What are you working on at the moment?

[Matt2112]

Update on More Than Words:

A road test at the open mic went okay, so at the gig at my local three days later I decided I'd throw it in as set one's closer.

Now, I appreciate there'll be constant chatter while you're playing in a pub; however someone who had a foghorn of a belly-laugh that was literally as loud as my Bose S1 speaker chose pretty much the whole of MTW to be in fits of guffaws during whatever conversation he was having, pretty much ruining my performance of that song - the "quietest" in my 20-song setlist.

Of course, it wasn't intended as an act of sabotage, but it kind of killed the moment.

Anyway, I ran through it in public again at the subsequent open mic where quite a few of the punters and the barman sang along to it quite nicely, with the (excellent) host harmonising beautifully, so that went extremely well and I got a rousing reception which felt really good.

I'm getting more consistent and confident with the string-plucking element so practising that definitely is reaping dividends.

[Thenop]

Well done Matt! It's not easy being up there especially in such a small and intimate (well, kind of) setting.

And yes: practice makes perfect.

[Slim]

I had the idea of sneaking my own guitar solo onto an old big band tune, like The Good Life or Fly Me To The Moon.

I'd more or less decided to use Sinatra's version of The Good Life, but Tony Bennett's is a bit slower so I decided to use that one. The plan was to take the vocal off one of the verses using AI and substitute guitar. But: it's very short and the song just won't work with half the vocal missing. So ..

I split the tune into vocal and music parts using https://vocalremover.org/ and loaded both the tracks into Audacity. Then I repeated the first verse (there's a sort of verse - verse - chorus structure, so it's now verse - verse - verse - chorus). Then I muted the vocal for the second verse (actually Tony comes in with the vocal a couple of beats before the split point so it wasn't quite that straightforward). So it's now 3 mins 10 seconds long instead of 2 mins 15 seconds, with a nice instrumental backing section to play over. It was really seamless, sounds very natural.

The hard part of course is recording a guitar solo over a beautiful old classic that doesn't sound like a crime against music. Fingers crossed.

[Thenop]

Looking forward to hearing that!

[The Picnic Wasp]

Likewise, as Harry Enfield's mate used to say.