Monday, September 15, 2008

Trying to put music on my blog

I've been on a course today to revise what I used to know about Logic, because I want to start writing songs for other people and sometimes those songs might be pop songs. Apparently, Rhianna's 'Umbrella' was all written on Logic.
It's an all-week course and I can only go for three random days, so maybe I won't learn much, but it was interesting anyway and I asked some dumb questions that I have been wanting to know the answers for for years, and now am much wiser. They are boringly technical, so I won't go into it now.
I remembered a guy called Groucho at CTS Studios in Wembley when we were cutting Freight Train telling us that digitally recorded tracks caused listener fatigue as the brain tries to process all those weeny samples of sound, and that means people don't listen to hours of it, whereas they can with analogue sound. He compared it to fluorescent lighting, which pulses and gives some people migraines.
Years later I was sitting next to a man who worked for Phillips in the Netherlands at a wedding, and I asked him if this was true.
'Yes', he said, 'and we are working hard on technology to help the brain to overcome the little leaps between samples'.
Groucho was apparently an ace live reggae mixer. In his room at CTS there was an original recording device where you could sing straight into a cone which led to a wax-disc cutting machine. He was dying for someone to try it, but I was too timid. Now, I'd love to. I wonder if it's still there?
Anyway, as an experiment I've tried to put London, recorded in Ross-shire, here. Does it work? No.

1 comment:

lazyllama said...

Would that have been Paul "Groucho" Smykle?
He's produced and mixed loads of stuff (have a look on discogs.com) and has his own website http://grouchodub.com/