Alta Native: Brace Yourself, My Dear

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I learned quite a few things about sequencers and physically modelled guitar plugins last night. I also learned that "Hey Matthew" done a la The Clash doesn't work.

I thought "What would be a surprising take on the song? I know! A 70s reggae-as-punk version". So after six or seven hours, I had two and a bit candidate backing tracks for the song, with basslines Paul Simenon might play in an alternate universe, and off-beat rhythm guitar that even Joe Strummer would find simple.

Result: Two and a bit tracks that I can't find a way to sing the lyrics over. The Clash themselves could (and did) learn their instruments as they wrote their songs, but I'm not so good at combining experimentation with production.

However, I do now know how to make a ska-like track using Nuendo and Slayer 2. So I'm thinking..."Holiday in Cambodia"?

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I won't get to do much tomorrow. Strict Machines are (a) practicing X-Ray Spex songs using the tabs I found for them and (b) playing a gig in the evening, which I'm recording. Piping six ambient microphones into a digital recorder turns out to be less of a logistical nightmare than giving each band member a stereo input.

They're "playing support act to" (read: headlining for) a band of 14-year old punk girls, who are reputedly very cool and would probably appreciate a CD of their set too.

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I've got to find some snippets of samplable film dialogue to go between the tracks of my own CD. There's over 300 films and TV episodes on DivX DVD in front of me, but they're in no particular order, and uncatalogued. So if the samples sound a bit random, that's probably because they are.

There's one somewhere of Jason King shouting "Your turn, Capitano!".

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