Hi there! Welcome to Chris's latest blog.
Last update: February 2025
Blog Archive
What I'm Reading
Chris's Music Page
Chris's Home Page
HFO Home Page
Comments? Feedback? Cool link? Send me an email at headfirstonly (at) gmail.com!
The older I get, the more I realise that the only sensible response to an increasingly irrational world is to try and make nice things for people. And so I make music. Lots of it.
My latest full-length album sees me going more ambient than I've ever done before thanks to some new gear I recently added to the studio. Restless comprises six tracks which were improvised and recorded live, with no edits; what I did is what you hear. That's not something I do very often and by "very often" I mean "at all." You can also explore my increasingly extensive discography of older material at Bandcamp.
Looking for social media? Please follow me on Mastodon and check out my photos at Pixelfed and Flickr. If you're still dealing with Meta, for the moment I still have a Facebook Artist Page and an Instagram account.
What's your hearing like? Even though I've been wearing earplugs at gigs since the early 1980s, my hearing is not what it used to be. In my teens I could hear the calls of bats in the back garden at my parents' house in West Wickham. Those days are long gone, but I still try to look after my ears because being able to judge whether a song has a decent tonal balance or not is an important skill for a recording engineer—and for a producer, for that matter. When I hear recordings that have been posted on BandCamp or elsewhere where the mix is woefully out of balance, I find it painful to keep listening. When the song's been posted on the FAWM website, sometimes I'll just skip it and move on to another piece without leaving a comment.
And that makes me anxious, because I wouldn't want anyone to do that to one of my songs. In recent years, I've been using a piece of software made by iZotope called Tonal Balance Control 2 as an extra check that what I'm doing will sound all right. It displays the "target curve" across the range of frequencies of human hearing that a piece of music in a particular genre should contain as a blue band; the sound of the piece of music being analysed is overlaid on this as a thin white line.
I've been recording things for a while now. In fact I'm closing in on having recorded 1,500 pieces of music in my bedroom studio (as of right now, the total stands at 1,447). I have been pleasantly surprised over the last month or so to discover that, even before I begin tweaking the equalisation, adding compression, or starting the mastering process, when I open the Tonal Balance Control 2 plugin in my DAW, my mixes all look like this:
There are no nasty peaks to be seen at all—and I'm in the zone all the way from 20 Hz to 20kHz. Is it being nerdy when I say how incredibly satisfying it is to see this sort of thing happening in my own work?
And that's a perfect example of the reason I'm so enthused about taking part in the February Album Writing Month challenge. You shouldn't need a "how to do it" YouTube video or an old guy like me grumbling in their blog to tell you that the fastest way to improve your talents in any form of creative work is to do as much of it as you possibly can. The idea behind FAWM is to encourage musicians to drop any concerns about quality, style, accessibility, or marketability and just sit down and write something. Anything. Because each piece you write will have an incremental effect on your creative skill set. It doesn't matter how small each individual increment is; they mount up. And if the body of work that results from doing this runs to four figures, then you're going to notice a significant improvement. I never thought I'd ever be competent enough at mixing to be able to judge what was going on by ear, but that is where I'm at today. Levelling up like this isn't just exciting, it's amazing.
And that's what's driving me to push hard this February and why so far this month I've got eleven songs posted on my profile page (yes, I've been rather busy over the last couple of days). After a few days of struggling to get going, I think I'm back in the creative swing of things again.
Because if you want to get better at something, you have to do the work.
I follow a number of home recording hashtags on Mastodon and elsewhere and I've noticed that while there are a lot of talented artists out there doing good things and posting about them on social media afterwards (with plenty of corroborating evidence that sounds really good), there have always been the wannabes who act like they're in the same league. You probably know the sort: they post an awful lot about the fabulous work that they're going to do, any minute now, but somehow, the work never gets done. Some characters do this regularly enough that I've been able to follow their musical development over the years, and I suspect that you won't be at all surprised when I tell you that they haven't made any visible progress in what they're doing. They like the idea of being good at what they do, but they aren't prepared to do the work to get there, and it shows.
(As an aside, after doing FAWM for sixteen years I've also noticed that if someone signs up for FAWM and writes their bio in the third person like it was a press release written by their public relations specialist, it's highly unlikely that they're going to actually stick around and post anything. They might actually be good at what they do, but with no evidence to prove otherwise I just assume that they're another fantasist/wannabe who enjoys play-acting more than doing the work.)
And even though I'm writing on social media about doing something right now rather than actually doing the things I'm writing about, you can depend on me to have actually gone off and done them shortly afterwards. You've seen the number of albums I've released on Bandcamp by now. That's how you make progress. You have to do the work.
And no, using AI as part of your creative endeavours does not count as doing the work. In fact, as a recent study showed (and it was funded by Microsoft, who are one of the worst offenders for pushing AI into every last aspect of their business portfolio), it will have exactly the opposite effect. Don't fall for it. And I note in that report that the authors appear to have confused the word "inaction" (not doing the thing that is required) with its opposite, "enaction" (the act of making something come to be). How ironic; did they get help from ChatGPT?
After getting a rare sleep score of 100 on Sunday night, last night was utterly miserable. I didn't help matters by messing up the controls on the central heating system before I went to bed and I set it to its "stay on until the regular timer switches everything off" setting instead of the "just run for the next hour, then switch off" boost that I'd intended. As a result I woke up at 04:30 this morning wondering why the bedroom was so hot. After lying in bed for an hour sweating, I got up to investigate and discovered what had happened. Switching the heating off didn't help. Nor did taking a couple of paracetamol; I didn't really get back to sleep again.
My aches and pains have aches and pains today. I think I may have been overdoing the bass playing, because the knuckles of my right hand are really painful at the moment. The gall stones are really giving me gyp. And even with my arthritic foot strapped up in its support brace, I couldn't get comfortable last night. Every time I turned over in bad, the resulting pain jarred me awake again.
I know I keep banging on about this. Unfortunately it's not something that I can ignore, and venting about it here is how I'm attempting to come to terms with the many ways in which most of my non-musical life presently falls well short of expectations.
FAWM's been under way for a week and as of lunchtime today, I've got seven songs uploaded to my profile page, so with three weeks left I'm already half-way to the challenge goal of writing 14 songs in 28 days. Yesterday I was going to take the day off from making music (and pretty much everything else) because I'm feeling very under the weather at the moment, but instead I ended up writing a song called Take The Day Off because that is what FAWM does to you.
I was extremely flattered when it made the recommendations thread in the FAWM forums. It's been a while since I managed to write something that did that.
I'm still struggling, though. I'm in a lot of pain, and I'm still waking up in the middle of the night every night. If you've never experienced a protracted phase of this happening to you—and for me this has been going on since before Christmas—it's impossible to convey just how debilitating it is. So I'm practising some self-care this weekend. I've got a pork joint roasting in the oven right now, which I will be smothering with gravy made with red wine before I consume it all together with a large selection of vegetables and what's left of the wine. Right now I'm slowly working my way through a gin and tonic while I write up the blog and the latest book I've read for my books page. Hopefully this will have the restorative effect I'm looking for.
We're now six days in to FAWM, and as you can see on my profile page there, I currently have five songs under my belt. That's more than double the total number of songs that I produced in the first two years I took part in the challenge put together, but somehow I feel like I can't get any creative traction this year at all.
I'm totally happy with the music I have managed to create, and perhaps that's what the problem is: I'm not bashing things out in a couple of hours any more. I could, but instead it took me three days to get track number 5 to the point where I could say to myself, "That'll do." It's not just that I'm putting in far more work on the production than I need to; that's been my thing for far more than a decade now (and I was gratified when a recent commenter complimented me on how cut-down and open it sounded when the thing was put together using a grand total of twenty-five separate instrument tracks, all of which were recorded in stereo—yes, it's a stripped-back job as far as I'm concerned, but way more than most FAWMers need to get the idea of what they're trying to do across) I think I've become more picky about deeming what I'm doing to be good enough to be let out into the wild. And that's really not what FAWM is about at all. At its heart, FAWM is about the process of converting ideas into music, and that's it. That's all it needs to be.
So, do I change my approach? Do I pump out a couple of frantic punk numbers, "three chords and the truth" style, to silence my inner editor and get my creative engines firing on all cylinders again? This year, surprisingly, I think the answer is probably not. The bottom line with FAWM for me is to celebrate and simply enjoy the process of songwriting. And I really enjoy the production, mixing, and mastering side of things just as much as the craft of writing. Probably more so, to be honest.
Unfortunately, ill-health is also having a much greater influence on the levels of creative energy I have available this year. On my levels of energy of any kind, in fact. For the past week I've been waking up in the small hours of the morning and then struggling to get back to sleep. I've been getting another two or three hours of rest between 7am and 10am but that really eats in to my day. Today it's already noon and here I am, still sitting in the living room after finishing a late breakfast. I have a bunch of ironing to do, too, so I won't be firing up the gear in the studio for a good hour or two yet. When I do, I'll be fighting the brain fog which seems to linger until early evening, because I am living in a constant state of exhaustion. I know it's better than the alternative, but getting old is no fun at all. At the moment it really sucks. And this is the root cause of why I feel like I'm not making headway this month.
But after buying a bunch of storage crates and other whatnot this week, the studio is looking much tidier than it has done in about a year and the bed in my guest bedroom is no longer buried a foot deep in piles of instrument and microphone cables, flight cases, and cardboard boxes; it could actually be used for the purpose for which it's intended, although the likelihood of that happening at any point in the near future is exceedingly slim. My social life is practically non-existent. The upside of this is that there are few things in my life which are likely to tempt me away from working on music. Some days I can almost convince myself that this is a good thing.
I went for a walk this morning to see if the work I was told would be happening "soon" when I moved here thirty years ago had finally started. It's been so long that I'd become somewhat sceptical that anything would ever come about, but I can confirm that it has; the road is closed, the excavators have moved in, and the air is filled with the sound of chainsaws. The first phase of work to support the reopening of Charfield Station in spring 2027 is well under way.
The downside of all this is that the easiest route from where I live to the main road out of the village has been fenced off for safety reasons. It will be closed for the next five months (which is a pain, because the alternative route entails weaving through a slalom created by dozens of parked vehicles, some of which are parked on bends). I think I'll be staying in unless I absolutely can't avoid having to leave the house.
A hearty "Well done!" to the gang at Real World Studios who picked up two Grammys last night for their work on Peter Gabriel's latest album i/o. All richly deserved and it was very satisfying to hear that they'd won!
Some of my fellow Fawmers have already written their fourteen songs and will no doubt keep on going for the next four weeks, but I seem to be working at a much slower pace than I've managed in previous years. I can't seem to build up any creative momentum at all until the end of the afternoon. Nevertheless I've written two songs so far for FAWM, so I'm a little bit ahead of schedule. And they are my usual, full production numbers with multiple tracks of guitars and synthesisers both real and virtual, because I like working that way.
I'll be back in my bedroom studio again this afternoon to work on song number three, but it's already past noon; see what I mean about me not getting going?
Yes, it's February again. I've buffed up my profile page on the FAWM website and this afternoon I'll start to write new music which you'll be able to listen to there until the site closes again on March 15th (the site goes in to hibernation for most of the year because February is special, but also because it stops moderators like me having to weed out all the bogus accounts that are created by forum scammers, which has become a real problem in the past few years).
My game plan isn't particularly focused and I have no idea if I'm going to end up with material that's tied together by any sort of overarching concept; I certainly haven't got one in mind at the moment. Instead, I'm simply going to attempt to create as many tracks as I can over the next four weeks.
I'm going to be taking things slowly today, though. Not only do I have some guitar repairs to carry out (see below) I'm also recovering from last night's front-of-house gig. It was a resounding success, but the nearest parking spaces were a good couple of hundred metres from the venue and when you're as old as I am and carrying a PA cabinet, that's a long way...
I really should know better than to make a stupid assertion that "I'm pretty much ready" on these pages. When I restrung the Squier Strat yesterday afternoon I discovered that two of its machine heads were knackered. Tightening the nuts on them with my socket set had the opposite effect, and the G string wouldn't hold tension any higher than D, which is not helpful when you're planning to lay down some tasteful guitar solos with it.
In contrast, restringing the Parker Fly was a breeze, because it has Sperzel locking heads where you thread the string through the machine head, twist a knob to lock it in place, and tune it knowing that the string is not going to be able to slip out of the peg at all. My Warr guitar has them as well.
So an emergency order of a set of Fender locking machine heads was duly placed. I'm currently sitting downstairs and anxiously waiting for the postie to deliver them. I'm hoping that replacing them should be a simple job of swapping out old for new, but given my luck these days I'm not counting on that being the case. I'll let you know what happens.
Update: The new machine heads have been delivered, and I've successfully fitted them (a certain amount of drilling was involved because of course they used two pegs to key in to the wood instead of just the one on the old parts. But the Strat is now staying in tune. And I think it's fairly safe to say I know why it was going out of tune, looking at the old machine head here:
The sleeve that holds the string peg in place on the headstock had completely sheared off at the base.