That’s right folks – we’re back… and LOUDER THAN EVER!!
A brand new 80’s Hair Metal album, with all the spandex and long hair you could wish for, is released today.
The result was a riotous album that folks seemed to love – 80’s Hair Rock Now, we’re here again with 80’s Hair Metal…
The albums feature Nigel Bailey on vocals.
Coming Alive – Up-tempo rocker with hot guitar riffs, slamming drums & male vocals
Give Me Your Love – Positive power ballad with huge drums & emotional male vocal
Heart Break – Melodic 80s power ballad with shredding guitars, big drums & male vocals
Got To Rock – High energy big hair metal. Living life to the limit lyrics with male vocals
Night Warriors – Razor-edged guitar riffs & hard hitting drums with classic rock male vocals
Primetime Love – Fists in the air 80’s stadium rocker with loud guitars & male vocals
What You Do To Me – Strutting classic rock with massive drums, powerful guitars & male vocals
Hit The Top – High energy driving 80s rock with chugging guitars & positive male vocals
Hope you find the album as much fun to listen to as it was for us to make!
Thanks for stopping by…
With the MoR Pop project near to completion, in December 2013, Barrie Gledden & I headed down to Northants to see David Tobin. David’s a fellow AudioNetwork composer & was tasked with helping out & scoring our string arrangements for the project.
As mentioned in my last blog, this project has been a long time in the making & the strings were to be the icing on the cake.
We spent a long day with David talking through each track & firming up ideas which he’d then turn into scores and arrangements in our absence.
A date was set for the end of January 2014 at The Chairworks Studio, Castleford for the actual recording.
Barrie has written a more in depth blog about the whole process here
Back at the start of 2013, I began work on 8 tracks in a very definitive style.
My year prior had been very much full to the brim with music. It’s my job… it’s what I do; writing, playing, recording and mixing.
Projects are always ongoing and there are deadlines to meet, but in January 2013 I set aside the whole month to concentrate on writing this one project.
I sat down in my own cozy studio watching the snow fall outside, loaded up a cup of tea and a blank canvas, and set out to write a collection of tunes influenced by the kind of music that shaped me as I was growing up.
Having not come from a particularly musical background; my parents nor brother are musically inclined, I never had anyone at home opening me up to different styles of music. Exposure to what was out there at the time, & what had gone before, came more from my friends at school & the radio. There simply weren’t any bands in my school and no real musicians to speak of, certainly not that i was aware of… so my early influences were picked up not by someone saying ‘here… you MUST listen to this’ but more by my Saturday afternoons spent in record shops looking at what was out there & spending my hard earned paper money on what I thought might prick my ears musically.
So why am I telling you all this?
Writing music for a living enables me to travel in all sorts of different directions sonically… Heavy Rock, Classical, Vocal Pop, Quirky… You name it, I’ve done it.
Every project is special & has the utmost time & attention paid to it. The company I write for require nothing short of the best & that’s what you strive for every time.
This project was to be no different from any other in that respect, except for it was going to be in a musical style very close to my heart & centred around the music I listened to as an easily influenced budding musician – a style from yesteryear yet with all the modern pop elements you’d expect, but with that comes the fact that I knew with the style and direction I was taking these songs in… it was going to be a long, long road to travel to get this project to where it ultimately needed to be.
‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’ – Leonardo da Vinci
On watching the ‘Sound City‘ documentary recently, I heard Mick Fleetwood reflecting on why Fleetwood Mac chose that studio to record the album ‘Rumours’ rather than do it in their own studio – ‘I can have fun doing this on my own, or I can have fun doing it with others’.
He has a point… The studio can be a very lonely and solitary place… unless you’re there with others… then it becomes fun.
Barrie Gledden has been a very close friend and a work colleague of mine since 1991, when I first met him as part of a support act for his band at the time ‘Brazil’. We’ve worked together ever since through bands & other musical ventures, and like me, Barrie is a writer for AudioNetwork.
Before Christmas 2012, I mentioned to Barrie my plans for January and that I was going to start this mammoth project. In the cold February of 2013, I took the tracks to his studio and played them to him. We chatted about where we thought the songs needed to go musically and planned how best to get them sounding and feeling as good as possible.
I’d mocked up the whole project using virtual instruments; keyboards, drums, bass, strings, piano, synths, guitars, acoustics… all triggered digitally from within the computer… a band in your pocket & an easy way to get your ideas from your head and into a permanent, recorded form – you can work fast & efficiently before the moment and idea is gone forever.
Virtual Instruments can be ground breaking and breathtaking, they can produce sounds that are very hard or impossible to emulate in the ‘real world’.
However, everything I’d used to create these tracks was ‘mimicking’ real instruments… and, more than anything, what this album needed was real… real everything… real drums, real piano… and a real string section.
What I’d taken to play to Barrie felt very polished yet needed more input… the ideas were there but they needed arranging, additional vocal lines writing, string arrangements scoring and everything needed replacing with ‘feel’ and ‘interplay’ with instruments from the ‘real world’. Of the initial 8 tracks, there were 6 stand out songs we chose to focus on first.
Let the games commence…
First up… replacing the drums… here’s a video of what we did… (skins tuned so low they were close to wrinkle point & tension rods dropped out during recording takes)
Barrie wrote a more in-depth blog about re-recording the drums for this project here.
