Bandcamp

A friend of mine recently put me on to bandcamp which is a publishing platform site that will host your music for free. It has good points and bad. It allows you to upload your own artwork, I did the painting and took the landscape photo and it went on without a hitch. It allows you to find out who is dowloading your music and it even has a facility for people to pay for your music. The downside is that it only uploads in ‘lossless’ formats such as wav files which can take quite a while to upload and bandcamp only allows 250 meg. It does not accept mp3′s which is the format that most people convert to after they have finished mastering in wav format, strangely bandcamp converts the wav file so that people who want to download  get it in mp3 format. I have loaded my track No More Lies onto bandcamp but in truth I can’t tell any difference in quality. Check it out and let me know.

http://skeelydog.bandcamp.com/

DESTINY

I wrote this song in early December just before I went on holiday for a month to Goa. I am not particularly superstitious, however, I am not a very good flier and I thought that for some reason putting this on the web before I go on a journey that involved three flights to get there was pushing it. OK I am a little superstitious.  This song is now lost except for the finished track because I lost all the recorded parts when I was transfering my stuff from my old pc to a new one. In January I bought Reason Record, a very powerful and creative tool which made putting songs together a lot easier but it wouldn’t run on my old pc because it was under-powered. When I wrote this song I did it the hard way  by recording all the parts on Reason then converting them to audio files and playing them through Sonar and then adding the guitar and vocals. I had the Sonar lite version which was cheap and cheerful but not really up to the job and made the process long and cumbersome. Anyway that is all behind me now. Of all the files I have transferred onto my new pc it is strange that I just lost the files for this song – maybe it is Destiny!!!!

I am becoming a great fan of Youtube, all you have to do is think of a track and you can find it. Last night I downloaded songs from the fantastic 70′s band ‘The Cate Brothers’, produced by Steve Cropper they were one of the best and most underrated bands of the era, songs like ‘Union Man’ and  Where Can We Go’ are just timeless.  Listen and enjoy  to some great funky guitar playing.

I’m not depressed!!!

Dark Shades in a Sunny Room

Two new musical creations with rather depressing titles. I don’t no why they end as they do. I start out with an idea but never really know where it is going to end up. The song ‘Dark Shades‘ was sort of spontaneous and I put together in less than a few hours. The second ‘No More Lies‘ took me weeks. I have a very patient wife who understands that if I didn’t spend time on my music I’d go nuts. I often wonder what other people do if they haven’t got music to relieve the boredom of everyday life.

I don’t often plug other peoples music but I just got ‘Club Des Belugas‘ 2008 album SWOP – it is has some excellent jazz/latin stuff on it which is very happy and uplifting. So if you are depressed after listening to me go on to Amazon and get SWOP.