Hey guys n' gals,

I just uploaded a video of a live acoustic take of Flying High. This is an early preview of a song intended to go on my forthcoming fourth album, Dangerous At Any Speed. This is one of the slower songs, as with all my albums you can expect a lot of variety over the whole recording!

Enjoy

Al x

Exciting news! Just wanted to tell you all my new single Turbononsense is released today on digital formats, with a rare live recording of Little Miss Hookey as the "b side". Please check it out, please buy it and please spread the word!

Al :)

 For those of you who like to jam and fancy a challenge, the tab of Turbononsense can be found here:

(tip, just watch out for the weird tuning!)

Turbononsense - Guitar Tab, on UltimateGuitar.com

Here is the freshly remixed version of Turbononsense, making it sharper and a little shorter for airplay. Still deciding what else to put on the record, but the single b-sides will include the full album version and as much other groovy stuff as the pressing plant will allow.

Enjoy :) Al.

Hi fans,

I'm announcing that work is under way on my fourth album, working title "Dangerous At Any Speed"

This will be an exciting project based on the 'incremental album' concept which will involve my fans closely during the development of the album. The final album will be due for release early in 2011. During recording I will be releasing individual tracks as singles / EP's  which I will share with my audience to gauge reaction to the tracks.  This will help me to get a better feel for what people want to hear on the final album and pick the best mixes too.

It also means you won't have to wait a year to hear anything new from me - which we like :))

First three track titles, written and being worked on in the studio are...

• Flying High
• When The DJ Calls Your Name
• Music For A Porn Show

More details and soundbytes coming soon :)

Allan

 

Hi people! It’s been forever since I last blogged, so I have got tons to catch up on. I was emailed recently by my old friend Andy, who is also a musician and songwriter, and he was talking about one of the songs on the Angels album, Beautiful Love Song, which I had totally forgotten he had performed with me at a live show a few years back. It was one of those last minute emergencies where my keyboard player, Steve, was due to go on holiday when we had a “Battle of the Bands” appearance booked.

Wow! I had almost completely forgotten about this moment in time and the memories flooded back about that event. Being a well spirited fellow, Steve kindly agreed to leave his keyboard behind if somebody could be found to play it for the show. In stepped Andy (ordinarily a guitarist) who devoted an entire week of his life to learning the complex piano part of my epic ballad to perfection. He played really well on the night and we got a great response from the crowd. Of course we didn’t win… the winners had loud shirts, stupid dances and were miming to a tape, but ya’know, a B.O.T.B. event it isn’t about winning!

So, having worked at a technical level on that song with Andy in the past, the conversation followed a technical path and I found myself explaining the production process behind the Angels and Alligators albums. As I did so, I realised this would be worth sharing on my blog too, so here it is!

Andy observed that the version of Beautiful Love Song on Angels is noticeably faster than we used to play it. I explained that this is because the whole performance is a live take, piano and vocal. In fact what is interesting about both these albums is that they are entirely live takes. In an ideal world I would have wanted to do two full studio albums, but I found myself coming up against two main problems.

Firstly, I had been trying to put a studio double album project together, with the working title "Start Again", but the time needed and all the changes going on in my life through this time kept pulling me away from it and I ended up with lots of little groups of two or three songs all started at different stages. It was becoming a nightmare to pull it all together and I just didn't have enough time to focus on it. Secondly, the songs that were getting close to finalised in the studio - even though I felt like 'wow, these are the bees knees' in terms of polished production and everything in its right place, the reaction I got from my fans was that my live performances were way more charged with energy. Listening to live snapshots I could see what they meant. You just can't fake the vibe and excitement of a live gig in the studio.

So, I took all that on board and decided on a novel technique to produce the albums in the shortest time possible and capture that live energy. I recorded about a dozen each of live rock- and live unplugged- concerts and cherry picked the best versions of each song encoded straight off the mixing desk stereo mix. I worked hard on making sure the mix was right at the desk before the performances happened, so that basically what got recorded was compressed and equalised at “release quality” and would require minimal work in the studio. So, basically all 24 tracks are exactly as they happened. In the case of Beautiful Love Song, I don't really play the piano that often so it was a bit "in at the deep end" to include that song in the project, but people who had heard me play it live were crazy for it and always requesting it. I listened to a few recent live takes of me playing it, alongside the original demo version, and I felt that the original version was too slow and came across as lacklustre compared with the slightly more upbeat live performances. By contrast, I also had a few live takes of it where the tempo was really dragging and I thought, omg this is like funeral music! So, when I came to record the handful of takes to choose from for the album, I must admit I was just thinking in terms of keeping the song fun, lively and not letting it drag... but apart from that the 1000% concentration on making sure my fingers hit the right notes was harder than my final year exam in rocket science so overall I am amazed I got anything worth putting out from the exercise! I didn't use any form of metronome for any of the unplugged tracks on the Angels album, so they probably wander a bit too... I dunno I haven't checked! hahaha :)

So there you have it! Thanks Andy for inspiring me to put those thoughts into a post!

I have more things to talk about, but its already very late here in England so I think I will sign it off there and chirp up again with more in a day or so.

Ciao!

Al :)

Hey peeps! Thanks for visiting my blog page.

Finally the new music revolution is here! And so are my songs!!! The Internet came along and started changing music just as I was starting to make in-roads to the music industry, playing the cool indie clubs of London, sharpening my skills as a songwriter and performer, and romancing the old-school record industry.

So, between a few sniffs of interest from the old world and the utopian glow of high-tech promise from the mp3 enhanced new world, I got caught in a dilemma for a little while:- keep pursuing the route to sell my creative soul for a record deal... or ride out the new media revolution and see where the wave carried me?

Against the advice of some respected contacts in the music business, I chose the latter option, to see what exciting doors the Internet could open. For a long while nothing much happened - the ideas where there, the technology was there, the popularity was slowly getting there, but there was something missing - the Internet just didn't have any "social gravity". So for a few years I concentrated on writing instead of promoting, deviated to do more with engineering and production, and generally let life carry me in other directions for a while. But in the last year I have found that "social gravity" online. I am using tools like Twitter, ReverbNation, Myspace, Facebook and my own website to get me connected to fans all over the world. 

So, these days I am what is called an "independent" artist - this means I am not really out looking for a record deal or waiting for a limo to pull up outside to take me to the shops. I am more interested in getting a fanbase around my songs because people like what I have to say, or just like my sound. So my fans, you are very important to me! I am excited to get to know you so please feel welcome to comment on things or message me. Also, you are the most important way that I will meet new fans, so please tell your friends about me and help me spread the word.

Al :)