Harry's Blog

I haven't written a song for quite a long time now. My beloved L is to blame for this. Those of you who remember our time at university may also remember that whenever I was feeling miserable I'd write some great song about it. The happier I got, the less inspiration I had for song writing. For the last 17+ months I've been just too happy to write songs - and that's down to L. Not that I'm complaining or anything.

The other issue is that I haven't been playing guitar very much in the last few months. I'm really rusty and rather annoyed with my lack of skills these days. However in the last week or so I've been playing guitar again, so much so that I've begun writing some new music.

Last night I re-installed my recording studio software which I can use for combining my guitar playing, programmed drums, keyboards and vocals. It was a rather frustrating experience. Getting the ASIO system to work correctly and the software record audio from my guitar took ages. Eventually I got it working, so it's best I don't fiddle with it again.

Although I did a little recording last year, I've not produced a major recording since I built my current PC in February 2005. So it was interesting to see how well this PC copes with audio recording and multiple VST effects and instruments. Thanks to the AMD 64 3000+ CPU it seems to work rather well and I can record in much higher fidelity than I have previously. Last night I had success in recording at 96 KHz in 24-bit, which makes for a very crisp clear sound.

But what exactly have I been recording? I've a new song in the works and just as I did the last time I worked on new songs I'm using the process of writing while recording. I really like this method of composition. Recording sections then gives me ideas for other tracks, overdubs and other parts of the song, the process feeds itself and helps me put together something I'm proud to show people.

Update:
So far there's very little down on disk. There's just some 12-string acoustic guitar played by yours truly combined with some programmed drums. And now what will probably be the big chorus riuff. However I thought I'd let you have a listen so you can see where I'm headed with this one. I think there's one thing that you'll agree is clear from this one minute of work-in-progress. And that is that I really need David Coverdale's phone number.

You can listen to the teaser for the work-in-progress Take It Easy (Demo 2).