Is this thing still on?

Well my slackness at keeping this blog up to date has been noticed, so I guess I had better do something about it.

I am continuing to work on my album Parkview. I has been slow progress, I guess that’s one of the issues when you are writing and recording everything yourself. Sometimes I am jealous of bands that can go into the studio and bang out an album very quickly. However I also know that that isn’t the way that I want to work at the moment. Although it takes a lot longer, a big part of the enjoyment for me is experimenting and improvising at every stage of the writing, recording and mixing. It also doesn’t help that I seem to be a big fan of massive amounts of procrastination.

That being said, there is definitely a time to knuckle down and get on with things, and that is what is happening right now with my album. I have now recorded all 11 of the songs that will be on Parkview, 9 of them are completely mixed and mastered and two are in the final stages of being mixed. With a little bit of luck this will be finished in the next month or two and then I can actually release the album.

You can have a listen to the tracks that have been completed so far here:

 

It hasn’t all been work, work, work on Parkview though. I have tried to channel my procrastination into something creative and that has been pretty successful to be honest. I have now written enough songs for my second album, which at the moment is dues to be called Signal Fire. I’m very happy with the songs and how they are sounding as I record them. I think the album will have a darker, vintage synth type of sound and I am having a great deal of fun playing around with lots of old keyboards and drum machines. This is one of my current favourites, the Roland VP330, which has been released as a very good plug-in called the V+ by XILS Lab:

I have also written a few instrumental tracks called Celluloid and The Landing which have gone down well with everyone that has heard then, but I will write them up in a separate post.

Stephen.