Category: Music

UPDATE: My triple-A-sided single is now an 11-track album with a new name.

Obviously, a good old-fashioned circular slice of polyvinyl chloride, PVC, or just vinyl to audiophiles, is a disc, two sides, A and B, sometimes labelled A and A…but what if you want three sides? Is it possible to have a hyper-disk with an extra groovy surface? In reality, maybe not. In virtuality…

https://davebradley.bandcamp.com/album/the-sea-refuses-no-river

Originally Life, Love and Lonicera was “triple A-side single” featuring a Pseudo Gabriel pastiche “Push the Button”, my feverish asthmatic falsetto in the mock jazz of “Wild Honeysuckle” and the slow build and gospelesque break of “Burning Out” based on a poem by JH Livingstone. Those tracks are all still on my BandCamp and SoundCloud pages.

Having mentioned 100 million chemicals just now, by sheer chance, I noticed that “Push the Button” stacks up as my 100th original tune on SoundCloud. It’s part of the double A-side “single” – Life Love, and Lonicera, which includes my big time Pseudo Gabriel sledgehammer of a song, “Push the Button” and Wild Honeysuckle which features my feverish festival falsetto, songs of sexuality on steroids…but NOT NSFW ;-) By,the way, the double A-side became a “triple A-side” and now it’s an 8-track.

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We know it's all electrified and open to abuse
But schmooze it up, confuse it up it is the only muse
Push the button!

A triumphant homecoming gig for Cambridge band Fred’s House saw a heaving Junction2 rocking to the rafters to the bands confident and big, big sound. The band old favourites at Strawberry Fair, Lodestar Festival and countless pubs and clubs in the region came home for the last steps of their Shut Up and Dance tour, delighting an enthusiastic crowd that was on its feet from the first beat with classics from their first, rootsy and folky album “Bonnie and Clyde” and introducing a few new tracks destined for their next album that reveal their strengthening songwriting skills.

The ever-smiling drummer percussionist Paul Richards provides the firm but dynamic foundations for the band with feathery flourishes interspersed between the strongest beat and partnererd perfectly by Gafin Jameson on bass guitar. The departure of lead guitarist Lachlan Golder, who played one of his final gigs with band at a private bash in Cottenham in February for Tricia, the band’s biggest fan who was 50 this year, left space for guest guitarist 18-year old Adam Chinnery who by turns was the classic country rock rhythm player and soloist and a speedy shredmeister where it was warranted by the space in some of the band’s more uptempo songs. Ali Bunclarke recently joined the housemates on keyboard, adding a subtle new layer to the overall sound and some cool fills and licks (Tricia is disappointed that I didn’t fit Ali into my photo).

Acoustic guitar player Griff, brother of Gafin and founding member, was on top form on the 6-string and vocally. And, of course, Vicki Gavin, on lead vocals is the band’s not so secret weapon, her voice never straining sweeps from the fragile rootsy sounds of their gentler repertoire to the full on raunch of their rockers. Vix and Griff, recently engaged to be married, blend beautifully with Gavin providing a subtle third harmony part (hinging on that vocal connection with Griff that you only get with siblings).

A stunning Neil Young cover was icing on the cake and there was plenty of whooping, footstamping and applause, and the occasional wolfwhistle (well done Chris) which brought the band back for an encore. From the first note, this awesome band are destined for greatness.

Husband and wife duo The Black Feathers opened wonderfully for Fred’s House. Beautiful harmonies on melancholic melodies, great guitar (with none of that silly two-handed percussive playing, just proper fingerstyle and strumming) and a unique take on English Americana.

When we’re in our teens, it’s common that we first discover the music we see as our own, discarding the vinyl our parents played, and kicking back on beats to our own tune. For me it was a migration from 60s pop to 70s prog and hard rock. But, when you get to middle age you might find yourself living in some kind of shack and you may ask yourself, well what do I listen to now, as you let the days go by? For me, I’ve revisited many of those “discs” my parents played, but digesting them via a stream of 1s and 0s rather than ass the amplified jitterings of a diamond-tipped needle coursing through the vinyl vein.

And, in turn a huge spectral wall of sound has fed into my own music making as you may well have heard via my BandCamp page. I also like to add a new spin to some of those old favourites, putting together cover versions. What was an endless surprise to me was how the ranking of the cover songs I used to have on SoundCloud ran quite steadily and reflected the longevity of some classic songs. Personally, I love all of them, despite their not fitting into any single niche, indeed they couldn’t be more different, could they, although they’re all basically singing and guitar with percussion? This week, for instance, the Top 5 listens to tracks I’ve racked up are as follows:

Take me home, country roads – John Denver
I’ll Be There – Chic ft. Nile Rodgers
Freewill – Rush
Baker Street – Gerry Rafferty
Solsbury Hill – Peter Gabriel

You’ll notice in at number 2, my cover of the new Chic song (originally recorded and mooted for Sister Sledge back in the day by Nile and Nard), now if you’re uptown, head on downtown, cos that’s where the real funk is at…that song is going to be the most mahusive hit of the summer of 2015, just you watch [UPDATE: It was a number one single! It was also banned by SoundCloud because, fundamentally my version was soooo good!].

A catchy pop song of 2014 had the refrain “I’m all about that bass, no treble” or somesuch throwaway line. The accompanying video, much parodied and pastiched, was popular on teh interwebz and was apparently all about raising body image awareness and itself a pardoy of the modern pop culture in which certain characteristics of the female and male form are emphasised in a modern grotesque..

Anyway, in the spirit of scientific endeavour I did a quick frequency analysis of the song to ascertain whether it really was “all about the bass”. And, guess what? There’s plenty of treble and loads of mid-range frequencies too. Indeed, as you can see from the chart below, at one point in the song there is only very low peaking at the bass end of the audio spectrum. The song, at that point is much more about the treble and plenty about the mids…

Quite bizarrely my tweeting this graphic to DrKiki led to a barage of abuse from a twitter troll, all sub-tweeted after the first addressed tweet. The saddo name for the troll and the fact that they had no followers was also quite bizarre. Their claim was my vaguely (un)funny graphic was the reason no one likes scientists and how we’re all a bunch of…well, you get the picture.

So, is my graphical pastiche of the title of a so-called bubblegum pop song offensive to sociopolitical efforts to remedy almost universal body dysmorphia propagated by the popular media? I really can’t see how (I hadn’t even seen the video until just now, nor listened to the lyrical content other than the refrain) and I’m sure Ms Trainor and her record company would still be laughing all the way to the bank even if it were, given that it was a Grammy-nominated song and one of the biggest-selling tracks of last year, topping the singles charts in 50 countries and selling more than 6 million copies. Yeah, it’s all about that bass, no trouble.

A song of history, chemistry and exploitation, I assume most listeners will get the references…

White line warrior
Heading up the Inca Trail
Silkroad Surfer
Hides behind electric veil

Foothill courier
En route to the promised land
Fuelled with a bitter taste
Torment is in her hand

Global decimation
One in ten, where worlds collide
Find the taker nation
A future lost for lack of pride

Main line quarrier
Digging up the dragon’s tale
Milk wet citizen
Finds the time to read the mail

Timeline warrior
Waking in the promised land
Works with little haste
Though history is in his hands

Global decimation
One in ten, where worlds collide
Find the taker nation
A future lost for lack of pride

Words & Music by David “dB” Bradley
Vocals, Fender and Ibanez electric guitars
Taylor acoustic guitar
Yamaha bass

Drums Klaus “daFunkyDrummer” Tropp

Mixed and mastered by dB

Heads down proggie rock with layers of guitar in the early 80s Rush vein (sans keyboards) and with the awesome Klaus Tropp on drums being the Neil Peart to my Alex Lifeson ;-) Where’s Geddy? Meanwhile, another online buddy Greg Schwaegler has recorded some synth layers and a Moog solo, and you can hear my mix down of that version of my song here. If the original version was some kind of missing link between Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures, then this is definitely the lost tape from Signals, hahaha.

UPDATE: I cranked up the bass a little on the latest mix, check it out, it’ll get your blood pumping…

I posted my song, The Silent Spring from critique on one of the songwriter forums and got a few listens and some nice positive comments, in particular with regard to the mastering I did…an area in which I’m really just a novice.

But, here are a few notes about what I did, just for my own personal notekeeping to be honest, but others might find them interesting if they’ve listened to the song. I suppose I could share the pre-mastered version, but there’s little point suffice to say it sounds quite dull and lifeless tonally compared to the mastered version, which is bright, sparkly and fills the stereo field with crisp and clear resolution between the different instruments and voices, thanks to my tweaking a preset in the iZotope Ozone mastering software, not because of any skill of mine (other than listening and feeling that it sounded right).

From my reply to the forum:

Mastering…I really ain’t an expert. But it seems to boil down to getting all the parts to sound as good as you can individually and making them work together at that level first (getting a good mix, in other words) and then working at the master track level to do EQ (equalisation), stereo imaging/widening, compression (to dampen down any too loud bits) then maximising/limiting to bump up the sound without it distorting in that order on the whole thing as a whole. Oh, some reverb in there too, to bring it all together and give it an ambience as if you’re hearing it in a hall or something.

You can do all that with the basic plugins, the VSTs, in my DAW (digital audio workstation, it’s Mixcraft, which is like Garage Band but for Windows). But for this song, I used a demo version of iZotope Ozone 5 and started from one of its presets called “Excitation and widening” and moved the various sliders or which there are many until it sounded as good as I could get it to sound to my ears in my headphones…

In future productions, I will try and emulate what Ozone does using VSTs for those four/five components mentioned above (thanks to MonoStone for spelling them out for me via email, he’s the real expert). I should also namecheck James Z, who gave me some early EQ lessons but also pointed out what mastering can do.

I think in the old days mastering was more about making a tune work for the pressing technology of vinyl records. These days it’s really just about adding sparkle and width to the song and improving the clarity (and boosting it for radio), so that each track you scooped and FXed sounds as good as possible sitting in with all the others.

This song has quite a few tracks – lead vocal, three sets of backing vocals (with the female doubled), lead guitar, lead guitar for solo (doubled), electric rhythm guitar, acoustic rhythm guitar (doubled), arpeggio acoustic guitar (doubled), bass guitar, percussion, I think that’s it…

I reckon I’ve spent about 10-15 hours on it in total from writing the first chord progression and ad libbing the lyrics to recruiting Emmazen and mastering it…and not counting the 37 years of playing guitar before getting to that point, hahahah.

You can hear the song via the Sciencebase Dave Bradley BandCamp page or on Soundcloud.

A song of hope with an allusion to both the book of the eponymous title and recent revolutionary springs…

The Silent Spring

They tell us history is a lesson to learn
Too many times we ignore it
They say the danger is a stranger to burn
Through the seasons they implore it

It doesn’t matter how near or how far
The border lands we deplore them
They feed us lies that just won’t settle the score
Fail to see that we abhor them

Across the desert a healing wind blows
Now the promise of a silent spring
Though lines were drawn and the borders were closed
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings

They say that fear is the enemy within
Too many times that we have sworn it
From East to West their lies begin to wear thin
The oath I swore I could ignore it

Across the desert a healing wind blows
Now’s the promise of a silent spring
Though lines were drawn and the borders were closed
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings

And through the valleys a healing wind blows
With the promise of a silent spring
The lines were cut but no borders are closed
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings

And in the cities a healing wind blows
With the culture of a vital sting
The ties once cut and all borders exposed
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings

And through the desert a healing wind blows
With the promise of a silent spring
The lines once cut and our feelings deposed
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings
Above the cloud the eagle spreads her wings

Words & Music by Dave Bradley
Vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, bass dB
Backing vocals @Emmazen
Arranged and produced by dB

The amazing @Emmazen joined me on backing vocals and her voice soars like an eagle on this one. This version is the high-res remixed and remastered song available for download from BandCamp. You can also have a listen via the Sciencebase SoundCloud page.

The photo was taken from Stiffkey Marshes in North Norfolk looking across to distant coastal pine trees embedded in sand dunes under a glowering evening sky.

Don’t worry, you’re not going to be Rickrolled, despite the song title ;-)

Words and music, vocals and instrumentation, Dave Bradley

Bait and switch

There was a key under-the-mat,
but you changed all the locks
There was a note deep in your pocket,
but no stamp for the box

I saw a light up in your room,
but your heart was like stone
And though you strayed out of the gloom,
there was nobody home

There was a seed inside the pot,
but no water for the bloom
There was food there on the table,
but no taste in the room

You wore a smile and a little more,
but you cried on the inside
And though you veil all that you feel,
there’s no place left to hide

When you turn about face
I can’t stay in that place
Switch and bait me
I know that you’re cunning

When I find the right pace
It’s the end of the race
Bait and switch
is the game that you’re running

One of my favourite riffs from one of my favourite guitar players, the rarely revered Andy Summers, he has a long, long history dating back to the psychedelia of the 1960s (Soft Machine and many others, much of it LSD fuelled according to his autobiography). Summers is best known for his time with The Police of course, alongside Sting (who hails from my hometown near Newcastle and was given his nickname by my sister’s friend’s Dad!) and drummer Stewart Copeland.

Anyway, this is me doubling vocals (one at the original song pitch, falsetto in the background and the melody again an octave down on the verses). Played the Telecaster parts, and bass guitar but used a downloaded MIDI drumtrack to keep better time than any drummer, even Copeland (Sting joke from Ghost in the Machine era Montserrat recordings).

Posting here as preview sample while licencing on Loudr FM goes through for posting cover to iTunes etc.

The original song was in the UK charts in 1979. It was based on that video I mentioned actually composed in Dm not C#m and I reckon they notched it down a semitone in the studio to give Sting’s high voice a little more headroom…for me I’d need to notch it down another couple of semitones to get the full high without screeching.

Bottle on the beach photo CC licence via Flickr adapted c/o Jenni C