Music: Songs for the Wild At Heart

[Tapewolf]

Urgh, it's been a long and bumpy road, but my second album has finally been mastered - Songs for the Wild-At-Heart.

The page and downloads are here.  There's also a PDF CD cover.  It prints out beautifully on a decent colour laser - the colours tend to bleed on an inkjet though.

http://www.dougtheeagle.com/sftwah.htm

Some of the older hands may remember my 'Legend of Daniel Ti'Fiona' EP which I first outed on The Nice in May last year.  Apart from the last track, which has been rewritten, that EP forms the second half of the album, and is based on the 'Dark Pegasus' storyline from DMFA.  Indeed, those who have heard the Radio Project will recognise the music, since the relationship between the two projects has been rather incestuous.
Very few people will have heard all the new songs - 'Borderline' is my personal favourite on this album, and I've been keeping it secret :twisted

For those of you who are coming in completely fresh, this is what we have:

Side 1:

1. Art Follows Art (instrumental)
2. The Falcon's Tale
3. The Young Human
4. One Less Hero (from the Chronicles of Jakob Pettersohn)
5. Borderline

Side 2:

6. Daniel Ti'Fiona
7. The Quest Begins (instrumental)
i. Journey to the Kingdom of Holly-Ann
ii. The Forbidden Lands
8. The Battle of Evil Against Good
  i. Dark Pegasus, I Presume
  ii. Fight Sequence
  iii. Pyrrhic Victory
9. The End?
  i. Reflections
  ii. Daniel Ti'Fiona (reprise)
  iii. The Hero's Return

Thanks go out to James, Bobby, Tezkat and Keiel for lending their voices to the DMFA songs.  Thanks to Zina and James for the cover art.  And thanks to Amber for inspiring it even though I don't believe she actually liked the end result.

http://www.dougtheeagle.com

[DigitalMan]

... the relationship between the two projects has been rather incestuous.

Always a wonderful way to describe it.

I like Art Follows Art, and Borderline is badass dood!

And you provided lyrics! Squeee!

[Tapewolf]

I like Art Follows Art, and Borderline is badass dood!

Both of these were co-written with my brother.  He wrote the core of 'Art Follows Art', which I embellished and stretched, and also the intro for 'Borderline', which was originally just titled 'Hot Blood' and used a sample of Kenneth Branagh which I later replaced myself.

Borderline is the probably the most substantial engineering project I've done so far.  The intro uses a backwards synthesizer, which I achieved by running the tape backwards.  This resulted in a bizarre accident where I muted the wrong tracks during recording (the track numbers are reversed when the tape is put on the machine upside-down) and suddenly heard a satanic incantation in my right ear.

http://www.jpmorris.force9.co.uk/music/test/incant.mp3 - (the beeps were for sync purposes so I knew when to start and stop the synth)

Other things which had to be dealt with included the electric piano software going about half a semitone flat when synced to tape instead of freewheeling.  In desperation I fixed this by recording the piano lines with the tape running about 5% faster than normal (I speeded the tape up until it became 'in-key').

The vocal harmony towards the end wouldn't fit as three tracks - I needed them for other instruments, so I had to get the harmony down pat, mix the three down to one other track and then erase the originals.  Needless to say it was quite hairy.

Finally, I wasn't happy with the choir at the end, which was originally done on a Roland MVS-1, but it didn't have that spine-tingling quality of the proper M400 mellotron choir used by Genesis, Rick Wakeman, Manfred Mann and so on.  I solved that by ordering the offical Mellotron sample CD all the way from Canada, and designing and writing my own playback software.  It runs under DOS and uses various ancient and forbidden programming techniques previously used only in Ultima 7, the 'No!' demo by Nooon, and BIOS update software.  (The whole thing boots off a compact flash harddisk).

Project details are here (but may not be forever):
http://nice.purrsia.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=79;t=002819;p=1#000000

Here's a clip from the first time I got the MIDI implementation good enough to work under sequencer control:

http://www.jpmorris.force9.co.uk/music/tornadoproject/trontest.wav.mp3

..there are other clips in that directory too, but most of them are awful.

Borderline originally had a slightly different ending, which I composed on the way into work one day and forgot before I had a chance to record it.  What's there is fairly close, but I swear there was more to it originally..

[DigitalMan]

... This must be how people feel when I try to explain vertices and UV mapping D:

I find the fact that you did this all with real machinery to be even more impressive. I only know how to use a "piano roll" editor, and I've never been able to get a synth program to work right anyways, besides that one Music Maker for the PS2 The fact that I don't know the technical term for the type of program I need doesn't help either...

Also, the fact that you made a program to handle this earns you a bigass round of applause from the DigitalMan. What programming language did you use, anyways?

A lot of people 'round these parts can work wonders with a pencil, or with a tablet. But you are undisputedly a master of a different art form entirely, one that sadly can't be exhibited on most graphical art sites.

Now I want a MIDI keyboard... And the ability to play a MIDI keyboard... And the ability to get the MIDI data into my computer...

"We tell DOS to shut its eyes while we briefly turn the universe inside-out and reset the value of PI to be 6 instead of 3.14."

Wish I'd thought of that one.

[Tapewolf]

I find the fact that you did this all with real machinery to be even more impressive. I only know how to use a "piano roll" editor, and I've never been able to get a synth program to work right anyways, besides that one Music Maker for the PS2 The fact that I don't know the technical term for the type of program I need doesn't help either...

Well believe it or not, the entire album was made with the piano roll editor too.  I just use it to drive a bunch of hardware synthesizers (and two softsynths) and laid it down track by track.  The only 'live' keyboard lines in the whole thing are the lead line at the very end of 'Borderline', which took about half a dozen takes before I could nail it, and the backwards synthesizer at the start of the track (which is just one note anyway).

Also, the fact that you made a program to handle this earns you a bigass round of applause from the DigitalMan. What programming language did you use, anyways?

Well the memory manager had to be written in assembler - it's quite simply not possible to alter the GDT or enter protected mode from within C.  The main program was written in Borland C 2.0.  It would have been smaller in assembler, but impossible to debug and I'm not that good at it!

Now I want a MIDI keyboard... And the ability to play a MIDI keyboard... And the ability to get the MIDI data into my computer...

As I say, I'm pretty hopeless with a proper MIDI keyboard.  This is why I've got a digital Hammond.  If I could actually play, I'd get a real one.

As for using tape, that's part of the fun.  I could quite easily have done the entire thing In-The-Box with Protools or Ardour, but everyone does that so it would be boring.  It was not without its trials - early in the project Quantegy went bust - at the time they were the last tape manufacturer.  They got better, but it meant I had to use some 1999-dated second-hand tape in order to finish the album on time (there is a dropout on 'Daniel Ti'Fiona').

The echo unit was fun, though - I put it into a 1960s-style feedback loop on 'Young Human' and at the end of 'Journey'.  I finished that song by switching off the drive motor which I don't believe can currently be done with any plugins.

[Tapewolf]

Oops, I have just noticed that the download page still said 'preliminary release - not yet mastered'.  That's a lie.  Sorry for the confusion.