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UNFAMILIAR VOICES

CD cover - head thinking This project was completed on 27 November 2024. It has been uploaded to Reverb Nation and BandLab.

I'm tempted to say this one is the fault of my sister and brother-in-law, who happened to mention a band called Public Service Broadcasting. Though they have done songs, they don't seem to have relished singing vocals and have usually preferred to obtain voice segments from other places and put music to them. Having listened to various of their work including The race for space, I felt like having a go at something similar.

I went to freesound and found one voice clip I liked, however the fact that explicit attribution text was required for every clip used put me right off. Next I tried BandLab's own library, which does contain some spoken vocal clips, but usually only short clips. They seem to have been more interested in song vocals. Plan C which eventually occurred to me was to write my own scripts and record those - that way I'd own the rights and there wouldn't be a problem, and of course they could be about what I wanted to write about and not whatever the person in the clip wanted to say.

Various themes were then included that clearly wouldn't have been otherwise - court cases, work of course which has been a long running theme of mine, JFK, the police, climate change, water, shipwrecks and others.

Orchestration and recording started in October 2022. Sometimes I would go upstairs and set up my guitar with no idea of what I was going to record, and it almost felt as close as I've ever got to what it might have been like to be in a studio recording with a band. There's a lot of my guitar in these tracks, albeit heavily edited. Some of the tracks were built from loops from the sound library, quite often concentrating on a specific pack which therefore gave the tracks the feel of the genre that the pack was from. I didn't think I should include more than 16 with spoken vocals, so after that I added instrumentals and even conventional songs as bonus tracks until I reached my customary 75 minute approximate running time. The last track to be completed was the song Believe me on 21st December, 2023.

After that as usual it was time for editing, which does hugely improve on the original rough cuts though normally with a law of diminishing returns. The vocals themselves got hugely better as a result of the editing, odd bits of extra orchestration were added. There were six rounds of this, including especially towards the end going through EQ purgatory on some of the vocals. I remember adding an amp stack to a few of the vocals, which seemed like a good idea until it didn't and I took them out again. Issues of software lag became increasingly problematic, though to be fair this may have been because with a lot of effects and cutting I may have been pushing the limits of what is realistically possible on that platform. Somewhere towards the end of editing I was told that I have mild hearing loss above 3.5kHz, though what seems to be happening is that quiet high frequencies are vanishing into my tinitus. I'm not sure how this has affected the mixing, though if you hear more high frequencies than you would like I hope you'll understand.

As always with these projects, after being part of my life for so long it does feel a bit weird getting to the end of it. There does come a point when going round and round over the same aspects of the same tracks feels increasingly futile and a line has to be drawn, usually after five or six rounds of edits when they are as good as they are going to get. I do wonder now whether with 29 tracks I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and it is a relief to get this out through the door.

I do hope you like it.

1 - Experimental sound - I wanted to try putting sounds together to make something vaguely musical and always intended this to go at the beginning. The sounds merge into music after a time and then back into sounds at the end. At one point while editing I decided it still wasn't experimental enough and adjusted it accordingly.

2 - A? - There was a huge story running at the time about a big name celebrity being involved in a scandal, and a certain amount of speculation as to who the celebrity was. One particular other celebrity was incorrectly named and duly sued the person concerned. In my fictional story inspired by that, the person making the media postings wasn't anyone in particular, and they were done apparently on one night while drunk. What we're listening to here is the barrister for the celebrity addressing the jury in the resulting court case.

3 - Speak up - I wanted to try putting sounds together to make something vaguely musical and always intended this to go at the beginning. The sounds merge into music after a time and then back into sounds at the end. At one point while editing I decided it still wasn't experimental enough and adjusted it accordingly.

4 - Yes - This was made using short vocal clips from the BandLab sound library. As per usual with these clips I have no idea who originally recorded them.

5 - You - This is another made using BandLab vocal clips. I was quite startled when I heard the completed track. It sounds odd, but while I was working on it I wasn't really thinking about what it was saying as long as it was cogent. However it is quite clear, and I would never have scripted it like this because it wouldn't have occurred to me.

6 - I see you - Another made using short BandLab vocal clips. I wasn't worrying particularly at the time about what was in the clips, they were just sounds.

7 - Believe me - Unusually for this collection, this is a song, loosely based on conspiracy theories around John F Kennedy. I'd decided that 16 tracks with spoken vocals was enough, and that more than that would get annoying. Having got 16 I then added what you might call bonus tracks, some of which were instrumental and a few like this one which were songs. By my standards this is quite hard edged, qualifying as at least hard rock if not heavy metal.

8 - Don't touch the chicken - I was on a weekend break in a quiet seaside town called Minehead. Just up the road going away from the coast was a pub/restaurant with a large menu. Other half and I were going there for dinner, but I had a queasy stomach and was wondering what I could have that wouldn't further upset it. She said I'd be alright as long as I didn't have the chicken. The rest is purely my overactive imagination, though I was probably also influenced by a cartoon I'd see years earlier of a diner being removed from a restaurant on a stretcher.

9 - A few rotten apples - Following the Wayne Couzens case, there was considerable publicity about what the police had or hadn't done, and in particular reported comments implying that Everard should have known that Couzens wasn't allowed to arrest her for Covid offences. Some of it came across sounding like victim blaming, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that had Everard declined to be arrested this could have been counted as resisting arrest, though I now gather that this isn't in itself a criminal offence. It sounded as if she was in a no-win situation which I found very troubling. In the aftermath of this, I wrote this script about a fictitious assistant chief constable explaining that despite large numbers of his officerts being under investigation it would be business as usual on arresting women alone at night.

10 - Going back - This is an instrumental. On BandLab it's very easy to reverse regions so I wanted to play around with that and see how it sounded. There are guitars going forwards and backwards along with vocal effects fading in and out. To me it all sounds somewhat psychedelic, vaguely like the sort of thing the Beatles might have recorded in 1966. It's probably my favourite out of the 29, but it didn't seem to get many likes on BandLab.

11 - This is a dream - another using BandLab vocal clips, put together in the very early stages of this project. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was very limited mileage in using these clips so I later switched to scripting and recording my own vocal segments. Both types appear scattered throughout the running order.

12 - Hues - While using Logic Express, over a period of time I'd had great fun with an exotic instrument called an erhu. Out of nostalgia I felt like doing this again so I had a look on BandLab. Sadly I only found a handful of clips, which I used to put this together. I don't think it stands comparison with the Logic Express erhu material, but then I could orchestrate the erhu there and I couldn't here.

13 - Another day - The BandLab sound library, like the one Logic Express used, has copious numbers of clips of singers singing segments of vocal. It certainly appears that users are expected to assemble complete songs from these vocal clips. I'd never tried to do that before, partly because there wasn't enough variety of material in the clips, but finally curiosity got the better of me and I attempted it. You tell me how you think I got on.

14 - Everything is improbable - As this character says himself, "There's been a lot in the news about climate change". He proceeds to argue against the idea that humanity is rapidly destroying the earth. I gave him the best and most eloquent arguments for this that I could, though I don't mean to imply that I agree with him. I view the characters I give voice to as fictitious - I'm portraying them, like an actor in a film.

15 - Sorry about the water - Sadly this is based on real events. The water company where I was, in common I believe with others, had prolonged serious problems supplying people with water. I don't now remember when this was, though it was being reported on in 2023. A lot of what this fictitious water spokesman says is more or less what was happening and what was being said about it. I recorded it in July 2023, largely out of sheer exasperation.

16 - On the move - Another made using vocal clips from the BandLab sound library, though it seems to be surprisingly late for that - I'd started with scripts months earlier. I'm wondering now whether it might have been originally intend as an instrumental, or maybe I just felt like having one more try at using their clips rather than me.

17 - Western Castle - I'd watched a number of shipwreck videos on YouTube, including one that I haven't since been able to find where many of the lifeboats were wrecked and the passengers mutinied. After seeing it I wrote a composite lyric about a fictitious shipwreck. I was trying to think of a suitable name for a luxurious ship to have - obviously Britannic, Olympic and Titanic were out - and it needed to fit the rhythm of the lyric - so Western Castle is what I came up with. Originally it was going to be a song, until I decided to use it as a spoken vocal.

18 - Inquiry - There actually was a political inquiry of some description going on at the time, and there were media reports that did seem to give the impression that people who had been involved were being steered into being careful what they said to the inquiry. I carefully haven't said in the script which organisation was having the inquiry or what exactly it was into ("to get to the bottom of the whole issue"). I did check to make sure it was an inquiry and not an enquiry.

19 - The bottom line - This song was triggered by something someone said (albeit not to me). I'd better not say who it was, but the remark was along the lines of criticising a well known state financial institution and saying he could do much better himself. This rang a bell - I remembered he'd said something like that before - and I had the idea of a character who always insisted he knew best and that the person he was talking to had worthless opinions and knew nothing. I had encountered someone else somewhat like that years earlier at college, so this may be an amalgam of the two.

20 - Staffing reductions - This is work related. The employer I had been working for (although by now I was retired) had announced a massive closure program, and there had been previous announcements about job losses. This a few years later was therefore a script about job losses being announced, in the sort of style that I was sadly used to. The points mean prizes approach to who was keeping their jobs did actually happen, though not there - that was someone I used to know who worked in the finance sector.

21 - Yahboo politics - The point about this one is that although this character keeps insisting that he doesn't do yahboo politics, he actually is doing even while saying he doesn't do them. For a while not doing yahboo politics was something of a mantra. I carefully haven't said which party this character is from; I'm not sure any party is immune from this. I did however almost by accident give him one very good line - "we're all tired of promises".

22 - Up and down - This is an instrumental, named after the lead guitar part which was actually me. I vaguely remember coming up with that while recording and thinking "that sounds nice".

23 - Gatecrasher - This character is gatecrashing a funeral. That is, he didn't know the deceased from Adam and is trying to pretend that he did. I tried to write the script so that it would sound as if he was talking about someone he knew but wasn't close to, hence "he probably never mentioned me" (which he wouldn't have as he never met him and didn't know him) and "I wouldn't say we was close" (because he didn't in fact know him at all). I'm not now sure what triggered this one, though there had already been a film about characters who gatecrashed weddings.

24 - Passing resemblance - I honestly can't remember what triggered this song, though I suspect it may have been an episode of a TV drama. Unusually for me it's a relationship song - this character looks somewhat like someone else who the female character had a relationship with before. She wants to have one with him as well, but he suspects she's on the rebound and isn't keen.

25 - Jealous - This song was going to be an instrumental, but listening to the backing I found myself mentally crooning something about "so I am a spiteful god". It did occur to me that this might be offensive to religious people, so I rephrased to use words that were biblically defensible - see for example Exodus 34:14 and Romans 12:19. I also tried to balance the lyric by including something positive towards the end ("I offer you salvation too").

26 - Stab in the dark - This instrumental is named after the synth that was used as the lead.

27 - Totally unacceptable - This is another somewhat political script. This fictitious Northern Ireland politician (presumably a unionist) is venting his wrath against the EU. It did occur to me how things change and new enemies appear in the crosshairs - back in the early 1970s say it would have been republicanism with nobody having any idea who the EU were, what the accord was, and so forth. The reference to Ian Paisley was deliberate - Paisley did in the end reach an agreement. The reference to the emergency brake was luck really - I was metaphorically sucking my pencil when I happened to see a news article about the issues surrounding this brake. A light bulb went on over my head and I thought, "I can use this!"

28 - Going somewhere - This is another of the scattering of bonus songs. Again unusually for me it's a relationship song - he surprises her apparently in the act of being about to leave him, and proceeds to try and convince himself not to jump to conclusions, though we as listeners think he's kidding himself. I don't remember where the idea came from, though I suspect it was probably from an episode of a TV drama.

29 - Pine Meadows- This very early track was always intended as the closer due to the way it finishes. The vocal came from freesound, which I was going to plunder for further similar vocals. However, I was struggling to find suitable material, and I was aware that attribution text was required: "Pine Meadows-Speech.wav by balloonhead -- https://freesound.org/s/362501/ -- License: Creative Commons 0". I just didn't want to have to plaster my stuff with loads of attribution credits, so this was the only one. Reluctantly I did search to see if the incident being referred to was real, but like Western Castle it appears to be fictitious.

The cover picture is a PNG. The actual CD jewel case file was created with Print Shop 6.4.