Stuff wot I dun

Time I put together a definitive list of stuff I've written for posterity. This could be a big one, so I thought I'd get it going, with links to the actual tunes where applicable. I'll edit it as I get time.

Game music:
2011 Alchemy Swap sound track

Theatre music:
2005 Rock Trial
2007 Hamlet Soundtrack
2009 Midsummer Night's Dream Sountrack
2011 Easter Island Musical

Orchestral tunes:
Three Cello movements (for Becky)
Resumea (incomplete string quartet)

Side Projects (songs written with no band/under the guise of a solo project):

Secret Fantasy
I met you at a party
P1

Melpomene
Extended Play


Bands:
Mourning After
Demos:
Temple of Insanity
The Madhouse

AFB
Demos:
The Lighter Demo

Out of Hand
Demos:
Dreamscape

Collecters
Demos:
All these words

Downtuned Shakespeare Company
Demos:
Edinburgh

The Unfaithful
Single songs:
Date Rape Junkie (words by Leila)
King of the Town (words by Luc Lam)

Babysitter - I wrote some songs for this that were never released
Individual Songs:
Red Diamonds
Clear

Electrickery
Albums:
...beyond this point

Individual Songs:
Self harming is character building
If (written with C. Yate)
All My Yesterdays
Strangling Red

Andraste
Albums:
The Secret Valley

Individual songs:
Pluck Pears
Eventide

Panto Music

I'll post links here to the backing tracks for the Panto as I finish them.
Finally, sorted out the file hosting solution. Thanks to Stuart the Nomad's web server will do nicely.

01 Mountain Town - vocal sheet music - Chorus, Cinderella, Man and woman with pram, Baker

02 I'm the King - vocal sheet music - King, Duke and Chorus
(bass part, keys 1, keys 2)

03 Kid's dance (Waybuloo)

04 I need a hero

This is a new version for you Billy! 05 If I were a rich man (apologies for the baby crying in the background!) - vocal sheet music - Baron

06 Walk Like a Man Lyricsvocal melody - Prince, Dandini and Fairy Godmother
(bass,guitar,keys)

[07 Kid's dance 2]

08 Grenade - Buttons

09 Wishing You - Cinderella

10 One of those moments - Cinderella, Fairy Godmother

Act 2

00 Masquerade - vocal sheet music - Chorus

01 Just Dance - vocal sheet music - Prince, Cinderella, Chorus

02 What's that - vocal sheet music - Cedric, Chorus
vocal harmony 2
vocal harmony 3
Vocal harmony 1 is the tune so I've not included it!

03 Perfect Year - Cinderella, Prince

04 All About You - Buttons, Young dancers

05 Don't Stop - Tutti

For Lizzy

All files zipped up

Warning: These are large files so could take some time to come down over a slower connection.

Backing i.e. all backing tracks

Guide i.e. backing tracks plus my vocals

Easter Island backing tracks

For the musical wot I am writing in collaboration with Thomas Jackson

01 Here on Easter Island

02 Here on Easter Island

03 Sing a sad song

04 When I've chopped

05 Chants

06 Is it too late? (Lucio's song)

07 How slender is the thread (acapella)

08 The Wizard

09 I've found you

10 The Real World

11 They think that I'm a monster

12 We can go together

13 I'll say I'm ill

14 Poor dear Bombus

Easter Island guide tracks

i.e. the same thing again but this time with my absolutely horrible voice singing all the parts!

01 Here on Easter Island

02 Here on Easter Island

03 Sing a sad song

04 When I've chopped

05 Chants

06 Is it too late? (Lucio's song)

07 How slender is the thread

08 The Wizard

09 I've found you

10 The Real World

11 They think that I'm a monster

12 We can go together

13 I'll say I'm ill

14 Poor dear Bombus

Unnamed new tune

After finishing annotating the In Flames tune in my last post, I turn my attention to a commission on behalf of a friend.
He bought my offer of a new and original work of music written in his honour.
I have taken the last five lunchtimes to write this as yet unnamed ditty:


Obviously this is a nasty beepy midi version so all the usual provisos apply. I will record it in due course. My home computer is currently in bits so this could take some time.
The tune itself is a bit of a homage to one of my favourite bands Cardiacs, and the solo works of their main man Tim Smith. Tim, who is a musical hero of mine, is currently very ill following a heart attack. The tune itself has a tinkly music box theme which runs through the whole thing. This is a nod to Tim's solo work "Sleeping with the Snake" on his "Oceanland World" CD, and also the rhythmic patterns on "Wireless" on Cardiacs amazing album "Sing to God Part 1". It mimics the band's psychadelic pop style, without their punky edge. I'm going to go instead for soft falsetto pop vocals in the style of Icelandic group Sigur Ros when I do the recording. I haven't written lyrics yet.
The music box motif is also a direct rip off of an In Flames tune, the name of which escapes me at the moment. I am perfectly prepared to admit when I've plagiarised other people's work. I see no problems with doing that. I think my song writing stands alone as original even with borrwing other people's ideas wholesale.

Back again

Not touched this in ages. Suffice to say my busy lifestyle got the better of me and I failed in my challenge. Such a shame, it was all going so well.
Anyway a little update, mainly because I wanted somewhere to put links to my latest works - midi versions of some (not so) popular tunes. If someone makes me aware of a copyright breach here I'll gladly withdraw these files, but I think they are sufficiently different as my own transcriptions to not be wading into that particular legal minefield.
I've sent the last few lunch hours at work transcribing Man Made God by In Flames for my band - just to make it easier for me to learn and remember the arrangement. It's also very good discipline doing these transcriptions. Listen to a nasty embedded midi rendering of this here:


The tune is an extra instrumental bonus track on some versions of their very old album Colony. It's going to be a challenge reducing those multitracked parts to a simple playable arrangement, but that's always a problem when bands do big lavish studio productions.
I did the transcription in my usual tool, Noteworthy Composer. the raw file is here. Look it up to download/play around with this.

Incidently I have a new band since my last post here: Andraste. We play folk metal. A very popular genre contrary to what you may believe.

Midnight Sun

Yesterday I picked up the following:
The Classic Guitar Collection Volume One - Four Easy Pieces (Joseph Kuffner)
Frankly it was easy, and dull and uninspiring. I didn't have time to rack my brains to find a way to bring it alive. I actually don't like much music from this era. I love baroque, rennaissance, early, mediaeval and so on, and I love romantic and modernism and 20th century and minimalism. I hate almost all classical though. No idea why, I just find it twee, dry, flat, monotonous, and some of the cadences Mozart uses induces a negative physical reaction in me. I think I'd rather listen to rap.
Anyway, that done I scooted out of the door up to Seussical rehearsal where we are still bashing through the music, which is growing on me with every small bit of exposure.
Today:
The Four Winds (Matt Seattle) - Midnight Sun Waltz (mandolin)
I originally tried it on a guitar but it lacked a certain something. It's intended as a duet for violins so I took the easy step of doing it for mandolin. The result is here:

It's a brittle sound, and with a couple of errors considering it's practically sight reading, but a lovely lilting melody. I may do this with my lil' sis' on fiddle when I next see her.

Cars Complete

Well I've allowed myself a little break from the challenge and the blog. I think I deserved it, as I was pretty knackered. I mainly spent the time in the recording studio with Greg the Electrickery drummer laying down nice meaty guitar tracks.
Back with a vengeance though. Yesterday's tune was:
Popular Songs for the Classical Guitar (Green Edition) (John Zaradin) - Stars Fell on Alabama (classical guitar)
This is a great book of jazzy arrangements of standards plus some latin numbers thrown in. I bought it years ago, before I could sight-read so I got nowhere with it. It's really satisfying to be able to plough through it now with a newfound confidence and ability. Today I actually picked out another tune and played that - "Tico Tico" which I have a staggeringly good showpiece version of by the box player out of Altan, Dermot Byrne. I'm going to stick with this piece for a bit I think as it has a latin sparkle which makes me go a little gooey inside. In fact here is him doing it live, and I strongly advise you check it out. If you don't play the box, let me assure you that tune is hard as nails.
Today's tune is this:
The Classic Guitar Collection Volume 2 - Recuerdos De La Alhambra (Francisco Tarrega) (classical guitar)
This piece involves a technique which I have never worked on - the repeated picking of the same note with consecutive fingers of the right hand, with the melody being plucked with the thumb in the bass. It is really hard and takes years to perfect. I didn't have years this evening sadly, but I was quite pleased with my progress. Nice Spanish sounding tune it was too. Here is a version being played at roughly 10 times the speeed I can do it by a lass called Kaori Muraji. I'm jealous.
The real meat of tonight's work however was finishing my orchestral version of Cars by Numan, and committing it to mp3 for posterity. I guess it's different enough from the original to allow me to post here without invoking the wrath of A&R:
It's just occured to me on posting this that this is the first recording to feature my voice. This is quite a stylised performance and I'm kind of putting on a voice for it. I've also used a vocoder for the word "Cars" every time it appears.

Setting a misery-guts.

Mel Bay's Complete Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar Book - There are no actual tunes in this book, just loads of short examples, so after picking my way through a few I gave up and moved on to yet another new project. I'm writing a fairly bleak minimalist setting of Where Once Poe Walked by H.P.Lovecraft. I'm setting it for piano, clarinet and soprano. Obviously not being a pianist, I'm unable to imbue their part with any playability or musicality, so all they get to do is play big octaves and long clashing chords. The reason for creating this ugly monster? I've been commissioned by a soprano (Ailsa Mainwaring) to write a tune for her to yodel. However, I know how fussy singers can be so I'm going to write a suite of numbers so she gets to choose, or take them all if she so desires. The tune so far is "modern" in sound (whatever that means), but I find I'm unable to avoid tonality (which I'm sure the singer will be pleased about). I don't actually think much of the brand of modernism that completely rejects tonality, but I do love the darker, edgier sounds of, say, Bartok, in his fabulous two-handed opera, Bluebeard's Castle, so that is the level I'm aiming for. Nowhere near the sophistication of course. I'll give her a chance to sing it before posting any instrumental versions up here.

Rawhide!

Of all the tunes in all the books:
Bluegrass Fiddle Styles (Stacey Philips and Kenny Kosek) - Rawhide - Bill Munroe (mandolin)

So an opportunity to brush down my bluegrass mandolin licks. I absolutely love this stuff. I think I even prefer it to Irish folk were I pushed. This tune is a showpiece as this staggering version attests. Just watch for the little Rasputin like character on mandolin. His bluesy improv. skillz make me weep. *edit* a little web stalking has given me a name (Andy Statman) and I have myself a new hero. Klezma and bluegrass. Lovely stuff. *end edit* The book suggests the absolutely blistering pace of 165 crotchets a minute. I have managed to get a comfy 100 going. Slow and accurate is better than speedy and rubbish. But I must lay it aside before getting the metronome to any decent place due to a rehearsal tonight for a new show. Yes you heard right, yet another endeavour that I, the glutton for punishment am putting myself through. This time it's Seussical, as in Dr. Seuss, the Cat in the Hat etc. and I'm playing th Grinch the moment I put down my baton for Iolanthe. Two show weeks in a row may well kill me, if the green makeup doesn't get me first!

Numan's a New Man

Beyond the Compass (Roy Palmer) - The Flying Cloud (voice, acc. guitar)
I rushed through this tune today. One day my voice will grace these pages. Not this week though. No real effort made, as I was rushing on to the next exciting project.
Where I work, four of us who sit in the same office are keen amateur musicians (some more amateur than others!) and we decided on a mutual challenge - to each record a cover version of the same well known tune in our own inimitable styles. We chose a song each and voted on which we wanted to do. The winning tune was "Cars" by Gary Numan. Judging by the styles of the participants, that means we get one proggy keyboardy version, a strummed acoustic one, and a soulful pop number. As for my version, well I'm not going to give anything about my arrangement away until it's actually finished, but I got disappointingly little done this evening - only a few bars progress.
n34 is coming on apace.
Here is a tune to keep you going:



This is a sampled rendering of the first movement of a string/clarinet ensemble I wrote last year for my friend Becky. It is a kind of fugue and rips off both Bach and Shostakovitch without even coming close to their quality. I'd love to hear this done by live musicians one day.

Too many smoothing irons in the fire

I have been keeping up my challenge, I've just not got round to blogging it, so a quick catch up:

Thursday
Iron Maiden Songbook (Arr Ray Donato) - Prodigal Son (classical guitar)
I mostly spent my time complaining that the arranger, whilst probably trying to make his transcription easier to play, has done precisely the opposite. I worked this out by ear, and this guy has written the opening:
E-------------------------------0-
B----4-------4--5----2-0-----2-0--
G---4--4----4--4----2-------2-----
D--4-------4-------2-------2------
A-2-------2-------0-------0-------
E---------------------------------

Which to my ears is plainly wrong, and quite difficult. The reason is, you get open string ringing and they'd have used a block pattern and shifted it down like this:

E---------------0---------------0-
B------0-------0-------0-------0--
G----8-------8-------6-------6----
D---9-------9-------7-------7-----
A--9-------9-------7-------7------
E-7-------7-------5-------5-------
etc.

How much easier is that? I don't *know* this of course, but it's what 20 years of guitar playing tells me.

I also had last rehearsal of term, and very good it was too.

Friday
Not a book, just a piece of paper I had lying about - Fly Me too the Moon (classical guitar)
I did it as a kind of waltz. My housemate told me it sounded like lift music so I stopped.
Also lots of good work on n34 which I'm chuffed to bits about so far

Saturday
Liasons Diatonique (Alexandra Browne) - Coconut Dance by Alan Lamb (melodeon)
Pretty cool book this where she's tried to annotate the inflections on the melodeon. Quite a nice tune, clearly written for the box.

Today
I'm still actually practicing variation 6 (Wednesday's tune) like mad on my guitar, and it's coming on a treat. I may have to redo the recording at some point. I also found a better way of fingering the most tricky bit.
Today's tune however is:
Folk Songs for Choirs (John Rutter) - Dashing away the Smoothing Iron (mandolin, acc. guitar, bouzouki, bass)
I've recorded the first few bars of this here:

Quite pleased with this really, I think it's bordering on sounding like Mike Oldfield, who I admire, if not worship.

Ill Still

I' was off work today, mainly sleeping, so I feel slightly guilty still keeping this up.
Today's offering is:
The Guitar Music Of Spain Volume 3 (J.Nin-Culmell) - Seis Variaciones Sobre Un Tema De Milan - Variation 6 (classical guitar)
Played on the beautiful guitar I bought in Barcelona on a work trip once. Unfortunately its intonation is a little knackered, but it has a fabulous tone.
I've bitten off a real hard one today as these books get harder throughout the series, and my fingers just arent' strong enough to do these incredible stretches justice. The worst culprit is this baby(it's a tab chord for those guitarist out there:

E-2-
A-3-
D-2-
G-5-
B-5-
E-X-

Getting both fingers across to the 5th fret whilst barring with the first is a challenge. Consequently this performance is sub standard. However I really wanted to get this up here as the variation I chose is absolutely gorgeous. Big full melancholy chords and a lovely take on the simple hearty original theme, which I should record one day for comparison. I put in so much effort to get this to this stage I may keep playing it in the hope that one day it'll trip off my fingers:

Feeling a little peaky.

Well I missed today's rehearsal as I'm not feeling brilliant, probably over working myself.
Still managed a tune though:
Jazz Guitar. Swing to Bebop (Doug Munro) - Solo #10

Jazz guitar represents an Everest sat a pretty long way over my horizon at the moment. I bought this book over 5 years ago. I decided to start at the beginning, so I opened it at page 1 (well 6, but that's not the point).
"Example 1 shows a C major scale in 1st position"
Nice and easy. Example 1 falls under my fingers immediately as I know it already.
"Example 2 shows the C major scale played in every position across the fingerboard using three notes per string."
Oh my god! Example 2 represents 10 years of hard labour. Every scale in every position on the fretboard - don't even think of turning the page until you've learned this. So I still bang through these scales regularly, but I'm not nearly as fluent or comfortable as I should be, or able to just pick out where to play in any given key - which are fairly essential skills for your jazz dude. Oh well it's not fun if it's not a challenge.

Lonesome Road

Today's tune is:
A Complete Guide to Learning The Irish Mandolin (Padraig Carroll) - The Lonesome Road to Dingle (Acoustic guitar)
No recording today as my effort wasn't really worth it, but I was experimenting a little with playing chords along with the tune at the same time, trying to emulate the style of American flatpickers. I didn't really succeed in this as this tune is a Slide (Single Jig) which rarely get this treatment, so I'm not exactly overwhelmed by examples to copy.
It's occurred to me that most of the sheet music I own is for Irish/Folk tunes. My favourite kind of music, which I end up listening to 90% or more of the time is metal, and my interest in folk has only recently spread outside of the one week a year that is the Sidmouth Folk Festival. In the last few years though I have acquired more and more folk instruments, and have mastered none!

Last night's rehearsal was excellent - I noticed ages ago that if you want to get a dynamic effect out of an amateur chorus you have to really over exaggerate the dynamics in practice - I'm doing this in one bit in Iolanthe where I want the sound to grow out of nowhere, so I'm getting them to going from whispering to almost shouting across the course of a couple of bars. It sounds amazing though.

I also started writing a new tune at work today. Working title is N34 (how original) and it's scored for Alto Sax, electric guitar, bass drums and voice. Not sure where it's going yet as I've only written about 12 bars.