Brother Ray -  a return to form! Welcome back!

For Will - loved the dramatic opening music, sounds like an epic film soundtrack. Then a huge dynamic contrast as we enter the sung part. Like the ‘baroque’ bit. Then back to the powerful stuff with the big drums. Great.

Miss You Kiss You - raising the bar to a new level of kinkiness!

Rescue Me - another classic Ray show-tune. The plot for a musical that has been forming in my head keeps taking new directions!

Sugar Daddy - another great long intro, slowly building into a nice edgy pop song.

Sister Selkie

Great session, well done.  Gentle Beginnings is beautiful. If early on in the day you were feeling like you didn’t have a single thing to say (track 3), you certainly turned it around by the end of the session with the amazing folk pastiche Robin’s Tale. Loved Wedding Vows and Cuckoo’s Melody too. Really nice recorder playing.

Brother Turville

From the Corner of My Eye -  a great guitar riff, and really interesting use of the diminished chords for a slightly uneasy feel.

Made for the Camera - another trademark riff/vocal melody combo. Liked the lyrics too. Very appropriate as the Chilcott Inquiry goes on.

Zombie Eyes - I know you said the drums were boring, but I like the sound of your drum machine - it does what it needs to do.

Sister and Brother Biccies (is that incest?)

An impressive quantity of songs with some real gems within. Your ’stream of consciousness’ vocals are remarkably well formed a lot of the time.

My favourites tend to be the simpler guitar/vocal tracks, such as Coffee and Tea, Tears and Bears and When You Were Young.  But there is some good comedy to be had with the ones that use backing tracks. It would be great if there really was a huge commercial AOR smash hit about inappropriate spellchecker suggestions.

The lyrical idea conveyed in If I Were a Giant is really nice too. Nice one, Will.

Brother Typewriter

The tracks to which we listened again on Saturday were Through Hollow LANS and Is It Really Relaxing?  Some great guitar soloing in the latter.  Similarly in Santana’s Last Stand. I need to work on my vibrato to get it as good as yours! The Sin Plant was really interesting - must follow your link and try it out for myself. And Cold Callers was good comedy.

Myself (the Buffalo)

I am particularly pleased with all 3 random card songs - and especially the lyrical inspiration derived from a tube of Homebase Essentials Quick Drying Filler.

Great stuff everyone. This all bodes extremely well for next month’s Derbyshire LiveLodge.

BB  x

Looking forward to downloading everyone’s tunes.

Brother Oak

I had good fun doing the session this month. Decided to do it on the actual day of the listening meet at Brother Buffalo’s - I had about 7 hours and managed to produce 9 tracks.

In the wake of the BBC4 Arena documentary on Brian Eno which aired on Friday, two of the songs are directly inspired by him. “Through Hollow LANs” is a play on one of his old song titles, and “The Sin Plant” is inspired by a plant-like VST instrument called Synplant which Eno was enthusing about in the documentary - link here. It’s a pretty weird synth to be sure.

One of the other tracks is inspired by an annoying interruption to the session, whilst another still is a fellow lodge member tribute. Other than that it’s pretty much your standard Typewriter experimentation (if that’s not an oxymoron)

I can’t remember what equipment I used but I’m sure the next door neighbour can… always turn it up while recording, kids!

Really enjoyed last night’s listening session - well done all.

BT x

Half-way through the session I decided it was time to resurrect the random cards - so there is a suite of 3 tracks for which the chord sequences were determined using the same process I used back in the day of BL session 6 - i.e. starting with 24 cards (for the 12 major and minor chords); randlomly selecting 8 cards for the first RCS (4 for the verse, 4 for the chorus), then another 8 from the remaining 16 for the next RCS, then the final remaining 8 for the 3rd RCS.

In case you’re interested the sequences that arose were:

RCS1:   D   Am   Bm  C#m  ;  Cm   C   B   Em

RCS2:  C#    E    Bflat m    G  ;   Eflat m   Fm   G#   Gm

RCS3:   Bflat   Eflat   F#m   G#m   ;   A   F    F#    Dm

Innovation for this session was that I did some ‘live drumming’ (on the keyboard) for one of the tracks instead of my usual approach of either using loops or clicking the beats onto the midi ‘piano roll’ score.  My timing is not that great, so a few notes needed to be quantized, but on the whole I thought it wasn’t bad.

Gear used was minimal - just a midi controller kbd playing the sounds incorporated in Ableton Live and an acoustic guitar with no effects pedals.  Simples.

Plus there’s a sample from the first LiveLodge in there somewhere.

Looking forward to hearing everything tonight.

BB

“Corner Of My Eye” and “Made For The Camera” are genuine ICS creations put together over the last couple of days.

“Zombie Eyes” is a fairly aged song of mine, but one I’ve only ever played acoustically, I’ve been trying to get it to sound OK as a sort of New Wave type song and this is the result.  As per usual, my drums are bit repetitive and unappealing.  If anyone can let me into the secrets of laying down good drum tracks, be it software or a way of doing things, I would be grateful.

Hope all goes well tonight.  I will download and listen to all your tracks next week and give my feedback in another post.

Cheers!

Brother Turville

I’m so sorry I missed the last lodge gathering. Hope you all had a fab time and everyone has got off to a happy start in 2010!

I’ve just been listening to all the music and am VERY impressed by how much was created. (but where’s your stuff Brother Oak???)

So here’s a few brief words of encouragement just to prove that I have actually downloaded listened to everything…

Brother Buffalo: The medley idea is very clever and got you to create a nice variety of moods. It must be my ego, but I loved the SelkieMedley best and was reminded of all sorts of songs I’d forgotten!

Brother Sewing Machine: How that hell did you manage to do so many tracks? I’m impressed. You definitely understand the whole essence of immersion. I was very amused by ‘All Played By Hand’. ‘Derbyshire Children’s Hospital’ is a real heartbreaker, and I also liked ‘I will Not Apologise’ because of the mix of spoken word and song.

Brother Turville: I really like your long instrumental lead-ins; they set a mood nicely :o)

Sister Biccies: WOW. You’ve virtually created a complete album in one session!!!!!!!!!! Top quality throughout with a really professional sound and a genuine heart/voice of your own. I loved loads of your tracks but here are my top favs: A Reggae Christmas, Ambioni, Double Funk and Rosiefrapp. You should be selling this stuff.

Brother Typewriter: Some weird but wonderful stuff! ‘Dr Canopener’ is very funny and I loved the guitar in ‘Red Lights on the Xmas Tree’. My favourite is ‘Under the Icefloes’, probably because I tend to go for atmospheric music. A perfect little winter collection!

Really impressed.

love Sister Selkie

Hope you all enjoy what I’ve done with your material and enjoy playing ’spot the song’ when we listen to them later.

Cheers

Brother Buffalo. x

All played by hand - Featuring the great Phil Oakey.

I will not apologise - based around a sample of Tom Cruise in Magnolia.

As the fatman sang - A reworking of my ‘off the cuff’ acoustic number from a previous session.

Book of longing - just me and a guitar.

Carry me Home - Look mum! 3 part harmonies (and no autotune!)

Chess - with a surprise mirror ending!

Derbyshire Children’s Hospital - more a reflection of our fears than what actually happened

Flipya for real - A traditional song. With a loud bit/quiet bit dynamic and backing voclas from Benicio del Toro

I say - Circuitbenders.co.uk posted samples of this great machine that sounds ike a filthy old man - great!

In praise of VST - I promise this will be the last Boosh sample I ever use

Just Like John Hurt - Bult around the intro of ‘Galveston’ performed by Glen Campbell

Naughty train - one of 2 that I’m giving to Steve to use in his xbox game.

Nick Griffin - The second appearance of Tom Cruise’s Magnolia character in one of my songs.

Noise Pollution - glitch rock featuring the talents of Jerome Flynn and My Life Story

Oh Oh - the second song for Steve’s xbox

Pump - Built around trying to get the VST compressor to ‘pump’ the bass and drum track.

Starting to learn - the first track I did built on a dum/synth loop I liked.

Wah Wah - thanks to Leonard Cohen for a lyrical idea.

What if its right - Was another synth and drum loop that I liked

Your dirty word - Leonard Cohen helping out again with lyrics

Lookign forward to tomorrow! Its going to be great