Author: Stoneygate

Playlist of the Week (2018/1)

I’ve seen a teeny weeny bit of growth in the number of people listening to my tracks over the last few months, mostly via other peoples’ Spotify playlists. This has been a big encouragement to keep going – the last couple of months have been pretty tough.

So, this year, I thought I’d do a new series of posts with playlists that I’ve been included on and give a shout out to the fantastic people who have been willing to add my music to their lists. If you like the list, give it a follow of course and listen again! I’ll keep going with the series for as many weeks as there are playlists with my music on, so if you’ve got a public playlist and I’m on it, let me know! (NB: your playlist needs to be suitable for all-age listening! I don’t think my music is likely to fit too well on a seriously dark playlist or one that has a lot of swearing anyway, so it’s unlikely to be an issue, but just saying…)

My first playlist of the week in 2018 is Our Fierce Female Friends. It’s by Susan Moss of MoonDreams Music, who makes beautiful lullabies and gentle music suitable for young children (make sure you listen to track 4 for a sample of her work). Susan’s an avid playlist creator, often featuring independent artists like myself amongst better known tracks, which is hugely appreciated.

So, I hope you enjoy listening. Hopefully it will brighten up your commute or chillout time or when you’re doing the cooking.

Crashing Down (part 2)

 It is about time I updated everyone on how things are going. My Dad is still in hospital: it’s been eight weeks already. He has been moved twice now and is back in the original hospital he started in. The move away was because they thought he would need an operation, but it was decided that wouldn’t be necessary, even though he had been as far as having a probable date for it and going nil-by-mouth on the day. So he’s been moved back nearer to home. It’s only a few miles difference, but the rush hour isn’t as horrific, and visiting hours are better for avoiding the worst traffic, so there’s a little less time pressure. I still haven’t met Hugh Laurie or his glamorous team…

We think Dad will be in hospital over Christmas and New Year now; they have identified the cause of his illness and he’s being monitored pretty closely to make sure the antibiotics are winning. We don’t know if he will fully recover, though, and his state can vary a lot between visits.  I’m the optimist and my Mum’s the pessimist. I’m looking at the good days and thinking that he could be nearly back to normal as soon as this infection is beaten, even if it does take a few more months; Mum’s looking at the bad days and talking about the worst-case outcomes.  Of course, either is possible, but Dad is a pretty determined individual, and given enough hope, he will fight this thing.

Doughty's Oil Mill in Lincoln will feature in the video for Run, by Manipulant, feat Stoneygate.

Sneak preview of the video for Run by Manipulant feat Stoneygate. Extra atmosphere provided by Doughty’s Oil Mill, a Grade II listed building in central Lincoln, UK.

I’ve been really tired myself, and am missing my creative work.  I have taken a few days respite, though, and have been working on a video for Manipulant’s track Run, which I contributed vocals to a few months back. I can’t share it with you yet, as it’s not quite finished, but will do once it’s up on YouTube.  It’s a bit different to the other videos I’ve made so far, because it’s a ‘straight video’ rather than an animation or being made from stills.

Just in case I don’t manage to post again in the next few days, please do have a lovely Christmas and New Year! I’m quite intrigued to find out what Christmas will be like in the hospital. All the wards seem to be making a big effort with decorations.  We are having a family get-together as normal, it will just be a bit different.

Everything Came Crashing Down

This is not the easiest post to write. Yesterday marked four weeks since my Dad was taken into hospital as an emergency, with an unidentified illness and a fever spiking at 40 deg.  That’s why I haven’t posted for ages.

The trouble started at the beginning of October, but it took a while for it to become clear that something more serious than a stomach upset or mild food poisoning was going on and to persuade Dad to get seen. There had actually been a few signs Dad wasn’t well over the summer, but we’d put it down to him overdoing it, and he had seemed to get better.  Dad’s age seemed to accelerate – he seemed about 25 years older than his real age on the day we called the ambulance.

After a pretty thorough round of testing in A&E* and an ‘acute’ medical ward, we were initially told that Dad had cancer in multiple organs and ‘months’ to live, even though he was miles better than a few hours earlier. Then suddenly just over a week after that, the diagnosis was changed to ‘not cancer’ but ‘abscesses’ of an unknown cause.  The medical team were more surprised than we were – they said they’d not seen anything like it, and that a turnaround like this was very rare.  It started to feel like we were in the plot of an episode of House, MD, just without Hugh Laurie or his glamorous team of assistants.

Dad’s now been moved to a different ward in a different hospital in a different city and been prodded and poked and tested and scanned a whole lot more. Visiting hours are shorter and travel times are longer, but this hospital has the particular specialists Dad needs, if he is going to get better. We don’t know if he will fully recover, or if there will be long term damage, but there’s a lot of prayer and we’re hopeful. Dad hasn’t lost his sense of humour, although he’s seemed close a few times, and he says he’s ‘got more tubes than the Northern Line**’. He wants to be out before Christmas, but I’m not sure that’s going to be possible.

Because of what’s going on, my life is completely on hold just now, and the album release is going to be delayed until next year. Dad’s been talking about getting ill as ‘when everything came crashing down’, which seems pretty apt for what’s happened. I’m hoping for the rebuild to go well, though, even if it takes a while.

 

* That’s E.R. for my friends in the US

**London Underground pun-based Dad-joke. Not bad for someone in Dad’s current state of health.

 

 

I entered a song contest!

Drooble-Competition-Entry-Sept-2017Drooble – a social media site for musicians and music fans – are running a song competition at the moment. They have two prizes, one for most original song and the other for the song that gets the most votes.

I thought I might as well put an entry in – it can’t hurt, can it? So I have entered Sleepwalker.

Please could you vote for me & share this link with anyone else who you think might like the song?

THANK YOU!

P.S. (If you fancy joining me on Drooble and discovering a load of other indie artists, as well, here’s a link for joining, too.)

My Chilled Folk Music Playlist

Every now and again I will hear something I like that just doesn’t fit into my other chillout playlists because it’s quite folky, so I had to start a new list to gather these pieces together. A particular highlights for me on this list are the songs from Uncut Pages, a British indie outfit with a songwriter that I know from way back near the start of my songwriting efforts, who now lives in the States with his wife, whose beautiful voice you will hear.

Which song is your favourite?

 

Just Keep Going Until You Get There

Album Progress Update

After a couple of weeks where I was getting a lot of other things done – like researching what to do if Soundcloud suddenly disappears (and actioning what I found out) – I’ve managed to make another dent in the heap of significant things-that-need-doing to finish a second album.

I recorded vocals for Solitude in Numbers and Niagara this evening and did some more work on the mix for Of Space And Time, one of the tracks from Tune-A-Day-June, as well as sorting out a few glaring problems with the backing track for Solitude in Numbers.  I haven’t reviewed the vocal takes for Niagara yet, so I may have to do that song again, but that won’t hurt – it’s a difficult song to sing, so practising it is a good idea. (Note to self: try to write some songs that you find a bit easier to sing… )

I’m not 100% sure that Of Space & Time will actually fit in with the rest of the album, as it’s steadily becoming more and more of a triphop album, but we’ll see. I might have to hold that one over for the next project, depending how weird the mix of tracks seems once I have enough tracks for some to be considered ‘spares’ towards the end.

As ‘No. 1 Fan’ was disappointed that I didn’t include Solitude in Numbers in the Sleepwalker album, I have sent her a mix to see what she thinks. (And to prove I’m really going to include it this time!)  It was one of the first tracks for the first album, and No. 1 Fan had heard my first mixes. I felt pretty bad about leaving it off when I saw her reaction, but it wasn’t in good enough shape to go on Sleepwalker.

Solitude in Numbers is the song that wouldn’t completely behave itself, no matter what I did to it. I hadn’t learned to mix when I put the first version together, which certainly didn’t help. The mood of the initial mix was upbeat and poppy, and although I’m all for sad songs sneakily hidden inside happy tunes, it wasn’t working, even after a remix. So a few months back, I started to record the song again completely from scratch, slowing it down a bit, and making the arrangement incredibly sparse this time, whereas the original version had been crammed with all sorts of unnecessary sounds which only served to make the track more difficult to pull together. At first, the new version sounded too empty, and needed more momentum, but it is now well on its way with what I hope are the right sounds and effects. This time, without the clutter, you can hear the lyrics better, and feel the message behind them. I think this version does the song a lot more justice than my previous attempts.

I’m sorry, but I am going to have to keep it to myself for a while yet, though, as I want as much of the material on the album as possible to be new to listeners when it is released. (There will be a few of the Tune A Day pieces on the album as well, though, and it’s probably not all that hard to guess which ones I’m thinking of using that I’ve not already mentioned in the blog!)

Covering A Song: Before and After

Something I have been meaning to do for a while is to do a cover song, Stoneygate style. (I play various Suzanne Vega covers on the guitar, but not as ‘Stoneygate’.)  So when a musicians’ Facebook group I’m following asked who would be up for doing some cover song swaps, I decided to give it a go.

The pairings were random, and the group is based in America, so I thought I’d probably be working with somebody State-side. In the event, the random pairing put me with (cue drumroll) Lynz Crichton, a fantastic singer-songwriter based less than an hour away from me! It was a lovely surprise to be paired with someone so close by, with the added bonus of a future meet-up for a coffee. (A Midlands-based Brit also organised the cover song swaps… watch out world, we Midlander musicians are taking over!).

Before

I thought it would be cool to share a little of the process with you. The first thing I did was to listen to Lynz’s EP on bandcamp, check out the lyrics, and sleep on it. I still had an earworm the next day with the song that had stood out, One Fine Day. Having another listen to the EP and reviewing all the lyrics helped confirm my choice.

Once I’d decided on the song, I could map out the structure and chords of Lynz’s original song in my digital audio workstation. I wasn’t sure about a couple of chords, and Lynz also very kindly let me have a chordsheet to check my work against. The key was not very keyboard friendly, as the song was originally written for guitar. That was going to slow me down for writing parts, so I transposed it up a semi-tone, at a very early stage, and checked it was still going to be within my vocal range. I also messed around with the tempo a bit, slowing it down to bring out the song’s full drama.

After that, I could set to work constructing an arrangement around the original song and record a guide vocal as a place-holder. My intention was to make it into a trip-hop version, but my first attempt with the arrangement felt somewhat disco-ey. It wasn’t that I disliked it, it was just that it wasn’t the vision that I’d got for it… I mentioned this to the swap organiser in our Facebook group, and he happened to mention Portishead. That got me back having a quick listen to Glory Box to check up on and confirm my suspicion that my bassline was the main culprit for the song having the wrong feel to it. It was just too bouncy.

I wrote a new bassline, stripping it right back so that it wouldn’t attract so much attention to itself. It was better, but the song now felt like it was missing something to really give it atmosphere. I tried adding some strings at key points in the song where there was space for them, messing up the chords so they felt more jazzy and retro. (This is what has given the song its James Bond overtones.)  Now the song was really coming together. Time for proper vocal takes, some more tweaks and mixing.

After

I released my cover in May 2018, on the Survival album.

Lynz is covering Silver Bird, by the way, and I’ve heard a draft already, with some awesome vocals. Watch this space!