Launch gig videos

A big thank you to all who made it out to the launch gig on Thursday. Here's a couple of wee videos courtesy of BrunetteKoala:

Dan Glover Band? - One of Two



DLDown - Since 3 Days Ago



More videos coming soon courtesy of the mighty Faramir Chowyunthin Gamgee, hopefully with lovely synced-up soundboard audio...

love,
J

Gigs! And a CD launch!

In excited anticipation announcing: 3 gigs!

1. A slot at Henry's Cellar Bar - 8pm, Fri 23rd Oct, £2

2. Supporting davesnewbike at The Lot - 8pm, Sat 31st Oct, £7.50 on the door/£5 in advance

And best of all...

3. Also He Made the Stars... album launch gig at The Lot - 8pm, Thurs 12th Nov, ticket price tba. With Dan Glover Band? supporting. It's gonna be great!

Keep an eye on our live page for more details!
J

Cover art and tracklist

Tracklist:

Planetarium
Since 3 Days Ago (Listen here)
Economology
Romans 7
Missing
Icarus (Listen here)
Left to My Own Devices
The Turning Song
Hide & Seek
Found You
Starmaker
Lilies & Sparrows
You Come Running
Good Night

Finished!

Well, kind of...

The mixing is complete.

The album had been uploaded to Tunecore, soon to be put up on the iTunes music store.

The artwork has been uploaded to the CD pressing people and deemed to meet their specs (they even liked it enough to ask if they could keep a few copies to use as samples), and the master CD is about to be put in the post.

The website will be undergoing a bit of rebuilding in the next few days to enable me to sell downloads directly from it.

Expect a couple of web singles to be up for your listening pleasure within the next week.

And a couple of weeks after that Also, He Made the Stars... will be unleashed on the unsuspecting world...

Exciting times!
J

Progress...

A quick progress report:

• The forthcoming album now has a title - all shall be revealed soon...
• Recording is getting there - a couple of songs have just a few more vocal parts and hopefully a little bit of sax to do. The tracks (likely 14 of them) are now laid out in order and the links between them sorted out. They are a mixture of new material and existing favourites. Then it's just final mixing and mastering...
• I'm beginning to put the artwork together, along with taking quotes for CD pressing, and deciding whether or not to put it up on the likes of iTunes.
• A preview track or two should be up in the next few weeks. Look forward to you hearing them!

J

Activities

DLDown is slowly getting back into doing some recording. Firstly, this involves getting to grips with the many shiny knobs of Logic Express, then working out how best to go about recording each track.

Usually it's best to get a basic guitar or keyboard track laid down for the whole song, normally with a metronome or temporary drum beat to keep the timing predictable. (A live take with a little ebb and flow in the tempo can add some nice expression to a performance, but it's then incredibly difficult to go back and multi-track other layers over the top.)

This is often the hardest step, and the most crucial to get right, as all the other parts making up rest of the song will then hang on this. I'm having a go at doing this for a re-run of Lilies & Sparrows and new song Left to My Own Devices (live version at The Art of Joy show, here). They're progressing, but slowly.

My other project at the moment is to update the DLDown website. I wrote the previous one fairly quickly in a WYSIWYG editor, which produces a usable page, but horrible source code which is a nightmare to edit. I'm having fun writing the new one from scratch, and brushing up on my html and css programming into the bargain.

Not having paid employment for a while has its benefits :o)
J