Blatant Promotion

Hello everybody.  How is life treating you?

I know, it's been a while since my last epistle, but here I am contacting those readers who find anything I have to say on here of any interest.  I'm being self deprecating there have you noticed?  It's humour people, although in this sun with things the way they are I can understand you thinking that I wouldn't have a funny in me at the moment what with work informing me at the beginning of the week that they had made a mess of my rota, which means that for the whole week I am on standby for day or night shift, and here I am on a day shift thanks to Andy who contacted me before I left work on Monday morning (after a Sunday night shift) to ask if I wanted one of his shifts so that I have something to add to the Friday night shift that I have on the same site on what seems like a permanent thing.  The rest of the week I will be using holidays to cover if there are no shifts to keep my hours at a workable level financially.

But I am not here to talk about that.  The clue to why I am here is in the title.  I am doing some blatant promotion whereby I am selling out having my music available on iTunes and Amazon for sale.  Before people start bemoaning a multitude of outrage though, I must point out that the releases are, in my opinion and I am sure yours' when you read on, of good value.

First of all some of you may have noticed that a collection I put out in my own name has been reissued (A New World Order).  I have talked about this set in length before now as it was originally set for release back in February.  However, after much waiting I contacted the distributors who informed me that I had sent in the wrong type of sound file.  I should have sent a wav as opposed to the mp3 files that I had sent.  I'll tell you what though, the fact that I was releasing it as a Special Edition with 32 songs rather than the original 22 on the CD back in 2004, meant that it cost a lot of mobile broadband usage.  So there we are, 32 songs for £7.99 on iTunes in the UK (I'm not sure of the cost elsewhere but have made it available in other territories on iTunes and Amazon).

After this was sorted out recently, I noticed that the distributors had a deal on where a percentage of their money for anything passed onto them for release over a certain time would go towards the Gary Sinise Foundation, which is for American War Veterans (what can I say, it's an American company, but I'm not averse to charity as many people can attest to), well I just had to do it.  There is also the fact that Tunecore were also only charging me half price as well which sweetened me up even more.

So because of this I decided to go ahead with something I had been planning on doing at a later date - the reissue of Colours (a Project Marv release), but again as a Special Edition featuring much more material at the same price.  That's £7.99 this time for a 30 song set.  Well, I say song, but the thing about the Colours set was that I always envisaged it as being a piece where there would be intervals to provide "thought moments", and the like.  A bit of an arty farty type of thing.  The original 17 track release then featured 4 so called Intervals (although only two were called intervals and one was missing from the original digital release).  Now the interlude that wasn't called one (Synchronise) has been named as such, and the individual intervals have their titles in place as I had originally nicknamed them (Piano In The Distance, Noise, and Farewell).  Farewell in fact is the interval that was on the original CD release but missed off the digital release, and is now put back in it's rightful place.

On top of the original release (that actually did feature the remix of The Little Man as well as the demo recordings for Reasons and Changes - CD not digital back then and now on the digital release), there are other bonuses.

There are also demo recordings for some of the other songs on the set, the original live guide recording for Here I Am featuring Jim Annison on bass (which was re-recorded by myself because we couldn't get the original bass to sound right - it was muddy).  There is an alternative mix of Don't Run Away (that has the harmonica removed and a nice echo effect on the back vocals), plus demo's for three songs that were never recorded but were written for the set, two more "intervals" that were recorded but not used, and two songs that were recorded for the set but not used for different reasons.  Sunshine wasn't included because I wasn't sure about the mix and, by the time I got around to deciding what to put on the album, I couldn't work on it as the files couldn't be found at the studio (a reason why I now take copies of absolutely every sound file recording now ).  Absolutely Anything wasn't included for two reasons.  Firstly I was (and still am) very insecure and unsure about my vocal on the song.  Secondly though I thought that the song was too different to everything else.  Listening back to it now, I think it would potentially have made a really good end track.  Oh well, we can all look back on things differently anyway.

So, there you have it.  Music available for your listening pleasure (or displeasure depending on your point of view).  I think it is really good value for money, and I would also be surprised if out of all of that 62 lots of musical entertainment there isn't at least one thing that you would like.  If you don't, then you can prepare yourself for more material coming soon which is again a departure from what has been before and will be headed by the release of a single!  Yes, and it's a different version to the one that will be on the album as well - a Single Edit!  Getting technical now.

The picture with A New World Order is one that I came up with - I say picture because it's not a cover as such but a picture you see that goes with the song or set.  I just liked the photograph that I had taken of a programme I was watching once about the separation and rejoining of East and West Germany.

The picture for Colours is a great picture that Matt 'Skip' Butcher made up, but with Special Edition strewn across it.  I'm crossing my fingers that Skip will have some time to do me the accompanying picture to the forthcoming single, because his designs are so interesting and inspired.  The "album" that will be released off the back of the "singles" will feature songs that are not just written by myself but by others (including Tony Hearn who will be very glad of that I am sure).  Darn, I've given away that there will be more than one single - oh well, they will be different versions to those that are featured on the album, so that should show you that I care about the music and what goes out there.  It has taken a very long time to do this, but I am very proud of what will be released.

Thank you for reading, and please take care.

30 May 2012 (41 years, 6 months, and 4 days old)

Blog To The Future

The title represents the fact that I wrote this blog early this morning while I was at work.  If you're wondering why I didn't post it at that time, then read on because it's explained straight away (plus Blogger doesn't seem to work on a Blackberry).

Here I am sat at work writing out my blog with pen and a pad because the fool that is me forgot to bring the power adaptor to work for my laptop.

In some ways it has made a refreshing change to be without the distractions of such things, although my Blackberry has given me other ways to check things out (can't play the Facebook games I play on there yet though).

The reason I forgot my adaptor is because I was going to get some music files copied over from an external hard drive onto my laptop to work to work on a project I've been working on for what is probably six years I think (maybe even seven).  Unfortunately neither of my external hard drives are working now on either my laptop or Louise's.  That has now left me with a very big problem because I am certain that the studio doesn't keep people's work on their computers, because they just haven't got that much space.  I have absolutely no idea what I can do now, and may have to forget any of that or the ten songs I had already started on the follow-up to that set as well.  Plus the work I had done for the Christmas album I was working on may also have to be shelved unless there is a way to get that information.

I'm sort of getting fed up of technology in a way, because everything seems to be breaking down.  The DVD/HDD recorder frequently has problems.  At the moment it is behaving, but for the past five or so months every time it is switched off, I have found it to have lost all of the channels each and every time I have switched it back on as well as the timed recording settings.

The laptop itself was a pain recently when I had to get it fixed due to the power button giving up the ghost.  One hundred and thirty pounds later and it was working - sort of!  It is now slower considering that it's a very powerful machine (and bloody expensive when I bought it - I had more money to myself back then)!

At the moment because of forgetting the adaptor, I am writing this whilst listening on my iPod to some classical thing called Christe Eleison (Soprano 1&2), which I have never really heard before.  It is lovely, but not so lovely as the preceding piece entitled Kyrie Eleison.  Both pieces are seemingly by Bach, which does surprise me as I profess to really love the music of Bach, even having learnt a piece on bass guitar many moons ago - I can't play it now!

Not being able to get that music has very much caused me to become low shall we say.  I was in a foul mood when Louise came in from work and was in the same mood when I left for work as well.  I know that I should learn to control myself, but at present I have no idea what to do.  I thought that having them on an external hard drive was safer than keeping them on the computer itself.  I realise now that I should have put them onto data discs as well - recordable DVD's that I could copy from and then they would be easier to keep.  Too late to think of that now, unless by some luck they work again when I would immediately do exactly that!

Anyway, I hope that you are all okay and have a lovely rest of the day.

Tuesday May 15 2012 (41 years, 5 months, and 19 days old).