Very exciting news today – my albums are now available in China on several different popular music platforms, accounting for 75% of the Chinese streaming market. Not being a Mandarin speaker (or reader!), I don’t know quite how much I’ll be able to do to get my music noticed in China without either a lot of help or a crash course in learning the language, but I did manage to find my songs on one of the sites.  That’s a start, right?

The albums had already been distributed to Netease, one of the remaining Chinese streaming sites, within the last few weeks. I was pleased to discover this last week when I started to look into how to get music to a Chinese audience, so I’m hoping that at least one of these sites will start showing some activity.

Judging from how things work on other streaming services, I will need to put some effort into marketing the music out there somehow, otherwise it could take a painfully long while before the needle moves, and it may even only be posthumous, if ever!   

Spotify, however, is going really well, in the sense that it is growing steadily, even though I didn’t release anything for a while. (I’ve been working at it steadily, too!). I’ve seen a clear jump in the number of people listening since MoonDreams released our Tropical Breeze remix, which is really encouraging. There *should* be another jump when the John Clark remix EP (Re:Bugged) is out, if this is anything to go by.  If just a small percentage of his listeners decide to follow my Spotify account, it will really help when I get round to releasing more music of my own. It’s really great that artists like John and Susan are willing and happy to work with me as a relatively unknown producer!  (Yeah, I know, I need to work on my confidence levels!).  

Talking of other projects, I may have done some artwork today for the next single. It is going to have to wait until mid November for release, at the earliest, as I didn’t manage to squeeze it into the narrow gap after Tropical Breeze and before Re:Bugged. As long as the distributor I’ve been using for these collaborations is still there and I can figure out how to complete their online form, I think we’re going to be good to release it then, though!  It is a co-write with another producer, but this post has already got too long, so I’ll tell you more about it when things are underway. 

I got a message from a blog I’d not been in contact with before about a month ago, saying that they would like to do a review of my work. I said yes please, of course!  A link to the most wonderful article appeared in my inbox last night and brought tears to my eyes. I thought I’d share it here, so you can enjoy it, too!  

I got asked a few weeks ago if I could tune my mother’s autoharp and replace a couple of damaged strings. I’m not a luthier and haven’t ever tuned an autoharp, but decided it couldn’t be too hard, so I said I’d have a go when I was next around, but I might not be able to replace the strings.  The payoff was going to be that if I could get it sounding nice, I’d be able to record some autoharp samples to use later on in my own music, potentially. 

An autoharp is like the harp out of a miniature piano, with a set of wooden bars across it that you press to dampen some strings so they won’t sound, leaving the strings that still ring to make a chord. There are different designs with different numbers of chords built in. The more chords you can make, the more different songs you can play.   

I forgot to take a picture of the autoharp before I gave it back to my Mum, but it looks a bit like this one, just a different maker and design and rather older. The one here is a re-make of a vintage design:  https://www.thomann.de/gb/oscar_schmidt_os73b_1930_reissue_autoharp.htm.    

I thought I might have to work out the pitches the notes were meant to be from the pitches that make up the chords on the bars before I tuned them, but it turned out that the strings were labelled with the letters of the note they should be.  As all the strings were also within a tone or so of the correct pitch, the
tuning part of the task turned out to be pretty easy, using my guitar tuner.  (Phew!)

Sorting out the two broken strings was trickier. There was a complete set of replacement strings, and you first of all need to work out which one is which, because they come in varying thicknesses, some are bronze-wound like the lowest guitar strings, and some plain steel, like the top strings of a guitar. 

Never having strung an autoharp before, there was some trial and error involved. I’d got the first replacement string on before I realised that it wasn’t 100% designed for this particular autoharp. It was a bronze wound string that should have been modified before I started, so that the wound part of the string was in exactly the right position.  It still works, though, and I was able to get it up to the correct pitch, so I decided to leave it rather than risk damaging the string beyond use trying to modify it. 

The other string that needed sorting out was the broken top string, which was still attached to the instrument. I couldn’t get it off, because the string was stuck between the wood and the metal tuning peg.  Thankfully my Dad is very clever with all things mechanical, so with an extra pair of hands, the string came free so I could work on it. Mum had suggested that string was long enough to be repaired rather than replaced, so I had a look at that, and it was possible to reuse it by fashioning a new loop at the other end from the tuning peg. The string did take more tuning though because there was a preformed coil of wire at the tuning head which took a while to settle back down because it kept slackening off. 

Once I’d finished tuning the top string, I set up for recording some samples, with a condenser microphone hovering on a boom, straight over the autoharp’s body. I didn’t sample the sound of every string, as that would have taken considerably more hours, which I didn’t have. You don’t really need to, unless you’re a purist: you can create several pitches from the same sample.

I’ve also recorded a few chord sequences, as the mechanical sound when you press the chord bars adds something extra, and I wasn’t sure how I’d build that into an electronic, sampled version of the autoharp. It’s a wood scraping on wood sound, and the strings being dampened gives a different ending to the notes. You can hear this in the attached file – the clunks are the wooden bars being moved as the chords change.  

I heard from John Clark this week about the remix EP… It’s all uploaded to the distributor now and just about ready to go. We have set a release date of 1st November. The title (unless we think of something we prefer in the meantime) is Re:Bugged, because of John’s preoccupation with insects. (A couple of the tracks on the EP are definitely very buggy, too, and so is the artwork!). I’ve attached a pic for you that John sent me of all the tracks lined up on the distributor’s system.  In case you can’t tell, I’m getting pretty excited about this already, even though 1st November is quite a way off. I’ve got John’s permission now to share some 30s clips of the songs, too – watch out for those in a future update.

The other project, the MoonDreams single remix, should be ready on the distributor’s site within the next few days, after a small delay.  It’s now looking like it should be a mid-September release, but we don’t have a definite date set yet, so I need to wait and see. 

I wrote you a Patron-only blog post about my visit to the local BBC studios. Enjoy!

https://sgstage.beakyjay.com/a-mini-adventure-live-unplugged-at-the-bbc/