketing a single?

Even the sales figures are fairly academic when the phenomenon of piracy is brought into the equation. I’m not sure of actual numbers, but I’d be willing to bet that for any given ‘legitimate’ sale on iTunes for any given chart track, there’d be multiple instances of illegal cloning and ‘sharing’ of that same track.

Even without considering piracy, the amount of music which record companies themselves are releasing as free downloads, is unprecedented. Look at Prince, Radiohead, the Charletans, to name a few – releasing their albums practically for free! Aren’t they devaluing the marketplace further?

In pop music, the only sure-fire way of making a living is by gigging. If your music is available in digital form, and if it is any good, it will get stolen many, many times. The amount of people listening to it will be far more than how many paid for it. Fact. It will not be long before entire albums are merely calling-cards for live shows.

The future of pop music has to lie in live performance. After all you can't clone a good night out and share it on Limewire!

A Great day at the Grove

What could be more fun? We arrived this morning at British Grove Studios in Chiswick at 9:00 (following a 5am start), to record strings for 3 tracks on the forthcoming Freya album. The live room was already set up for our strings players, with some of the worlds finest microphones - a selection of Neuman M49s and M50s along with an array of Schoepps - all courtesy of the Decca microphone collection. Alastair Gavin (currently MD for Mama Mia in the West End) was our string arranger and conductor. He'd lovingly scored out parts for 1st and 2nd violins, violas, celli and double bass, for 3 of the songs on the album. The 11 musicians arrived (including prinipal violinist Alexander Balanescu), the session files were loaded into the studio's computer, and at 10am sharp, the baton took flight. WOW! What a sound!!! Brilliant musicians!
I sat and listened as a piece of music written after a couple of cans of beer and a lengthy jam session by myself and bass player Karl Morgan suddenly took on a new life. It was an incredible experience!
The studio itself is stunning - built for, and owned by, Mark Knopfler. A fabulous Neve console in Studio 1, flanked by 2 beautifully refurbished vintage desks, fully plumbed in and working. In Studio 2 is a wonderful API desk. Both studios have a splendid collection of outboard equipment and each have 3 Studer 880s, fitted with 24, 16 and 8 track head blocks. The machine room is a work of art. It houses the power supplys and automation computers for the consoles, the servers, the A-D and D-A converters and the 2 Mac Pros. Everything is clearly labelled - a real labour of love. I love this level of attention to detail.

A truly magnificent day - one to remember. Thanks to all the staff at British Grove; to the musicians; to Alastair; to JD for the ride; to Major Butler for his significant expertise behind the desk, and as captain of the ship!

project:Freya myspace site up and running

With the album recording in its final stages, we've decided to put a few previews on myspace. Check it out. (Also the more 'plays' we get, the more chance we have of getting reviews in industry publications.)

We're looking to have the album completed by the end of November. The project got put on hold, as Freya lost her voice, and then fell off one of her polo horses and broke her ankle!

She's beginning showcasing imminently, and we're looking at marketing options for early next year with a hope of a spring release.

Linux - I tried!

Linux is a free open-source operating system based on Unix. Linux was originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers from around the globe.

Many people who are frustrated with the Microsoft family of operating systems, e.g., WindowsXP, Vista, etc, are switching to linux. There are a number of available packages (distros) which are mostly completely free. Free, too, are the many applications which you can install. Many of these rival main-stream products, like Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, MediaPlayer, and so-on.

I've been experimenting with the Fedora Core distro. It comes with KDE - a windows-like desktop environment, a number of Office-like applications, media players, email, contact and calendar apps, and a host of other goodies. There are thousands of completely free (open source) software packages to be found amongst the linux community.

However, there is a bit of a learning curve, and I found that it was becoming a hobby which I did not have time for!

There are a number of configuration issues, particularly if you have fairly new hardware. Drivers for certain things are not always readily available, and the file system takes some real getting used to.

It is an unbelievably stable system, though - mine did not crash once all the time I was using it. Large companies have reported years of constant crash-free operation! It also runs really well on older and slower machines - machines which would not be powerful enough to run XP.

My problem is that I run a (home) network of 5 PCs, two of which are dual-boot, and doing any 'under-the-hood' operations - such as disk management, back-up schedules, calendar and contact syncing, etc, required almost constant research onto the internet to find solutions. I felt that I was over-complicating things by having another operating system on the home network.

If you are not particularly technically minded, Linux is great as a useful (and extremely reliable) Windows / Office replacement - with the added satisfaction that you are not lining the heavy pockets of Bill Gates. Don't let me put you off! However, if you need to manage more system-level stuff, then be prepared to fettle! Having said that, there is a vast amount of knowledge available on the net to help you along.

For me it was causing more problems that it was solving - namely it was taking up far too much of my time!

I will, however, be installing a linux distro on an older PC I have in the garage for fiddling about with when I do have time, but I've discovered I'm not yet in a position whereby I can go completely microsoft-free just yet!

Recording "Freya" album

Its been a very long time since my last post, but there is good reason for this! I've been involved in a writing / recording project since January 29th, and have not found a great deal of spare time!!

It all started on a family holiday two years ago. We (myself, Penny and the kids) went camping near St Tropez. Freya (Penny's cousin) was staying with her folks, at their house also near St. T. We were invited over for a meal, when I heard Freya playing the piano and singing. I thought it sounded good, and suggested that, when we all got back to blightey, I bring some kit to her place and make a recording. The following April, we hooked up and recorded a demo. She loved the process so much, her heart was set on writing and recording more material. I was duly enlisted to facilitate this!

Freya and I have now written a whole bunch of songs, enough for at least a couple of albums, and are now in the recording phase of the project, due to complete this on July 19th whereby the mix sessions will follow.



For the writing phase, we set up a writing space at her parents fabulous home in the Cotswolds, taking over their shooting lodge whilst the shooting season was in recess. We hired some wonderful musical instruments - Gibson and Fender guitars, Rhodes Suitcase88 electric piano, Hammond C3 and 147 valve Leslie, a set of beefy studio monitors and a nice big mixing console and set to work. Thanks to Tickle Music Hire for this. We also bought a whopper of a computer to handle the recording and midi sequencing tasks required for the writing and demo stage - thanks to Carillon and Turnkey for this. They also provided the software: Cubase 4, Reason and NI Komplete (a brilliant collection of software synths and sample players).



The songs are based mainly around Freya's life experiences - she's kept diaries since she was first able to hold a pen to a piece of paper, so there was plenty of material for inspiration - some jubilant, some quite dark and difficult.

We also did the Dylan thing, hanging out in coffee shops and making up stories about the people we observed! Great fun...

Once the writing phase was complete and some demo recordings drafted, we set about finding a place to record. We'd initially booked Real World - Peter Gabriel's staggeringly sumptuous studio, just outside Bath. However, this would have proved logistically difficult, as Freya had other commitments elsewhere, and would have found the endless hours in the car tiring. By chance I came across Yellow Shark studios, right in the centre of Cheltenham, and happened to call them on a day when a Mr Matt Butler was in residence. Butler was Paul McCartney's engineer for many years, and has recorded and produced many of the worlds finest bands and artists. On meeting him and the studio owner (also in the process of setting up a record label and publishing company!) we played them our material, and their eyes lit up. Suddenly the project had shifted gear! Matt "Major" Butler was brought in as engineer and producer. With his contacts amongst session musicians, we set about hiring some seriously good players to overdub the instrumentation. This has taken the sound of the project to a new level.

The studio itself is excellent, euipped with a virtually new Studer 2" 24 track recorder, along with Radar, and Pro-Tools. It also has a fabulous Yamaha C5 grand piano, a beautiful Hammond A100 (basically a B3 with extra bits and bobs) , a 147 Leslie, a Rhodes 76, a great collection of mics, and some great sounding rooms. Also, being in the heart of Cheltenham, there is no shortage of fine eateries and drinkeries!



So we're now negotiating recording contracts, publishing, licensing, PR and marketing, with a view to releasing the first single in early Autumn.

We've yet to record the lead vocals, brass and backing vocals, and we're going to Czechoslovakia to record the orchestral strings, as this is more cost effective than our original plan (Abbey Road - exciting, but expensive) so plenty yet to do!

I'll endeavour to keep you posted as to release dates, forthcoming gigs and any radio / tv stuff which may (hopefully) be happening.

Sorry, nothing for you to listen to yet - there'll be a myspace site set up soon as part of the marketing and PR campaign where you'll be able to hear what we've been up to...

System Tools

I heard a wonderfully simple analogy yesterday during a group meditation on Psalm 23. We were looking at how the concept of rest is a divine source of re-charge for the soul; how the busy-ness of day to day life can de-energize and drain power from the long-term plan; how the onslaught of a thousand emails, text messages and voicemails all awaiting response can clutter the brain so that ones efficiency at dealing with said requests diminishes at a rate which can cause major stress, and eventual melt-down.

The analogy was of the process of defragmenting the hard-drive. Those of you who are used to using microsoft operating systems will know what I mean. For those who use proper operating systems, I'll explain...

If you use your computer a lot, its hard drive gets cluttered. Installing and removing programs can be the worst culpret. Residual 'stuff' which the un-install programs fail to remove remain in-situ. The consequence is that when the hard drive's read-head needs to find a piece of data, it has to trawls through a load of disorganised sludge to get to it. If it has to do this a few times in quick succession, it can cause the machine to slow down horrendously.

Windows includes a program call DiskDefragmenter. What this does is scans your hard drive and re-organise it so that all the folders in use are in one place, all the system (essential for running) files are in another, and the free space on the disk is all in one nice neat and tidy area. This dramatically increases efficiency of the drive to store and retrieve data.

What is great about the program is the Graphicl User Interface, i.e., that which you see on the screen during the process of defragmentation - you can actually see it happening; you can actually see how inefficient the drive has been, and watch all of your files being organised.

If you haven't defragmented your hard drive in a while, you may find that you are not able to complete tasks as quickly and efficiently as you once were, and the arrival of new tasks seems to place a disproportionate load on your system.

Defrag. Defrag often; build it into your schedule. By taking this 'green pastures' rest you are not eating valuable time, you are actually re-energizing your soul, so that the time you have got can be used wisely and efficiently.