No More the Child

A 2000 song from Kevin Summerfeilds pen. Music written by me
Kevin traveled from Northampton several times to record music with me after he responded to an advert in the Stage newspaper i had running for a fortnight. The other songs included a Billy Ray Cyrus cover "Some gave All" Original "Rain" "White girl Baby" and finally his last original song "Back to Haunt you"
I've lost contact with kevin he's possibly in the manchester area.

Do Ya Rememba (Joseph Tour Demo '03)

I was looking for some Martin guitar strings the 2nd from bottom A string broke, it had been so long and i'm surprised it hadn't gone earlier, I usually get them from Amazon, anyway the router in my brothers bedroom stopped working and i popped upstairs to reset the 'mainframe & airport transmitter' & i found an old demo cd from the Joseph Technicolour dreamboat tour of 2003. I had a MacBook 15" a Oxygen midi man 2 octave keyboard. The vocals aren't good cause they were sang into the laptop microphone and thats whats printed! I've added some outboard to polish as much as i can since.
I usually keep the place names of the town and hotel room i composed the song in including original lyric sheets etcetera , they're here somewhere 'bouts here just lying in a cupboard but for now as eva here a note of what i was doing in 2003, and hope you don't ask me to stop singing!

Francesca - Songbird


Tiny excerpt of Songbird from Francesca Mepham (Lv)

Matt Condon (pno)

IMHO better than 1/2 of the penned ballads written today

(from the album Dreams by Fleetwood Mac written by Christine Mcvie (Pno, LV) , Lindsey Buckingham (ACG)

NB. The Bernard Fanning "Songbird" from Tea & Sympathy is misrepresented in Wikipedia as the same musical & lyrical composition as Christine McVie

Ring My Bell '98 vox dubs

Such a long long time ago, the whipendale studio management programme
Most of the talent travelled from Leeds, Manchester perhaps the midlands, here is the acapella from the Anita Ward cover "Ring My Bell"
If i remember it right the Producer was Ron Wubry, we chatted in the annex for hours before the vocalist arrived (traffic) the MC from DJ Jamie Richards (Ealing Broadway Boulevard) Glenn came and added a few lines a cool cat but the song refused to deliver its magic and its stayed 'in the can'

Bass - to stereo chorus or not to stereo chorus

Bass - to stereo chorus or not to stereo chorus

So you've recorded a trio or quartet and the low part of the mix needs an extra smoothness or contains long notes requiring an extra effect to perc up the interest down there or its a smoking hot reggae dub & you want to do something out of the ordinary , a Levi Stubbs motown groove, etc the list goes on and on.
Anyhow whilst we tap out possible genre's of mix or crack up listing them, lets just presume you are going to add chorus to a low end instrument and you are faced with two options, mono or mono to stereo chorus.
Nine out of Ten clients choose stereo if i ask them which kind of chorus they would like. Citing " it's wider, its bigger and stereo has been better than mono since 1960's " All of which is true in some respects but the stereo effect should be used with caution on lower end instruments due to phase coherence.
If you imagine one large speaker and two medium speakers, the sum of the 1 large is equal to the 2 medium.
Brill, now imagine a single bass note played on both set up's. If the 2 medium speakers are not set exactly in the right place the sound waves that emit from the speakers will not 'scan' correctly within the mix/control room and frequencies will be cancelled out causing troughs and peaks within the replayed notes.
The large 1 speaker only has to play its low note and it is correct. The problem of coherence is greater in the lower frequencies because the sound travels at a slower rate so the cancelling out part where the frequencies fight and reduce the 'weight' 'power' and 'strength' of the signal last longer.

In summary the lower part of the mix is best kept in mono for strength, coherence and the ability to replay the mix on incorrectly assembled systems with greater chances of sounding like the system was correctly set up.

Thats a lot of tech & i understand if you zoned out within the first few lines. The Detroit ' motor city ' motown sound is such a good example of great mono recording if your jonesing for simplicity, try an early Stevie Wonder recording, plenty of music. Then contrast it to a very elaborate recording such as 'Frankie goes to Hollywood' Two tribes. The high end is crystal clear in comparison to the early motor city recordings, but back down on the bass end its strong and coherent a great example.


Keep mixing!