cool tones

I get an email from my friend Neil (professor of something-or-other at the University of Cambridge and star mandolin/guitar player) telling me that the gig we’re booked for at the end of February has been postponed until July.  This is a bit of a relief to be honest. Four years without a voice means a lot of work and progress is slow.  July might seem a long time off but it’s not.  I'm away for March and half of April and Neil has jollies conferences in May, so our actual rehearsal time will be measured in weeks rather than months.

There’s a downside to the delay though; although I have more time to get my voice working again, I keep finding new songs to do; another list that keeps growing.  And they come from the unlikeliest of places.  Like seeing Colin Hay in Scrubs.  My latest is something I heard at the gym.  

I grew up listening to Doo Wop on a street corner, which is not really something you expect to hear from a white boy, living in Southern England.  An older boy (boy? - he was about 17 I guess) who lived opposite, left school to join the Merchant Navy.  He would bring back records from his travels and play them at full volume out of his bedroom window.  I would stand in the street and listen to Danny and the Juniors, Frankie Lymon and The Drifters.  This would be the late 1950s - early 1960s and most of these records were not available in the shops.

Fast forward to the gym a few weeks ago and I hear ‘there goes my baby’ by The Drifters while we do our warm-up exercises.  I can’t get the song out of my head.  And I keep coming up with different ways of doing it.  

One of the marks of a great song is its ability to work in various styles. The best example is probably Summertime which started off as an operatic aria and ended up as a hippy anthem, via jazz standard.  I once saw/heard The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain (in tails coats) do ‘I am an anarchist’ as a slow shuffle - and succeed in getting the predominantly middle-class, middle-aged audience to sing along.  When it works, it’s magic.

So too is home recording technology.  This device, smaller than an A4 sheet, probably has more recording capacity than those early bands had at their disposal.  I know Anniemay won’t mind if I go off-list for another day (and thereby reduce my ability to destroy the house) and so I plug my guitar in and try various ideas for  ‘there goes my baby’ .  When I’ve finished playing around, I email Neil a couple of tracks to listen to.  

Those last few words seem like a throwaway - the reality is quite astonishing. I can make a recording in my own home, connect the recorder to my computer and then send the output to my friend, who can not only listen, but can alter or add to what I’ve done and then send it back to me. 

How cool is that?

ps. cool tones is a preset in Nik Silver Efx which I thought appropriate for this blip.

pps. I’ve mended the garage door.  I call the garage installer and he talks me through the process of getting the door mechanism back into the overhead track.  That’s pretty good service given that we bought the door 9 years ago.