It's not often that I get chance to sit down and write some words... I'm usually working on new tunes or bits of sound work for a few film/TV people I know. Wow, how exciting, you might say. What a fascinating and star-spangled life you must lead, you might carry on to say. You would be wrong. Sitting in a studio with your face lit by monitors is neither star-spangled nor is it providing your RDA of vitamin D, I've discovered.
It is, however, the only way for me to stay sane. I tried not making funny noises with computers and it made my brain collapse in on itself. I ended up reading old copies of Reader's Digest and making my own cottage cheese. After a few months of this I realised that I had no friends left and I had gone completely grey. I'm not talking about my hair – oh no – I'm taking about my face. This is not a good position to be in, I thought to myself, I should perhaps investigate the outside world. Maybe I should replace my poor old battered four-track with a spangly new computational adding device and write all those amazing pieces of music I'd always promised myself I'd write.
A friend of mine had an Amiga with tracker software on it so I spent some time boring him to death while I tried to figure out ways of making more than four notes happen at once. This quickly proved limiting so I bought an Atari ST and an early copy of Cubase and a couple of noise making boxes. This quickly proved limiting so I got hold of a PC, a slightly better copy of Cubase and some more noise making boxes. This quickly proved limiting (can you see a pattern forming here?) so I sold my soul to the devil and bought a big hairy Pro Tools setup, mixing desk, proper monitors, cables, guitars, more noise making boxes, keyboards and various weird wooden things that variously go “bonk”, “bash” and “thunkle”.
Along the way I did some writing, production and film/tv/theatre work and quickly established a name for myself as “that hairy bloke with a garage full of stuff”.
After a particularly irritating spell with a record company, trying to write to an increasingly specific formula, I decided this really wasn't for me and I chucked it all in, burnt my bridges and started to write the stuff I was interested in writing. This proved to be a great thing for the mind and soul but a dismal thing for the bank balance. Never fear, I told myself, at some point people will appreciate this and your music will sell nearly dozens of units!
So this is roughly where I am now. I'm working with some lovely and talented people on music I actually like. I've got a nice studio that actually works when you turn it all on - apart from the microphone which is a nice old valve job that has it's own opinion on what should and shouldn't be recorded. I have a decent local pub that features neither a vomity smell nor fighty shouting tossers and I don't think I've ever been more content with the sounds coming out of all those small black boxes.
If you are writing music then make sure you figure this bit out much earlier than I did. Write what you want. Write what you love. Ignore people who don't get it because there will be plenty of people out there who will (finding them is tricky and a subject for a completely different and more lengthy blog but it can be done!) and most of all ignore all those people who regularly try to piss on your bonfire. You may not become a millionaire but you'll be a lot happier than the majority of those frustrated writers/composers/singers out there...
Here endeth the lesson (for "lesson" read "rant"). Now go buy our music. x
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