Once that was done, it was time to pack up camp.  To start with, everything was unplugged.  Then cables were coiled and separated into groups depending on which part of the house they needed to end up in.  Then the computer was taken upstairs, followed by all its related peripherals and cabling.  The guitars and keyboard were put back in their corner, in cases where appropriate.  The microphone was put back in its case, the pre-amp was put back in its bag, and all the remaining cables put back in their respective homes.

Of course, that left quite a lot of empty floor, which showed itself to be noticeably less empty than it should have been – but nothing a good hoover wouldn’t sort out.  So I hoovered the whole house (more or less), just for good measure.  After all, my Dad is coming round this evening and my wife is coming back tomorrow, so the house ought to look presentable for them, if only to prove that I can look after myself.  Furniture was put back in place, windows were opened to let in some fresh air, a mug of tea was brewed, and I finally sat down to watch Doctor Who in the evening.

So, all in all, a fantastic week.  I have missed my wife a lot, perhaps more than I expected to, and the occasional phone calls and Skype video calls have been lovely but at at the same time a reminder that they weren’t at home, which in some ways made it more difficult.  Still, the ultimate aim of giving me a nice quiet house to record in was achieved and much appreciated, and I look forward to editing all those track down at some point and creating some finalised tracks for the album.  And putting them into some sort of order.  And then designing some cover art.  And running off a load of CDs.  And working out how to sell them.  And investigating whether I can sell them online as well.  So still plenty to do!

I started off with a drum track, using drum loops, and then added guitars, bass and vocals.  I’ve given it a slightly edgier feel, and hopefully a more mature interpretation too.  It took a while to get right though.  A younger version of myself would have dismissed most rock music as being unsophisticated and requiring very little intelligence – after all, it’s just a case of turning the guitars up too loud and playing three chords…  But I’ve learnt in recent years that there is a definite art to creating a convincing ‘rock’ sound, and getting just the right sound from the guitar and amp combination is tricky stuff.  And of course if you then add in complex guitar solos as well, you can take it to a whole new level again.

Now, I’m not saying that my recording of Father God you reign would compare to a version recorded by Brian May, for instance, but it is pretty rocky, and I reckon it’s much better than the version I did for the Rooted album.  We’ll see once it’s been edited.

After that I drew my attention to The Lord watches over you, which is a song I tried to do with Rooted but never really got the hang of it.  Turns out it’s not really something for a band after all, which explains why I could never make it work.  So instead of featuring the guitar, which is how I wrote it, I’m using an electric piano and giving it a decidedly jazzy beat.  I had lots of fun experimenting with keyboard sounds, working out how to get the sound I wanted out of Logic Express’s software instruments and effects.  I actually ended up doubling up the part onto two voices, to give it a bit of depth and character, panned either side of central to give it a sense of space.

And then I had to think about percussion.  I had been quite impressed by the sound of the jazz drums software instrument on Logic Express which I used earlier in the week for another track, so I played around with that for this track too.  But not before recording some finger clicks!  It all started to take shape nicely, especially once the vocals were added.

As a finishing touch, I recorded some more piano, this time a ‘real’ sound rather than an electric one.  You just can’t have a jazzy track without some improvisation, so I went wild on the keys!  It needed two takes for me to be satisfied, although I’ll probably still tweak it later on – it’s recorded as a MIDI track so I can move notes around and take out some of the mistakes if I need to!  Not quite in the jazz mentality, but there we go.

So that’s 9 songs recorded in 5 days.  I’ve actually decided not to do the last one after all.  I wasn’t entirely convinced by it when I was writing it, if I’m honest, but I added it to my to-do list for this album just to fill it up.  But having done a whole week of recording, I don’t think I could make it work to the same standard as the rest of the tracks, and it doesn’t really fit with the general direction of the album as a whole.  So tomorrow I can focus on revisiting the other tracks and then packing up in good time.  I know I still have a guitar solo to add to Father God you reign, and I will probably re-record the other guitar parts too as I’m still not 100% happy with them – the timing is still out in places where I’ve rushed ahead of the beat a bit.  But overall, I think it’s been a very productive week!

The new song for today was On a hill far away which, contrary to what the title may suggest, is not a rewrite of the old hymn of the same name.  This is a completely new song.  I say completely new, it does draw on a Biblical theme, so I can’t exactly claim complete creative copyright on it!  It focuses on the shepherds looking after their sheep, being told by the angels that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  A nice Christmas theme.  But not at all Christmassy in its musical style, you’ll be glad to hear.

I’ve recorded the piano and vocal parts today, and I’ll go in later and add some string parts to pad it out in places.  I’m fairly pleased with the chorus though, which tries to give an impression of what a choir of angels sounds like (probably completely inadequately, of course, but within the constraints of a minimal budget, earthly musicality, and the stylistic direction of the song as a whole I think it’s pretty close).  I’ve got a nice bit of four part harmony going on there, at the moment with just my own voice but if I get round to it I might see if I can record the church choir singing it instead.  Maybe.

Once that was done, rather than start a new song, I went back and had a listen to the songs I had recorded earlier in the week.  Extra takes were recorded of various bits and pieces, either changing the sound of the guitar, fixing mistakes, re-recording the vocals with a bit more passion, or making the timing a bit more precise.  I spent a fair amount of time re-recording pretty much the entirity of Jesus your name is higher, for instance.  I wasn’t happy with the guitar parts, which had been recorded through my guitar amp and sounded a bit dull, the timing in the bass part was all over the shop, and I replaced the drum loops with a performance on my keyboard instead, which sounds a little more convincing.

So that’s 7 songs down, 3 to go.  And I need it all recorded by Saturday evening, before Ellie’s return on Sunday lunchtime.  And to add to that, I’ve also got to do some shopping, do a few loads of washing, do some other housework, look after the gerbil, pack up my recording studio, move all the furniture back where it belongs, remember to put the bins out, remember to eat, and put my Dad up on Saturday night.  Let’s just hope work doesn’t interfere tomorrow and eat into my afternoon…

Oh, and one final thing – my feet are killing me.  It’s all that standing up to play guitars and sing.  Trouble is, it just can’t be done sitting down, it doesn’t feel right.  However, I am loving my condenser mic, and I’m really noticing the difference in my voice when I warm up properly.  If only I had time to warm up like that before church every Sunday!

I spent a fair amount of time on that, so it was a while before I got to start on the second song of the day, which was Too tired.  This song is written from the perspective of someone who has become disillusioned with the church, who has maybe been when they were younger but stopped going in their teens.  It tells a story of how the church doesn’t seem to hold anything of interest for them, and that God in general doesn’t seem to make much sense, so why bother believing at all.  I guess that’s something a lot of people can relate to.  However it then goes on to talk about how empty their life actually is, that something is missing, and finishes with an element of wonder and guilt that despite all the running, God is still there waiting.

The chorus says this: “Am I too tired to let you revive me, am I too lonely to call you friend, am I too caught up in worldly ways to glorify the King of kings, to worship you the beginning and the end.”  It draws on the idea that we can become so concerned with running away from God and living our own lives that we don’t realise that he can help.

So I started work on an arrangement of that song, and after experimenting with a sort of hip-hop / R&B feel, eventually took inspiration from Evanescence.  Their song My Immortal is such a fantastic song, with a beautiful first section that is primarily piano, string and voice.  They could have left it just with that, but then they went right ahead and reprised the chorus with a full-on rock band interpretation, and it’s truly inspirational.  So I decided to take a similar approach with Too tired, worked up a nice piano part, and made sure I could do a passable rock guitar bit as well.

And then I had to put everything on hold because I had forgotten the time and I was late for an In Spirit rehearsal.  Normally my darling wife would have reminded me.  I’ll be glad when she’s back!  And once that was finished it was a bit late to start thinking about what to make for dinner, so I grabbed some fish and chips on my way home.

That left the remaining few hours of the evening to do a bit of recording for Too tired, but I kept it to just the instruments rather than singing, so that I could do it all through headphones without disturbing the neighbours.  I’ll have to do the singing tomorrow.  Needs a lot of refining, and potentially some re-recording, but there’s already a lot of potential there.

The ‘ethereal’ aspect was provided mainly by the piano, with the sustain pedal held down the whole time.  That adds a very interesting suspended sound to the notes, with them all merging into one another, but it works well in this case.  I also recorded some solo guitar bits too, which with the right settings sounds a bit like the music Marks & Spencer used in their sexy food adverts!

Next was The mystery of the cross, which I actually wrote several years ago.  The lyrics play on the contrasts present in Jesus’ crucifixion.  God the creator, destroyed.  God of love, despised.  God the healer, beaten.  Musically it’s quite simple, so the track is deliberately acoustic, and will be almost completely guitar and voice.  I recorded a couple of tracks of each so that I’ve got something to play with later.  I’m also planning on getting In Spirit to sing on this track – they’re a group of young people at our church who sing together at services sometimes.

And then, in a moment of boredom and curiosity, I added a female voice to the mix in the last chorus.  Not that I had a female voice around to record, mind.  I was actually using the Vocal Transformation filter in Logic Express to transpose my voice up an octave!  I also played around with the formant a bit, to make it sound less chipmunky and more like it was being sung by someone who naturally sings that high.  And to add a bit of realism into the mix, I also sang with a slightly Irish accent to give the impression that it was someone entirely different!  It won’t make it onto the final mix, but it was a fun experiment!

Finally, I started rehearsing Stranger than fiction, which I’ll be recording tomorrow.  It’s got a somewhat funny first line – “What if I told you the sky was green” – and I’m going to try to pick up on that in the style of music.  It’ll be quite quirky, in a way that’s actually surprisingly difficult to describe.  I’ve decided which guitar voice to use though (because I have loads to choose from), so hopefully I’ll make good headway with that tomorrow.

Come holy fire, Mystery of the cross

So after lunch I finished plugging all my rough-shod studio equipment together, warmed up the vocal cords, and started on the recording.  The first song I turned my attention to was Amazing Grace.  Now, I know what you’re thinking, Amazing Grace isn’t exactly a song I can claim complete authorship for; a certain John Newton is famous for that one.  However, not long ago I wrote a new tune for it, and since the original is well out of copyright, I’m all clear to record my own version.  I had recorded the piano part already, and put in some string parts (though at the moment they’re playing through a tinny software instrument until I can find some actual string players), so I just had to add the vocal parts.  I was deliberately keeping it fairly acoustic, so the arrangement was very simple, but it was a good place to start.

Next up it was time to fire up the guitar and make some noise.  Jesus your name is higher is a song I started writing last year at Spring Harvest, and put the finishing touches to a few months later.  It’s turned out to be quite a popular song already – I’ve introduced it at church and also at the camp training day at the weekend, and both times people said how appropriate and fitting it was.  I’ll have to post the lyrics online at some point, and hopefully the score too once I’ve written it.

Anyway, first up I reviewed what I’d recorded last time.  The first step is always recording a framework from which to record onto.  I had already recorded a guitar part, the tune and programmed in a drum track, so I started today by re-recording the guitar parts with a little more precision.  Next up was the bass part, which took only two takes to get a track I was happy with.  Unfortunately I didn’t have time to re-record the vocal parts, but it’s slowly coming together.  The important thing at the moment is to get everything recorded so that I can edit it all together later, which I can do even when Ellie and Samuel are back.

So that’s the first day sorted.  I’ve also got a list of all the songs I’m recording, and there’s 10 of them at the moment.  I’ve rehearsed most of them so I know what I’m going to be doing with them, so hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to do less planning and more recording.

Now I’m about to start my next album.  It’s primarily a solo album, as I am currently without a band, although the plan is to get various people at my current church involved in various ways; they can then use the album to help raise money to replace the church roof.  Of course, with a not-quite-6-month-old baby in the house, recording at home becomes somewhat impossible, so very little has been done so far.  Thankfully, my wife came to the rescue with a cunning plan.

At the weekend we all went up to Gloucester, stayed overnight with Ellie’s Mum, drove to Peterborough on Saturday for a CYFA camp training day, drove back, stayed overnight again, and then after church I drove back to Somerset on my own, leaving wife and child in Gloucester.  They’re going to live it up at Grandma’s house, while I have the house to myself to record as much of the album as I can before they come back on Sunday.  That sounds like a challenge.

So, this afternoon I drove back, and promptly rested in front of the TV for a good hour or so to regain some energy and enthusiasm.  Then began the task of turning the lounge into a recording studio.  The big sofa was moved out of the way, the dining room table was lugged in to serve as a computer desk, the keyboard was moved out of the corner and into the centre of the room, guitars were got out of cases, all manner of cables were strewn on the floor, and the washing up was left ignored in the kitchen.  And thus began the week of bachelor-style squalor.

I’m using my G5 Mac to record everything onto, but that’s also the computer I use for work.  And technically I’m not on holiday, I’m just not doing quite as much work as normal, so I’ve been checking emails and suchlike throughout the day like a good little boy.  Of course, lugging the wrought iron G5 downstairs was a job in itself.  Okay, it’s not actually made of iron, but it has got a hefty metal case and weighs almost as much as me.  Still, before long everything was beginning to take shape, and cables were being plugged in all over the place.

I’ve got my electric guitar plugged into my guitar amp, which is plugged into a pre-amp (because I don’t have a mixer), which is plugged into a USB sound card, which is plugged into my computer.  I also have my bass guitar, which can be plugged straight into the pre-amp.  Then I have two microphones I can plug into the pre-amp, though not at the same time.  The keyboard is connected to the computer via USB and is set up as a MIDI device.  Sound output from the computer is sent to the USB sound card, which is connected up to my speakers, and headphones are plugged into the USB sound card as well so I can monitor the sound without it coming out of the speakers.  Sound complicated?  Below is a quick diagram I whipped up in MindNode:

And then came a problem no sound engineer should ever have to suffer.  I didn’t have enough cables.  Specifically, I didn’t have something to connect my pre-amp to my USB sound card.  Well, technically I did, but I was using that cable to connect the USB sound card to my speakers.  I needed two of the same thing.  As it was, I would be able to record OR play back.  Not both.  And you kinda need both to be able to record properly.

So, in the early hours of this evening, I had to put a halt to my studio set up.  I’ll have to pop out to Tesco tomorrow to see if they have what I need.  And before you start, yes I know Tesco aren’t renowned for their quality sound equipment.  But living in the middle of nowhere I don’t have a great deal of choice.  And besides, my so-called recording studio has zero budget, which is why I’m using a pre-amp instead of a mixer and computer speakers instead of monitor speakers and Tesco value cables instead of top quality insulated ones.  We make do with what we’ve got.

And tomorrow the recording begins…

At the weekend we found ourselves in Paignton, staying overnight with my parents.  It’s not the house I grew up in, but it’s a home from home I’ve learned to love.  ‘Home’, for me, will always be Watcombe Park, in that cosy little 3 bedroom house with the back garden that flooded when it rained and the front garden with the rose bush at the end of the path (but that’s another story).  A great many happy memories were generated in that house, from my earliest childhood memories through to leaving home for university.  And now, nearly 25 years on, with a youngun growing fast, I’m conscious that everything we do has an impact in some way, even if he is only 11 weeks old.  Memories are being made, and as a father I have a duty to ensure that they are good memories.

And so, on this somewhat spontaneous visit, I decided it would be a good opportunity to reclaim a few cassette tapes from my youth, to give Samuel something to listen to.  Or, as the case may be, for me to sing along to until such a time as he can join in.

Top of the list was “Tommy’s Tape”, the product of a Challenge Anneka episode (anyone else remember Anneka Rice?).  The aim was for her to create a tape of nursery rhymes starring celebrities within a weekend to raise money for the premature baby ward at St Thomas’ hospital in London.  It was a tall order, as most of them were, but the result was incredible.  Lots of famous people got involved, all at very short notice, including singers like Beverley Craven and Sonia (both of whom were popular at the time), the girls from Birds of a Feather, Right Said Fred, poetry read by Joanna Lumley and Pam Ayres (to name but a few), a very young Phillip Schofield, and all produced by the legendary George Martin.  The quality, especially given how rushed it must all have been, is incredible.

As a quick aside, I really ought to mention just how excited I was to find that someone had posted a video of that entire episode of Challenge Anneka.  It was 1992, Anneka was wearing a luminous pink and blue jacket, they drove around in her iconic beach buggy, and she talked to her film crew.  Even now, memories are flooding back of watching that programme at home, sat around the television as a family… happy days.

Although I wasn’t able to put my hand on any of the other cassette tapes I remembered from my childhood, Tommy’s Tape surfaced easily, and we promptly popped it into the hifi to listen to it.  Sure enough, it was right there, just as fresh and familiar as if it were still 1992.  Then we listened to it in the car on the way home.  Of course, we don’t have a tape player in our lounge, so I decided to hook my wife’s old walkman up to my computer and transfer the whole thing into MP3 format to preserve it from decay.  That meant listening to it all through again.  Shame.  And then once it was all converted and split into its component tracks, I had to listen to the completed album once more to check that it was playing in iTunes correctly.

For reference, for anyone who might be interested in the technical side of the operation, I plugged the walkman into a USB sound card I have, which provides phono input and output connections, and recorded the source in Audacity (one side at a time), normalised the audio (to make sure it’s all at a suitable volume), saved out as an MP3, and then used Logic Express to split the audio track into per-song chunks which could then be ‘bounced’ out as individual MP3 files.  Those MP3 files were then imported into iTunes, where they were ordered and had their ID3 tags filled in with the appropriate details and album art.  Next time, incidentally, I’ll record straight into Logic Express rather than going via Audactiy, as that turned out to be an unnecessary link in the chain.

I have some favourite tracks, of course.  Timmy Mallet’s rendition of The Laughing Policeman has to be the best I have ever heard.  Beverley Craven’s Hush Little Baby is beautiful, and will undoubtedly make its way onto Samuel’s relaxing nursery playlist.  And I reckon Joanna Lumley’s delightful and expressive performance of Jabberwocky must be definitive; if you know of a better recording, I’d like to hear it.  And the three tracks that have been unrelentingly on my mind the last few days are Sam Brown’s Nellie The Elephant, Julia Fordham’s The Ugly Duckling and Sonia’s Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf, not because they’re necessarily the best songs ever recorded, but because they’re just so catchy.

So thank you, Anneka, for a superb collection of nursery rhymes and children’s songs, which I am still listening to 18 years on and which, thanks to the joys of technology, is now immortalised in my iTunes collection.  And no, you won’t find this album in the iTunes store, nor even on Amazon I wouldn’t have thought, because it was only produced as a tape, there were only ever 10,000 of them, and it was sold exclusively through WHSmith’s.  So if you want to listen to it, you may just have to come and visit us.

So now I have a collection of other tapes that need converting, now that I’ve successfully transfered this one.  If you need me at all in the next few weeks, I’ll probably be in my study, surrounded by cables, cassette tapes and headphones…

When we were at camp just over a week ago my wife gave one of the talks, which was loosely based around the story of King Ahab and the vineyard – Ahab wanted it, the owner refused to sell it, Ahab sulked, his wife had the owner murdered and Ahab claimed the vineyard.  The point of the talk was that sin by association is still sin; God still condemned Ahab for his actions, even though it was Jezebel actually doing the deed.  He didn’t object to the sin, and benefited from it, so was held culpable by God.  Ellie used the illustration that “sharing” music is effectively the same thing – sure, someone else has ripped the music off the CD, but we’ve still accepted the MP3 files and are therefore benefiting from it.  So in God’s eyes, as well as the law’s, we are guilty.

Of course, I sat there and immediately thought about how difficult that message would be for some people, and it came as a shock and surprise when I realised that actually I ought to be applying it to myself as well.  I don’t have huge quantities of downloaded music, but it’s still there, trying to look innocent in the corner, trying not to be noticed by my conscience.  A few I have downloaded, some from the authors’ web sites (though probably still not legally), a few from ‘sharing’ web sites and links, and quite a number that I have ‘borrowed’ from friends and family over the years.  Sure, it’s outweighed by the amount of music I do own, but that’s beside the point.  I have illegal music on my computer.  And I’m now doing something about it.

I’ve opted for a two-stage approach to my music cleansing.  The first step was to open iTunes and untick all the songs I don’t own; that means the MP3 files are still there, but iTunes won’t play them.  The idea behind that is that I’ll be able to more easily see how many songs I don’t own, and be able to judge which I can live without.  I don’t miss them, they can go.  If I do, I’ll add them to the list of albums or music to buy.  The second stage will be actually physically deleting the files.  And getting rid of the backup CDs I have containing those illegal files.  Painful, but necessary.

It does raise an interesting question about ownership though, which I’m still undecided on.  You see, I have music on my computer that belongs to the family.  When the original CD was purchased (legally, I might add), I was living at home and the CD was purchased for the benefit of the entire household.  By that definition, I (at least in part) owned that music, and therefore have every right to have a copy of it on my computer.  However, although I am still part of the family, I am no longer living at home.  So can I still claim ownership of that music?  Is ownership restricted to your physical location?  Or, to put it another way, is the family unit a strong enough bond to permit the bending of the rules?  Where do you draw the line?

I never thought I would find myself in this situation.  I was always happy with the music I had, and had no qualms about having music even though I hadn’t paid for it.  I also thought that getting rid of my illegal music would be a really difficult and painful operation, but I’ve also found it quite liberating – I’ve got a really good feeling from cleaning out the closet of all those cobwebs, owning up to my transgressions and turning over a shiny new leaf.  It also gives me more pleasure in the music I do own.  I’m currently listening to an a cappella group called Glad, from a CD I’ve had for several years – being legal is far more comfortable than teetering on the edge of guilt.

It’s a gathering song, speaking of our unity in Christ, so would go well at the beginning of a service.  I particularly like the end of the second verse, which says “trusting not in our own strength but in your power, saved by grace and not by what we’ve done”.  It helps us recognise how awesome God’s grace is, how he allows us into his presence despite our many failings, and the chorus invites God to “set our hearts ablaze with passion” to do his work.

Come Holy Fire

1. Every walk, every past,
gathered in your name;
fallen hearts, weary souls,
we whom you forgave.
Humbly now we bow before your mighty throne,
and recognise the power of your name.

Come holy fire,
set our hearts ablaze with passion.
Come breath of God,
fan the flames of our desire.
One heart, one mind,
we have gathered here to worship.
Closest friend, humble king,
you are worthy Lord.

2. So we turn from our sin,
drawing close to you;
set aside hopes and dreams,
we will follow you.
Trusting not in our own strength but in your power,
saved by grace and not by what we’ve done.

Chorus

3. Now to you we will sing
of your matchless grace.
Now our souls are set free
to worship in this place.
Earth and heaven open wide to praise your name,
reconciled, united in your blood.

Chorus

Copyright © Matthew Dawkins 2009.

“Come holy fire” by Matthew Dawkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

It’s my prayer that this song is useful.  If you like the song, please let me know and spread the word – it’s not currently associated with a publisher, so you can use it completely free of charge (for now at least).

Download the score for “Come Holy Fire” (PDF)