It's Clobberin' Time... I mean, Studio Time...

Sorry, my son keeps doing the Fantastic 4 movie quote 'it's clobberin time' in the voice of the The Thing toy... cute the first fifty time you hear it!

So yea, I'm back in Basement Records recording six new tunes. I have all the music done, thanks to Pete Newton for laying down the groove on Bass and Simon Larbalestier, for engineering what we've done so far. I'll go back in after Christmas and do all the lead vocals.

Between now and then, I'm hoping to work with a talented female vocalist called Monica, to see if we can come up with some interesting harmonies, backing vocals and perhaps even shared lead on a couple of the new tunes.

Simon will take what we've done, layer on some percussion, strings, keyboards and whatever the songs need and then we have ourselves some pretty polished demos ready to send off to Tommy and Pauly in New York City!

New recordings:

Don't we just make fools of ourselves
My run
Keeping Shtum
My card
Weighted Down
Mellowdrama

I'm hoping to take the tunes out live with Pete, Alex Glendining, Monica and Simon if he's free!

Anyway, when they're done, I'll stick a few up at My Space and/or Garageband so people can hear them.

Still working on finding the funding and management although things look good...

Garageband

I started out my adventure online many, many years ago at a site called Garageband.com

The idea is simple, but genius! Basically, in order to upload one of your own songs to the chart, you have to review twenty pairs of other artists' tunes, rating them on things like production, melody, lyrics, you can comment and you can nominate them for additional awards like 'Best Male Vocals' or 'Best Movie Soundtrack Potential' and so on. Then you are asked which of the pair you preferred and if you would buy it. Your scores, help place the artist in the genre chart they belong to.

Of course people can just listen to the uploaded tunes in the charts and the artists have their own 'page' with a URL, where people can read their bio, lyrics, influences, see the awards, ranking and position in the charts, but best of all... it is a place where you can host your songs and as many as you like as long as you either do enough reviews as mentioned above, or just pay your way into the charts... I.E. $16 and you can upload a tune and start getting reviews.

It's when your tunes have been uploaded that the process starts getting fun, though. You see, every time you logon, if you have received a review, you get a message and you can then go in and read what people think of your tunes. Of course you get a mixed bag... some people know it's a competition and see you as the competition and play the game by scoring you poorly, some people simply want to rack-up the required review pairs so they can upload their own songs, so you get a rushed, useless review where clearly the reviewer didn't listen for longer that thirty seconds! But you do get some insightful reviews from people who are genuinely there just to listen to the music. It can be nice seeing your songs getting four or five stars (out of 5) and of course, picking up awards.

I first entered the charts at Garageband with my surfy rock band, 'Curses'... the page is still up there and you can see the reviews those tunes got and of course, hear them for yourselves by going HERE

I was really excited when I had finished '...honey' and couldn't wait to upload some tunes to get some feedback and see how they did. 'Sold' started out as the runaway fave, picking up good reviews, at one point having five stars and getting selected for Track of the Day in July 2004. But it didn't do too well up against the big boys, and fell away before placing too high. But 'Something to look forward to' placed quite high too, but never really captured anyone's imagination.

Recently, I uploaded the New York mix of 'Sold' and it is doing really well. Click HERE to check it out.

It's Track of the Day on Thursday and has won awards for:

Best Male Vocals
Best Production
Best Lyrics
Best Melody
Best Mood



Safe to say, I am really pleased!!!