Busy Day!

Woke up at 6am this morning as usual - can't sleep beyond this time for some reason.  My husband gets me a cup of tea and some fruit.........as usual :)

I am meeting a friend today for lunch  so prepare a moussaka for my husband so he doesn't feel too aggrieved!

Then to the gym for an hour - half an hour cross trainer and 30 mins weights equipment.

11am catch train to St. Pancras and meet my Iranian friend who now lives in Turkey at my favourite meeting place... Searcys, opposite the champagne bar.  It is such a relaxed venue. Food is very good and you can linger as long as you like.  Such a bonus for a girlie lunch with so much to catch up on........

http://searcys.co.uk/venues/st-pancras-grand/#.U16YjV6aLwI

Called in at L K Bennett on ground floor and found pair of nude shoes I had seen on line in the sale.............good job I bought them from the shop as needed a whole shoes size less!

http://www.lkbennett.com/Shoes/Court-Shoes/Samira-Patent-Leather-Court/p/SCSAMIRAPATENTTaupeLight%20Taupe?nr=54&product=54&show=All

My husband collected me from station at 4pm and after a cup of tea and a little rest prepare food for evening meal.

Perfect day!   Time now for a relaxing night and tomorrow is another day.....................

Interesting Friends………………...

On holiday I met quite a few people of similar age who quite openly said that they enjoyed doing nothing,  quite content to sit for long periods of time just staring out to sea. If this is what you want then fine.  However I like to surround myself with people who still have a zest for life and who are still excited with the prospect of what they can do next!  Age should never be a limiting factor in pursuing your dreams.

From time to time I am going to pass the gauntlet on my blog to friends who are pursing their dreams.  Here is one of them. If music is your thing you will certainly appreciate the passion and dedication of Alan!

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Planning for retirement? Record an album!

When I worked in training & development, I organised my first pre-retirement course at the age of twenty-seven, so I’ve had plenty of time to figure out what to do when it eventually happens for me (which will probably be in a couple of years or so)!

I’ve been incredibly lucky in that my lifelong pastime of playing and writing music will hopefully now provide plenty of projects for the future – on piano my style is kind of a cross between Randy Newman and Bruce Hornsby and I can fortunately  also do reasonable guitar, bass, drums and vocals.

So, having played a lot of other people’s songs in bands, about ten years ago I invested in some decent recording equipment and set about recording my own back-catalogue of songs. Since then I’ve given up bands (too much artistic angst at times!) and concentrated on playing solo, with keyboard, 12-string and vocals (more nerve-wracking but at least you’re in control of things!).

On to my new album, ‘Storyteller’ – how did I actually set about making it? Well, you have to play every role – songwriter, artist, recording engineer, designer, producer and marketing agent – so it helps to be mildly schizophrenic for a start!

Usually a thought comes to mind which forms the concept of a song – for me, often a chorus. A good example of this on the new album would be the song ‘Ridgeway’. I live quite close to the aforementioned pathway, and sitting up there one day a few words came to mind ‘Ridgeway wanders through the country, Ridgeway knows of Father Time, Ridgeway welcomes all who know her, from Wessex Downs to Chiltern lime’.

A mad dash down the A34 muttering the words so as not to forget them and on to the piano – shut your eyes and see what comes out. If I start with words, I can usually form a concept of the song in my mind – ballad, up-tempo, rhetorical etc. In this case a kind of ‘piano Dire Straits’ came to mind and off I went. As an aside, I once wrote a song called ‘Leaving the South Behind’ as I was driving up the M42. On that occasion I phoned the sung chorus into my work voicemail as a backup.. good job my PA was on holiday!!

But usually I never record anything straight away, the idea is that you should sleep on what you’ve written and if you can remember it the next day, then it’s worth following up. I say ‘written’; for me that usually means a few scribbled words and guitar chords. It’s a bit like having brief notes when doing a presentation - a guide, and what comes out on the day just kind of follows the structure.

Anyway, the verses often follow a few days later (I sometimes cheat and do a bit of research on the Internet first, if the song is about a place, for instance) and the next acid test is playing it live. The occasional gigs I do are somewhat long (3 hours plus is not uncommon) so there is plenty of time to pop in a few new songs here and there and see how they go down. Depending on reaction, I modify things – you haven’t got to be too precious about what you’ve originally written (that’s the ‘producer’ bit!).

Onwards to the studio. I usually start with a piano or guitar, then start adding other parts – bass, drums, vocals etc. Some of my earlier efforts suffered a little from not knowing when to stop adding

instruments, which a) caused a nightmare when mixing down and b) caused audiences to comment that they weren’t buying the sound that I was playing live.

So ‘Storyteller’ is very much a live sound – one piano or guitar, vocals, some bass and maybe a few background synthesizer strings added, but not straying too far from what you can produce live – just enough to give the sound a bit of body. Now, my recording studio is not perhaps what you would envisage. Unlike recording ‘All You Need is Love’, there are no hoards of head-banded, pot-smoking, ‘hey man’ people – just me and all this equipment! So, off we go…..

Recording the first track on, say, piano is often a challenge. Especially with fewer instruments, you need to maximise the playing and expression, but with no-one there to perform to (perhaps I do need the hippies!). I don’t go in for lots of computer editing afterwards – you can lose too much of the ambience of the song – so for me, what goes in is broadly what comes out, so it has to be right. My usual routine is to keep playing the whole piece until I’m happy – which can often be a few hours and many cups of tea later - it used to be wine, but for some strange reason the playing got worse when I thought it was getting better! Putting second, third instruments on then becomes a bit easier as you have something to work with, listening to your first recording through headphones as you play along.

After the instruments come the vocals and it’s best for me to do those a couple of days after a live performance – my voice is a bit more relaxed then. That is the only part where a microphone is used and any background noise should be avoided…all the instruments are wired directly into the recorder, so it doesn’t matter if a 32-ton juggernaut drives past!

Now you have your recorded song and the technical bit now kicks in big-time, adding a few effects like reverb and compression to brighten the instruments, getting the balance right between all the instruments and the vocals, and making sure you have deleted any extraneous noises.

This part can often take as long as the recording, but what you end up with is the first cd of your new album, recorded directly from the recording desk. It is a truly wonderful feeling when a message pops up on the screen of the desk asking if you have copyright permission to make this cd and I always grin widely (now with the aforementioned wine) when I click ‘yes’!

I recorded ‘Storyteller’ at my house in France, so the next part of the album journey was to bring it back to the UK for ‘mastering’. This is the only part of the process I don’t do myself as it requires some expert equipment and personnel. The album sound is filtered through various electronic gadgets that boost certain frequencies etc, which has a similar effect to polishing a brass candlestick! The whole sound comes out as fresher, as if you are playing it in the same room. This is then called a ‘Red Book’ album and is of the technical quality to be pressed and played on radio stations. Also, there is a type of electronic bar coding added so that if the song is played on the radio, it is identified and the royalties roll straight into your bank account! So, my idea of retirement is……..

The last piece of the jig-saw is the album cover. I tend to design my own and I like to put the words in, so I usually end up with at least an 8-page booklet. I like a clean look and there are a number of critical issues, not least of which are the title, colour, typeface, pictures etc. For ‘Storyteller’, I chose one of the songs as the title, mainly as all my songs usually tell little stories and went for a typeface called HANA, which gave the right sort of ambience. For pictures, I used a couple of my collection of gig’ photos, but also Googled ‘Storyteller’ and found an interesting original print from a Norwegian professional storyteller. A few e-mails later and I had his permission to use this on the front cover!

So that’s about it. I currently have the final proofs for the album and am awaiting delivery of the first batch. Like most printing things, it becomes cheaper the more you order, but some self-control is needed otherwise you end up with a house full of unsold cds (cough)! Lots of this first batch will be sent out to radio stations in the hope that the royalties come flooding in…

What next, well I have thoughts of revisiting some of my earlier material – the ones I currently play live – maybe ‘Another time around’ or something a title. Also, I have another interesting project on the go, writing music for a one-hour musical/narration tribute for the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in 2016. With a bit of luck, that might coincide with my retirement - watch this space….

Alan Garmonsway

3 March 2014

© Alan Garmonsway 2014   All Rights Reserved                                                                                                                     

Alan Garmonsway has spent much of his career in biosciences companies in Human Resources and Change Management. His first gig was at the age of 15, to a bunch of skinheads in a church hall near Sunderland. He survived that and went on to play in both folk and rock bands before recording the first of his eight albums in 2001. His songs are regularly played on Internet radio stations and he has a webpage  at www.unsigned.com/alangarmonsway . If you are interested in purchasing the Storyteller album, just e-mail him at alan@garmonsway.com .

Its a small world………..

Last Thursday evening we went to see "The Weir" -at the Wyndham Theatre.  Impressive performances from the well known cast, although the content required a great deal of concentration - here is the summary….

Conor McPherson’s critically acclaimed play opens at the Wyndhams theatre on 16th January and plays for a strictly limited season until the 19th April 2014.

The Weir was first produced in 1997 at The Royal Court and earlier this year enjoyed a sell out season at the Donamar Warehouse with an impressive cast list including Risteárd Cooper, Brian Cox, Dervla Kirwan, Peter MacDonald and Ardal O'Hanlon

The play opens in Brendan’s bar, an isolated rural Irish pub, where the men gather for their daily pint. Brendan along with Jack and Jim discuss Valerie, a pretty young woman who has arrived in their midst from Dublin.

Valerie arrives at the bar with Finbar, a local businessman. The men reminisce and  regal her with stories, trying to impress her with supernatural tales of souls past and of spirits very much present. But Valerie’s story is more chilling and more real than any of the men could have foreseen.

The play is typically bitter-sweet, and on its première in 1997, The Weir won the Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and Olivier Awards for Best New Play, and established McPherson’s place as one of our greatest living playwrights.

The Weir has become an undoubted modern classic and with this fantastic cast it is a must-see play.

We did enjoy it - however we were troubled by a woman directly behind us, probably in her early 40s who fell asleep more or less from the start and snored so loudly I had to turn round and nudge her…..this seemed to do the trick …….

The impressive cast were so recognisable……..I kept thinking of TV productions in which the individual actors starred  like "BallyKissAngels", "The Bourne Identity" (I think Brian Cox was in this one or another Bourne :)) and the much missed "Father Ted"

However the most intriguing part of the evening occurred at our pre- theatre meal. I noticed a group of people opposite us and in particular a woman who had her back to us. I know it sounds strange but even from the back this woman seemed so familiar particularly her hair.  Eventually I could see her face and I know I have mentioned similar things before…..but it is getting really scary….  but here was a woman who we haven't seen for about 10 years, we exchange Christmas cards and keep trying to meet up.  As she now lives in Devon it has always been difficult to make this happen.  By coincidence she had some consultancy work in London and met up with friends who shared her birthday.  We were all delighted to see each other and had hugs all round.  What struck me about her is that she had just celebrated her 70th birthday -( I must confess I thought she was much younger!) but she was so bright, bubbly and full of life and still doing work on an ad hoc basis. For as long as we have know her she has always been hungry for the next project and making it happen.  How refreshing in this day and age…..truly an inspiration.  We parted company with the same promises of meeting up and this time we are going to make it happen……………..




http://www.fromtheboxoffice.com/detail/2BPU/London/Wyndham_s_Theatre/The_Weir