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

A slightly frustrating day...

Well, I was quite up for a little more recording, but today the background noise near our flat has been crazy. I mean, there's usually a little traffic noise, but nothing that causes any bother on the mics or guitar pick-up. Today, we've had:

• Big lorries reversing up the street with those big-lorry-reversing noises.


• Lots and lots of fire engines.


• Helicopters. Not sure if it's a swarm, or just one very persistent one.


• Someone in the old brewery opposite shooting seagulls (or possibly just using a bird-scarer).


• Said seagulls complaining about being shot at (or possibly just being scared).

And all that without the usual banishing of the clock into the kitchen. So I didn't really try.

On the other hand, I have managed to get a fair bit more of the revamped website done (hence the change in theme on here, which gives things away a bit...). Coming soon...

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

New stuff!

Hey people, new online happenings:

• DLDown has a new Facebook fan page with a proper music player and video capabilities. I'll be using the new one more over the next wee while, and phasing out the old DLDown group. The new page is here - come and be a fan :o)
• New versions of 4 tracks are up now on Myspace and the afore-mentioned new Facebook page. They are Romans 7, Missing, Icarus and new song Lilies & Sparrows. Lyrics can be found, as always, on our lyrics page.

Let me know what you think!
J

Falling with style

The brand-spanking-new studio version of Icarus is now up at myspace for your delectation and delight. Feedback please!
J

New myspace tracks

A couple of new tracks are up on myspace: a work-in-progress version of Missing, along with a live It's All in Your Mind from the Merlin gig with Tim. Hopefully will have another up soon. Happy listening, and feedback welcome.
J

Are you still alive?!

Well, you may be wondering what's been going on with DLDown in the last wee while... well, here's some idea of what I've been up to anyway...

• A spot of recording! - studio versions of Romans 7, Icarus and Missing are all at various stages near completion, so look out for one or two of those on myspace soon.

• A wee bit o' songwriting. I'm sure everyone has different ways of going about this. My method (for want of a better, less precise word) usually involves lots of scribbled ideas on lots of random bits of paper lying around in my room.

Sometimes, the whole song grows and expands out of a sentence or phrase that I've heard in another song, or have subconsciously picked up somewhere else, the obvious examples being Farther Up and Farther In (from a line in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle) and Icarus (which began as an extrapolation of a line I heard in a Phish song, The Squirming Coil). Others are an attempt at a different angle on a Bible story or passage, and still others are more closely related to emotions or circumstances I'm going through at the time.

Occasionally, some of these make it to the consolidation-into-something-coherent-and-singable stage, from which point the best ones pretty much write themselves, usually in the middle of the night when I really ought to be sleeping. Lilies & Sparrows is coming along nicely, and I'm hopeful that a couple more will be on their way shortly!

• Looking forward to tonight's gig - the first in a wee while. Should be grand!
J