New Album OUT NOW! First the announcement! A Place I’ve Only Seen In Pictures is OUT NOW on all major streaming sites. You can head to this page to find links to Spotify, YouTube, and if you’re feeling really generous, consider buying the album on Bandcamp, CDs are currently still available. A little about the album I signed an album contract with Monochrome Motif and started writing this album in 2023....
Filtered Sidechains? Most people are familiar with a sidechain input on a compressor. The sidechain is a separate input where you are signalling to the compressor that it should activate on a different signal to the one it is compressing. In some modern pop, this is often used to duck the track volume out when the bass drum kicks in, giving that familiar pulsing sound, but this is not the only use of sidechains....
Announcement Time! So excited to announce the release of my first single with Monochrome Motif. It’s called A Glimpse Into Our Past and is available to purchase as a Pay What You Want now on Bandcamp! Each of the songs on this album is intended to be a land exploring a life. Each has a specific soundscape but elements which are the same and sometimes even used in the same way across tracks, creating a connection between the lives being represented....
Philosophy 0.5 “Algorithms, fuelled by this binary logic, curate our online environments...”I’m no philosopher. Really! But every now and then something sparks my interested and I’ll write about it because it’s important to me. This is one of those things. It relates to music, art, and almost every other creative endeavour, as well as almost every other subject imaginable. We seem no longer to think of things with a scale, but describe our likes and dislikes in increasingly polarising ways....
Introduction A couple of people have asked me how I processed the vocals for my latest release “Shots in the Dark”. There are a number of different layers and I approached them with the thought that I wanted them to sound complex and distressed. The whole theme behind the song is about how I felt compelled to write the track and couldn’t really help myself, despite knowing that it wasn’t a genre I was overly familiar with....
When I was a kid, Silver Bullet’s - 20 Second’s to Comply was released; I was 9 at the time. As an avid listener of the UK Top 40 charts in the UK, I heard it hit the Number 11 spot and remember being transfixed at how this person could talk so fast. Naturally I waded through the copy of the nearest chart magazine and looked for the lyrics the following week. I wouldn’t say the lyrics resonated with me, but the skill and precision with which they were delivered left a big impact.
As a musician and composer, few things can bring as much joy in the musical realm than a successful collaboration. When Jonathan Hadley first approached me to work on arranging an orchestral backing to his track, “When the Lights Go Down”, I was nervous; when he told why he wrote it, I was darn near petrified.
New year, new me! That’s the plan anyway right? It’s about this time of year that we decide we are going to become completely different individuals and then, if you’re anything like me, whittle down the list of things we commit to to the bare bones. I want to say this year is different, but I’m not sure it will be.
Music is something incredibly special… “Music has accompanied our most important life moments. It has comforted us, and been our fight song.”There’s something about music. Something innately powerful. I’m not going to delve into the history of music here because a) it’s hugely vast, and b) I do not know enough to speak about it at length or accuracy, let alone manage to condense it down into a succinct, consumable introduction....
When is an artist not an artist… There’s a draft sitting unfinished in the posts folder of my website. It’s titled I just want to be me. There’s little more than a sentence there, but I can remember clearly what I was intending to write. (I mean it was only a few weeks ago) Proof of the draft.... I wrote a whole post about streaming numbers and what to do when you don’t get the engagement you worked so hard for....