dandelionburdock
Sunday, June 22, 2003
First post, and a slightly redundant one as not a note of interest has yet been played or sung. However, I’ve just been clearing out my email history, and I’m astonished to see that it was roughly this time last year that I first decided to get my arse in gear with this, and promptly purchased a guitar, a practice amp, a keyboard, mic, sampler and some bits of software.
Unfortunately, soon after all of this arrived, it became clear to me that any illusions I had of picking up a guitar and conjuring up echoes of Purple Haze were a little misguided. It took me three days to properly tune the fucking guitar – I misread the instructions supplied with it and inadvertently tuned all the strings the wrong way around. Unsurprisingly, my first attempted “chords” sounded not dissimilar to the sound a guitar makes when you kick it. And I can verify this because several times I felt that was the best chance I had of getting a reasonable bastard note out of the thing.
Not much better was to follow once I’d vaguely sussed what I was supposed to be doing with it – I’m not the tallest individual in the world, a point emphasised when this is coupled with my peculiarly small hands. Hence, I can’t physically wrap my hands around to play most of the chords on a normal size guitar, and hence said guitar being consigned to a cupboard for the best part of a year.
So, I moved onto the keyboard and spent several weeks trying to suss how to feed it through the sequencer software on my PC. Looking back I’m absolutely staggered that the same PC I was pissing about with then is the same PC I’m currently typing on. What I will say is that trying to convince a PCI soundcard that it will fit into an AGP port is a mistake I’ll only make once in my life. Some vaguely dancey, piano-y things were faffed with – one track was even completed – but nothing even remotely worth letting anyone listen to emerged in my first couple of months as an aspiring rock demigod.
Shortly after I scuttled around all of my new, exciting gear, I realised that none of it was going to solder itself to my fingers and play on my behalf, so I sank back into my everyday pitter patter, consigned it all to various stations under beds and behind cupboards, and pretty much forgot about it.
Then, around Christmas, I had another fit of “must be pop star man” and farted about with a notebook, scribbling down anything that even vaguely rhymed and definitely wasn’t a song by The Bluetones (couple of semi-exciting false starts on that last point). Then got bored and stroppy at inability to be talented once more.
And now, six months on?...
Well, my hands haven’t grown, and the dirt-cheap ¾ size electric I’ve had my eye on has been out of stock for months now. It arrives on Tuesday…
Friday, June 20, 2003
Some backstory to this whole thing here.
In theory I think it’s a brilliant idea: write and record a stack of songs, bypass the music industry completely and try and cultivate a following through a website talking about your work (ed: work? Who do I think I am?) as it all progresses. Then ask said following (ed: following? Fucking fuck!) to provide ideas and to make various contributions towards the project, such as album titles, sleeve art and suchlike, and finally flog the finished article online to them for a reasonable profit.
However, as the person that the whole thing centres around is me, there are a few snags:
I can’t sing.
I can’t play guitar.
I can’t play piano
In fact, the “I can’t play list” is very long, so take my word for it that I’m not exactly god’s gift to the world of music. I can’t read music, have absolutely no contacts in the industry whatsoever, and essentially have never provided anybody (myself included) any kind of reason to believe that I could pull this off.
So, armed with an ailing PC, a discounted software sequencer, a keyboard that only sporadically works, an ancient second hand sampler that I can’t fathom, possibly the cheapest electric guitar on the market, an amp so small and unimpressive that the breeze from opening a door knocks it over, not to mention a singing voice so bad that my cat comes to check I’m alright whenever I use it, I’m going to see what I come up with. And then I’ll sporadically pollute the internet with it, just for my own amusement.
