covid-19

3Jan2021Blog, News Brexit, covid, covid-19, EU, France, life change, lockdown, moving house, new studio

Moving to France…

The long-suffering nightmare that has been Brexit (often renamed Brex-shit by many) really pushed Claire and I to reconsider our future options, and the decision was, if UK wouldn’t stay in Europe, then we would physically move there instead.

We’ve always loved France. We started visiting for holidays in the late 1990s, and, especially once we became balloonists, kept wanting to go back, and often wondered what it would be like to live there. We’ve made many friends there, and simply love the countryside, the food, the wine, the lifestyle. If we were going to get out of the rat race and the “grind-the-worker-down” environment that is so typical of the United Kingdom, then it would have to be soon. Brexit just made us decide to go sooner.

We started looking at houses in 2019, rather tentatively at first, with the help of our friends Pete and Alison, who live in France. But in March 2020 we found a lovely house that suited our requirements.

Then, everything went into lockdown.

This made the house buying process a whole lot slower. Firstly, we couldn’t view the house. Once the isolation restrictions were lifted in France, though the borders were still closed, Pete and Alison could go and view the house, and kindly videoed it for us. We loved what we saw, and we bought it subject to being able to view in person as soon as the borders were open again. We eventually went out in August to finalise the deal.

Though we sold our UK house within a week, moving house during a pandemic also posed its problems. We had a few months wait from August until the legals processed, and we completed on the house via video in early December. We had already briefed a removals company and had a date in mind, again amidst rumours of another lockdown imminent. Luckily we were able to move finally on the 18th December. I drove across with Sophie, our dog, and arrived on the 19th to let the removal guys in. Claire came on later with our balloon in tow on the 20th. We’d made it!

Now all the hard work begins. Music-wise, I have a studio to build. While I originally thought our cellar and garage space would be best for creating a new studio, now I’ve been there a while it’s not the best spot sonically for recordings, as there’s too much pipework and a large boiler in the next room.

Instead, I’ve chosen a mezzanine space on the first floor, which again needs work, but could be great for recording and even has a space suitable for performance and video-making.

26Sep2020Blog, News band, collaboration, covid-19, lockdown, P.ii, release, zoom

Thinking On Your Own – Part 2

Westy

For a while now I’ve been a (somewhat quiet) member of a community called “Produce Like a Pro“, run by the Los Angeles-based producer Warren Huart. I joined PLAP (as it’s affectionately known) primarily to continue to improve my recording and mixing, and thus end up with a set of quality songs for my first album.

After the upload of my song ‘Thinking On Your Own’ onto YouTube and Facebook, I was contacted by fellow PLAP-er Tim Ellifritz, based out in Johnsburg, NY, who loved the song and asked if we could collaborate and he would produce and release it. Well…. what do you say to that!

Of course, it was “yes!”

In just one day, Tim had a group of guys ready to record and work on the song, and by then, Tim’s selected drummer, Patrick Peeters, in Belgium, had made a guide track from my Youtube video, all set to 162bpm for the rest of the guys to record in their DAWs.

On the 28th March I had my first Zoom meeting call with Tim, and his fellow American Dave Merkel from Billings, MT. We got on really well, and a ‘lockdown project’ was formed. Tim had managed to recruit Dave, then Patrick, and a bass player from the Netherlands, Peter Süoss. We became a band of producers.

This just shows the power of the internet and the fact that you can work with a bunch of guys you’ve never met in person, and come up with something incredible.

Over the lockdown period, each of us went to work on our respective parts: I recorded two acoustic guitar parts for a stereo mix and five vocal tracks – one lead and two-part stereo backing vocals, plus some keyboard vocal ‘ooooohs’; Patrick recorded several tracks of drums; Peter’s track used his fretless bass; Tim provided lead guitar and a rhythm electric track, plus a low vocal; then Dave provided an organ track and some strings also.

We each decided at the outset to film our performances, for the video to follow.

Building the song involved a couple of drafts from each of us, then discussion via Zoom. We shared our tracks on the cloud, and each of us could mix according to taste and add things on top for the band to hear and review. What was most fascinating to me was how different each of our mixes were. Here we had five different versions of the same song.

By July we had the song finished. We decided that we’d ask another PLAP-er, Sara Carter, to do the final mix from our tracks. Sara had years of prior experience with the BBC, and had recently started her own mixing business ‘Music Mix Pro‘, and the result was amazing.

Release date was July 31st. We spent a great deal of time building up to the release, with the creation of a Facebook group, and a number of promo ‘reminders’ that appeared on both Facebook, and our other respective channels elsewhere. I produced a load of graphics and visuals for the release, and the other guys worked on video material too for our new fans. In the 11 day build up to release day, we’d got over 300 followers.

Thinking on Your Own - All band members assembled

We’ve enjoyed the entire process so much, from start to finish, that we are determined to have a go at some more music together. We’ve also started a P.ii video channel with an episode each Friday, called ‘Friday is P.ii-Day’. I’m not sure how long we can sustain this series, but we’re certainly going to give it our best shot.

23Jul2020Blog, News apple music, covid, covid-19, music, P.ii, release, single, spotify

Thinking On Your Own – Part 1

Westy

March 19th. The UK was going into lockdown with rising cases of Covid-19 being reported. The media frenzy at the time was on how people were panic-buying in the shops, with various photos and video footage of people stockpiling shopping trolleys full of toilet roll, pasta, bread, milk and other groceries, and in doing so, depriving the most vulnerable in our society.

I was angry at what I saw, and I felt I had to write a song about it. Sure, people were scared, none of us really knew how Covid was going to affect or change our lives. But, depriving others at a time of real need, was selfish and unnecessary. Global crises really show us how base and primitive the human race can still be.

It didn’t really matter to me that the song was probably just going to be labelled as ‘another from the glut of songs written in lockdown’; it was heartfelt, and I felt strongly about its message. I wanted to get across that, in isolation, we are still able to think of others and should be concentrating on them, not thinking on our own. It was asking people to consider: “Who else can I help?”

If, in listening to this song, it makes one person think again, and decide not to act selfishly, giving the more vulnerable person a chance – just for once – then it will have done it’s job.

I posted it on Facebook. I wasn’t sure what to expect really, but I asked people to like and share, and a few people did. Thank you to those who did, because what happened next was a complete surprise.