We've discovered as we've begun recording for The Cracked Man debut album, the arrangement of each of our songs goes through changes as we explore the possibilities of going beyond the live performance restrictions of only 2 instruments and one voice.
Continuing to document some of the changes, here is the 2nd of our short Video Diaries and is to do with our song, "Moving On", where we discovered the one bodhran rhythm Kim knows worked quite well in the climactic section of the song. Apologies to anyone who plays bodhran professionally and is cringing at his technique.
Original foot-stomping, spine-tingling, brow-twitching, cheek-spasming, tea-dunking music that will leave you breathless but deeply satisfied
The Cracked Man Video Diaries #1 - Zero Energy
It's coming up to 2 years since we formed The Cracked Man, and not far off a year since we released our EP. So now we're working on an album.
One of the core aspects of The Cracked Man is every song we create, and every arrangement we produce, has to be something we both approve of. If one brings in a riff the other dislikes, or suggests an alteration that doesn't appeal to both, then it is discarded. This means no song has a sound completely dictated by either Kim or Marcus - every output is a collaboration.
As Marcus once said, "We're not a democracy, we're a dual dictatorship..."
Although we're pretty satisfied with the arrangements of our songs for our live performances, the album is turning into quite a different beast - not least because we don't have to be restricted to to a maximum of 2 instruments and 1 voice.
Marcus is a producer and sound engineer by trade, which gives us the wonderful luxury of being able to play, record, listen back, tweak, add, adjust, rearrange, experiment, delete and start again until we're both satisfied.
And what we've discovered is every time we start recording one of our songs, something new happens that we couldn't have predicted before we began. It could be the addition of an instrument, a different way of producing a sound or even a change of rhythm.
So what we've decided to do, for anyone who is at all vaguely interested in how songs develop, is create a series of short video diaries, documenting some of these changes on the very evening they've occured.
This means the videos are not rehearsed, highly produced or polished - they are just 2 blokes talking or playing to the camera to illustrate a particular alteration. We hope this means that what might be lost in slickness is more than made up for in a sense of authenticity.
At the moment, we are unsure how often these video diaries will be put up online - anything from weekly to monthly is our best guess - but over time they should accumulate into a collection that gives an insight into our creative process.
Here is our first, which is looking at our song, "Zero Energy"
One of the core aspects of The Cracked Man is every song we create, and every arrangement we produce, has to be something we both approve of. If one brings in a riff the other dislikes, or suggests an alteration that doesn't appeal to both, then it is discarded. This means no song has a sound completely dictated by either Kim or Marcus - every output is a collaboration.
As Marcus once said, "We're not a democracy, we're a dual dictatorship..."
Although we're pretty satisfied with the arrangements of our songs for our live performances, the album is turning into quite a different beast - not least because we don't have to be restricted to to a maximum of 2 instruments and 1 voice.
Marcus is a producer and sound engineer by trade, which gives us the wonderful luxury of being able to play, record, listen back, tweak, add, adjust, rearrange, experiment, delete and start again until we're both satisfied.
And what we've discovered is every time we start recording one of our songs, something new happens that we couldn't have predicted before we began. It could be the addition of an instrument, a different way of producing a sound or even a change of rhythm.
So what we've decided to do, for anyone who is at all vaguely interested in how songs develop, is create a series of short video diaries, documenting some of these changes on the very evening they've occured.
This means the videos are not rehearsed, highly produced or polished - they are just 2 blokes talking or playing to the camera to illustrate a particular alteration. We hope this means that what might be lost in slickness is more than made up for in a sense of authenticity.
At the moment, we are unsure how often these video diaries will be put up online - anything from weekly to monthly is our best guess - but over time they should accumulate into a collection that gives an insight into our creative process.
Here is our first, which is looking at our song, "Zero Energy"
Zero Energy
Kim reckons one of the things he enjoys the most in the world is standing on stage with his bouzouki, while it is plugged through a delay pedal and distortion box, and he's using a bottle-neck slide.
Photo courtesy of Mark Robinson
One such time was when we played at "Stereo" in Glasgow, and in a rare stroke of fortune, it was actually videoed from 2 different angles. We were sent the footage, but unfortunately the sound quality wasn't very good, so it got shelved.
However, we are slowly putting an album together and a few weeks ago we were working on the track, "Zero Energy", which is one of our songs where Kim gets to use the magic combination of delay, distortion and slide.
Although the recorded version of this song is still being developed, Kim decided to see if he could construct a video using the footage from Glasgow and one of our more recent recordings.
It took a little while to line up the music with the video, because it turned out we played it live at a slightly different speed to our recorded version. However, changing the video angle each time it started to drift, helped a bit.
He also raided the freely available video archives of The Hubble Telescope to throw in some images of planets and exploding stars, to add a bit of texture to the visuals.
The result was this:
Hope you like it
Photo courtesy of Mark Robinson
One such time was when we played at "Stereo" in Glasgow, and in a rare stroke of fortune, it was actually videoed from 2 different angles. We were sent the footage, but unfortunately the sound quality wasn't very good, so it got shelved.
However, we are slowly putting an album together and a few weeks ago we were working on the track, "Zero Energy", which is one of our songs where Kim gets to use the magic combination of delay, distortion and slide.
Although the recorded version of this song is still being developed, Kim decided to see if he could construct a video using the footage from Glasgow and one of our more recent recordings.
It took a little while to line up the music with the video, because it turned out we played it live at a slightly different speed to our recorded version. However, changing the video angle each time it started to drift, helped a bit.
He also raided the freely available video archives of The Hubble Telescope to throw in some images of planets and exploding stars, to add a bit of texture to the visuals.
The result was this:
Hope you like it
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