Just a brief update while watching the Brothers Gibb on Sky Arts. Must be quite old footage as all three of them are on stage. I remember being dragged along kicking and screaming (metaphorically) to the old Wembley Stadium many years back by my first wife to a One Night Only gig of theirs, being surrounded by 70’s throwback porn-tached types wishing the seating would swallow me alive and praying that I didnt see anyone I recognised. But I digress. I cant take anything away from these guys as writers, they wrote some amazing tracks and richly deserved their success. Maybe it was just the fan base, especially those of a particular age that I couldnt warm to.

Anyway…

Its been a busy week, writing and producing with my dear friend and collaborator Robert Pearce (check him out on Soundcloud and ReverbNation. Had it not been for him, I wouldnt be doing this stuff now. I owe him a lot). I’m quite pleased with a track I’ve produced for him, called Brand New Wave. I’ve watched this track evolve and grow and from one of its earliest iterations, I figured that it would be well suited to an Elbow kind of feel, which I think, barring managing to kidnap Guy Garvey’s orchestra and choir, that I’ve managed to achieve, given my limited toolset and experience.

Have a listen to it, if you will… the link is here >>> https://soundcloud.com/steven-mccarthy-hunt/brand-new-wave-2nd-roughmix-12th-sept-2015

Its still a roughmix but I’m quite pleased with how it has turned out.

Thursday sees the start of the short, intense and challenging BASCA Songwriting Camp at Monnow Valley Studios in Wales. This was a formative event last year which cemented my desire to do something positive with my writing and try harder to be as much of a writer as much as I’ve been a producer. The next few days are going to be taken up by ensuring that the Cubase rig that I’m taking with me is going to be ready (Im in the middle of transferring about 30+GB of samples from my main studio iMac to the Macbook Pro Cubase Elements rig. I’ve also got to hook the system up and test it end to end to make sure it all works as expected. Using at least one external firewire disk, plus a Focusrite Saffire interface, a USB Keyboard plus a TC Helicon Voicelive. Going to be running out of USB sockets very fast!

Plus deciding what instrumentation to take with me as well… (Blade, Gretsch or Duesenberg electric guitars, Martin or Taylor acoustics, 88 note vs 49 note USB board, fretted or fretless basses… I’m useless when it comes to having too much choice!)… I’m guessing if anything that the logistics of the trip are probably going to be an awful lot more challenging than the actual long weekend itself. Pretty much all the lyrics that are on this blogsite will be taken with me in their folder and hopefully once I meet the rest of the guys and girls, if they serve to fire our imaginations and take us off in new directions, they’ll have served us well. There have been brief introductions by email so far and this year’s crowd does seem to be quite diverse and eclectic which is exciting.

As I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ll be blogging from Monnow Valley when I’m there. Its an environment where its possible for sparks of ideas to catch fire and grow very quickly into something that everyone leaps into passionately and its wonderful to watch it happen and very gratifying and fulfilling to be part of it. I’m anticipating blogging probably at the end of each day, going over the day’s activities. Thats the plan, but whether it survives that way, I guess time will tell.

Until then… I’ll update you all on Thursday.