clivemurray.com

It’s been nearly 5 years in the making, just this one song. I dread to think about the number of times I scrapped melody lines and almost deleted the whole thing from the hard drive, but something kept me going.

Anyway, if you’re a regular reader you probably know most of the saga behind this track. It’s inspired by the Stephen King “Dark Tower” series, and in particular the lead character, Roland of Gilead – the last Gunslinger. It’s 200bpm, the rhythm guitars are played on a drop-A tuned 7-string, and I did all the lead parts on my fixed bridge Blackmachine B2. All guitar tones by my the Behringer V-Amp2. Drum programmed in Cubase drum editor, sounds from a soundfont called Gold Drums that I use for literally everything.

Guest solo in the middle section by Dan Ranger – thanks for playing, man. Nice one.

Caveat: I’m not an engineer, and I’m still not 100% happy with the mix, but I have to just get this out the door now so I can move on. Perhaps I can come back and remix at a later date.

No further ado, here it is: Gunslinger. [MP3, 5m05s, 192kbps, 7Mb]

Enjoy.
–c.

PS: The title of this post is pretty self-aggrandising, I know. The “wait” referred to is me waiting to get time to finally finish this track and get it out the door. I’m not implying that hundreds of adoring fans are awaiting every note from my guitar with baited breath…

If you spend all day on the internet like I do (working, dammit!) then you may well have seen this already as it’s been around almost everywhere, and that’s normally enough to keep me from posting a “hey wow look at this!!!” link, but in this case it very much bears repeating.

Anyone who’s spent any time clicking randomly around YouTube will know that people are wont to post videos showing off their musical skills, be it their latest band video, the fact that they can play Pachelbel’s Canon really well, or just singing a few warbley notes in that horrid R&B “hunt-a-note” style that still seems so popular. (Mariah Carey has a lot to answer for…)

Imagine, then, that someone took the painstaking time to hunt down loads of videos on YouTube, and remix them into new coherent – and viable – musical entities. Brand new songs, composed of unrelated pieces of music, played across the globe by people who never met.

Imagine that this person cut together not one, but seven of these songs, and that they all work beautifully.

Imagine no longer. I stop talkee, you clickee watchee. It’s called THRU YOU, and it rocks my socks. (That link goes to track 3, which is my favourite, but you should really take the time to check them all out.)

–c.

Anyone who works in IT in this country, and probably most of those who work in development, will know The Register even if they aren’t regular readers. It’s the premier UK-based tech news site, and it covers everything from new bleeding edge hardware to trends on the web, to whether Bill Gates or Steve Jobs have had a crap that day. It’s a well respected, often well written site, and I myself often post links to the Register when trying to prove or back up a point about some tech-related discussion.

But.

I absolutely fucking detest its tone of voice sometimes. Just as I can’t stand the idea in some agencies that the techies and the designers don’t mix, or that Mac users and PC users should stay out of each other’s way, or any of the other ridiculous stereotypical nonsense that can easily spring up in technical communities, I hate the sneering way that The Register looks down on certain things with a kind of knowing, pally ridicule which implies that everyone reading agrees with them.

Examples? It’s in the lexicon. Twitter is referred to as a “Web2.0rhea outfit“. Second Life is referred to as “Sadville“. The iPhone is the “Jesus Phone“. There are others. In one article the site TechCrunch was referred to as “the Special Olympics of Web2.0″.

It just winds me up – it’s lazy journalism. It’s not just giving me the news, it’s spinning it before it gets to me. As it happens, I have an iPhone and I use Twitter (though not Second Life) but it’s not just about feeling wounded – give me more credit than that.

I just like to make my own mind up, that’s all.
–c.