It’s a Tascam 464. Yes it’s 15 years old. Yes it’s cassette tape. Yes it’s noisy and hissy . . .

But you can’t kill a good thing!

This is my old cassette 4-track that I gave to Matthew a few months ago when he was starting the songwriting. He wanted a quick and easy “desktop” solution to quickly capture ideas. We’ve previously used things like those old table top cassette recorders or even dictaphones. They’re handy and quick, but they don’t let you explore additional ideas in the same way as the 4-track does.

These early stages of demo recording are always rough and ready. To the average listener, some of the sketches would probably sound clumsy, amature’ish and somewhat disjointed. Usually an acoustic guitar or piano rambling away with very few fine production points. Sometimes it takes a little leap of imagination to hear the kernel idea in a song this early on. The better ideas usually jump out at you very quickly, but you can’t discount ANY ideas – you never know where the next nugget of a pop song will come from . . .

And of course, recording this way forces you into a certain methodology. All the mod cons of modern digital recording afford the writer certain luxuries. For instance, being able to work in a non linear way means that you can go over and over a chorus until it’s somewhat “perfected”.

A writer can endlessly audition and alter any single part of a song (verse, chorus, bridge, middle 8, etc.) until he’s satisfied with the result. Consequently, when recording is complete it’s not uncommon for some musicians to have to go back and “relearn” the part they just recorded – because all the verses, choruses etc., were created in a disjointed, non-linear way.

Linear tape recording forces the songwriter to focus on the creation AND the performance at the same time. Some songwriters find this makes for a more “robust” song.

But that’s not to say that one method has an advantage over the other. They just produce slightly different results. In fact I doubt most of us could spot the method used to write a song just by listening to that song!

So the 4-track cassette approach to writing and demo’ing songs has been Matthew’s preferred (but not only) method for a long time now. And for these sessions we were all adamant that this was the way that was going to work best for us.

It’s not until the song is very well formed that we then take it and bring it onto the next “pre-production” stage. Only very occassionally will we bring it straight to the recording studio for a full blown session.

Whatever the method, it really pays to have everything worked out by the time you hit the recording studio. Some bands and musicians are happy to leave some important parts of the creation process until they’re in studio. Especially when money is not an issue, because this method invariably takes time which means, of course, money. In fact I’m sure that the maxim “Time is Money” was first used by musicians recording in very expensive studios!

So, what I should have said in the first paragraph is: -

“If you fail to prepare then you have prepared to fail” . . .

Instead I went and made a long story boring. Ah well, ya live ‘n learn

Darren . . .

We have finished recording the demo for a song called “Chocolate Factory”.

Featuring Mandolin,Marimba,Acoustic Guitar,Bass and Drums.

Influenced by a story about the Cadbury’s Factory.Story goes that it was built right beside a famine mound.

Oh the bitter sweet irony.

This version is the second we have recorded and it has changed only slightly from the original.

This song you could easily recognise as a Pale tune.

Not that it is Pale by numbers, but it has a good few trademarks and landmarks of a Pale song.

Mandolin player Shane Wearen has a big hand in this song as he wrote the music for it.

Oscar,Bravo,Delta,

Matthew Devereux

We have finished the demo process for this one just recently.
Two versions exist of this song at the moment.
Version two will more likely the version we will record.
The first version was a lounge-like organ and piano version in a somewhat Leonard Cohen “I’m Your Man” fashion.
The second version is a very different affair with the entire music getting re-written in the process with a few new and unlikely instruments are getting used.
The words have remained untouched.
The testimony by previous students of the Christian Brothers are clearly one of the subject matters on this one, no disguising it.
One of those songs that is what it is, without apologies.
I will post a further update about this one soon.

Delta, Aplha, Omega
…Over …And …Out
Matthew Devereux

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_Christian_Brothers