This was available a while back in exchange for a tweet, for Twitter users, but is now on Soundcloud, available for anyone to listen to, download, share, comment on, link to… You know the drill. Here it is:
We recorded this album back in, uhm, February, I think... A long time ago. I’m not used to recording stuff and then it taking this long to happen. But Mike and I are both busy and – crucially – both dads, which seems to make the logistics of making things like this happen that bit more tricky. Continue reading “Third Preview Track from My Forthcoming Album With Mike Outram”
I’ve been uploading these over the last while – some are brand new experiments, a lot of them are things I’ve found on my hard drive recently, of indeterminate origin! I’ll keep adding to the set, but for now, you can have a listen to these (some of them are downloadable if you go to the individual track pages). And it includes my recording of Portrait Of Tracy that I did for Total Guitar Magazine.
There are another handful of tunes to go up – maybe more once I get the hard drive on my desktop computer back up and running. Goodness knows what’s hidden away on there.
On Saturday, I was at v late notice invited to an amazing gig I didn’t even know was happening.
Vernon Reid and I have been Twitter-buddies for a while. We have a few friends in common, and had chatted a fair bit on there. He mentioned he was in London, I suggested meeting up, he invited me to his gig.
I’m SO glad that our new live mixer set up allows us to multitrack record everything. It means we can capture lil’ moments like this one, when I decided to open the House Concert in Camberley with a version of Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello‘.
I’d previously played it at home, but just the chord melody bit. The weirdness in the middle was a whim – I’ve blogged before about the way that the house concert set up lets you take more time over things, and more risks in your playing. Here, they paid off: Continue reading “House Concert Footage: Hello?”
So, Mike Outram and I have been releasing a new preview track each time the play-count on the previous one reaches 500 – the last two are on Souncloud, and are both past that benchmark, so we’ve made another available.
BUT.
It’s not on Soundcloud. It’s available for free in exchange for a Tweet.
I finally got round to doing something I’ve been meaning to for ages, but never managed to line up being motivated and having the money for it – I replaced my live mixer and preamp with a MOTU Ultralite Mk III Soundcard.
As promised, when the 1st of the Steve Lawson/Mike Outram tracks reached 500 plays, we uploaded another one. It’s a really long one that goes through 3 or 4 very different sections, though that evolve on into the next in a lovely fluid way. In order to explain a little of what’s actually going on (it’s a pretty big noise for just a bassist and a guitarist to make live!) I’ve annotated the track, as you can see below. Continue reading “Annotating Tracks With Soundcloud”
…That’s what my brain is asking when I’m improvising.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure and good fortune to spend a day recording with Mike Outram – guitarist extraordinaire. I’ve been a fan of Mike’s for a long time, having heard him in a couple of different settings with Singer/Songwriter Rebecca Hollweg, and more recently with Theo Travis’ Doubletalk quartet.
Recorded at Friday night’s gig at the Islwyn Guitar Club in Crosskeys, Gwent, South Wales, here are two new tunes that ’emerged’ – they’re both improvs, but I like ’em, so will probably have a bash at something like them for the new album…
The recordings are remarkably good considering they’re just on a little Tascam digital recorder thingie (recorded by Andrew Buckton – fab singer/songwriter who came with me, and sang beautifully on the gig too).
Soundcloud is SUCH a great compliment to BandCamp. While BandCamp is all about the curated artifact of music, Soundcloud is all about malleable audio – there’s no restriction on file-size, or resolution, so you can put MP3s up, podcasts, entire gigs as a single embeddable file…
It works great as a sketchbook, and again, you can control whether the stuff is streamable, downloadable or whatever else… There’s also a nice social side to SoundCloud, with the usual 2.0 follower/followee relationship, as well as the option to have ‘private’ files, for sharing music amongst collaborators before making it public. Very useful. It’s got a host of other fantastic features, which you can check out here, and to see it in action, here’s the EP that Michael Manring and I made available a few weeks ago, exclusively via SoundCloud:
The pairing of Bandcamp and Soundcloud is a pretty much unbeatable combo for distributing audio files online. And Bandcamp gives you to option to charge for them as well.
What is as yet un-mapped is the actual relationship between how we value music, and how artists can price their work relating to that value. Donations, like the pay what you want option in Bandcamp, work really well – we the audience get the chance to be generous if we want, and people with no money can still get the music (and if they want to ‘pay’ something, can just share it around – after all, that’s ultimately what it’s all about!) but it still the case that you either pay before you listen (in which case the donation is a guess) OR the listener has to come back and make a donation after (which requires a level of commitment to the ideal that few of us are capable of…)
One of the projects I’m working on is a platform that seeks to work out that value and allow listeners to pay based on it, and I’ll write more about that very soon…
