'Blackbird' on the Carolan Guitar (ft. Dylan Jones)

Last thing I heard the Carolan Guitar paid a quick visit to Real World Studios in Wiltshire, and is now on its way to France?

Well, here's some fond memories of when the instrument was in my hands, and when I invited my friend Dylan Jones to come over and do some songs. Here is a rough version of the Beatles song 'Blackbird':



Take 47. Or was it 74? :)

'Handle With Care' (Home-Recording)

Day 2 of the November Celebration:

Back in 2008 I was recording very quietly. My oldest daughter was two then, so when she was finally tucked into bed I was able to switch on the multi-tracker and do some recording in the evening again. Still, I couldn't do anything really loud, because she was asleep in the room next door ...

This is the main explanation why I decided to turn this rather exuberant Traveling Wilburys hit into a slow and ponderous acoustic grumble.

That being said, I was quite pleased with the result, as it got rid of the many-cooks novelty-mood of the original (which happily veers from George Harrison's sweet-voiced but biting sarcasm, to Roy Orbison's operatic pathos, to Dylan and Petty's sand-papery lustfulness), and replaced it with an all-encompassing gravitas. Yeah yeah ...

  Handle With Care by Ymaginatif

'Child Of Nature' / 'Here Comes The Sun' (Home-Recordings)

This month I've been going back and forth between angry protest rock and sweet Beatles-covers. Tossing a coin on which ones to 'entertain' you with (first), the choice fell on the Beatles-covers. Lucky you! Maybe because there has been a lot of sunshine over the weekend? ...

Anyway - time for a thematic 'virtual single', I thought. Or afterthought, it was. But is somehow seemed to fit ...

A. Child of Nature (Lennon)

Or 'Jealous Guy', as most of you might know it. I started to record this song as 'Jealous Guy', but these 'great classic' compositions are always a bit daunting to pull off. I found that once I decided to re-instate John Lennon's original 1968 lyrics, suddenly things were a whole lot easier: now it made sense to have a sitar in the arrangement and to replace the whistle-solo with a vintage synth sound. At least, that's what I thought.

The vocal is way too high for me, but as usual, I did't let that stop me ...

B. Here Comes The Sun (Harrison)

Finding that I was able to play the acoustic guitar riff of this one (after 15 years of looking for it, haha), I gave it a quick recording. The sound turned out quite nicely (despite the barking dogs outside and the crying daughter in the background), so taking my cue from the original Beatles arrangement (not trying to copying it, but thinking of this as a quiet acoustic song with some surprisingly robust band-backing), I added drums, bass, percussion and synth.

Let's see whether you can spot the dogs and the daughter! 

 

"You Won't See Me" (Home-Recording)

Every now and again I have to return to The Beatles.
Yes, it is something that started 24 (!) years ago, and which I still haven't got over. I first started to sing to The Beatles (in the attic, where I thought nobody could hear me) and a few years later I first started to play the guitar from the 'Beatles Book'. It was The Beatles that started me off collecting music. And it was The Beatles that made me form my first band. All that is bound to leave an imprint.

This particular song, 'You Won't See Me', is from 1965 and a rare occasion of McCartney in a negative mood. Things were not going to well with Jane ...
When they came to record it, The Beatles gave it a light, countrified arrangement, and added rather silly ooh-lalala backing vocals. The result was a pleasant mid-sixties pop-song, but detracted, obviously, from the song's black mood.

So, when it was my turn to have a go at this one, some time earlier this year, I thought I'd give it an edgier treatment. No more backing vocals, but a garage-band guitar/bass/drums approach, which adorned the song with squashed chords (nothing fancy), a much faster tempo, plenty of distortion on guitar and bass, and some frantic kit-drumming.
It turned out to be rather hard to keep up the vocal. Especially since the key doesn't suit my voice very well. In the end, I went for the low snarl rather than the high shriek ...

"Strawberry Fields Forever" (Home-Recording)

This cover-version was recorded about 4 years ago. The basic track is my brother (who likes to call himself Jeroen) playing piano and singing. The MP3 version was emailed to me, which I proceeded to edit on computer. I overdubbed keyboards, guitars and drums (all plugged straight into the computer) and laced everything with a generous helping of swirling effects. A funny feature of this version is that I had to have the entire overdub-section follow the same wavering tempo of the original recording, resulting in some slowly gliding and othe gallopping parts.

Unlike me, Jeroen can hold a note!

"Only A Northern Song" (Home-Recording)

If you cover the Beatles, why not try a really obscure song and Sgt. Pepper outtake? And then make it even more obscure? One sunny afternoon in March 2008, I did just that - with a doctored drum-machine beat, and recording different musical overdubs without listening to the other ones previously put on tape (they come out surprisingly in synch!!). The cherries on the LSD cake are the shimmering voice effect and the alien backing vocals.

"If you're listening to this song
You may think the chords are going wrong
But they're not
He just wrote it like that"