The Circle
[A site for musical sharing and critical analysis]
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We recorded this in a very militant fashion, just to prove that we had a collection of songs that are nearing ready for performance. It was again recorded on the internal mic on my laptop, but we’ve almost perfected the balances and room placement, etc. There’s also some vocals, but they’re fairly rough at the moment - singing with music all around your head, with no space for hearing the music in your head, is harder than it seems. Anyway, these are the most complete songs we’ve got so far, even if a couple of them need more work. There are mistakes and happy accidents along the way, but I think we’re going to attempt a more fluid style in playing the songs in public. Anything goes in our sessions - we never tell each other what to do, but come across some interesting sounds because of this. I love my band. 
Campanology
Bring Your Face
Treading Water
Lunar Month
New Arsehole
Madcap
Tea Chest
Secret Drawer
Riding Roughshod

This will be the last SeeBeeOne post for a while, until we record something properly over the summer. This post is a bit of a strange one because, after discussing whether we need a bassist or not over the last few months, one fell out of the sky a couple of weekends ago. It was a bright sunny day two Sunday’s ago, if you remember, and so there we were jamming away with the windows open. After three tracks, our drummer’s housemate informs us that we have a fan outside. Our pianist pops his head out of the window. It’s a large guy in a muscle vest with a case. ‘You need bass?’ he asks. ‘You play?’ asks Dave. ‘Yeah, I got bass now,’ he says. So that was that, up comes our new buddy to lay down some low frequencies. His language is no good whatsoever (he’s from Slovakia, apparently), so it’s a bit of a struggle until we decide to just let the music talk. We start playing, and this guy is good, very good. And here are some of the best results from the couple of hours we got with him. So, now you really get to decide whether we need bass or not. I think, on hearing these results, that we do NOT. Nothing against this guy’s playing (he was superb throughout), but we sound more like a generic funk band with a bass involved, whereas we were sounding much more original beforehand. Anyway, not wanting to taint your opinions any further, here you go . . . 
TrackTwo
TrackSeven
TrackTen

Here’s some more SeeBeeOne. It’s taken from our second recorded jam. I had some crazy pedals on some of this, including one which emits seven octaves for every note played and sounds like a deranged organ - this is Electro Harmonix ‘HOG’ (Harmonic Octave Generator) for those who are interested - as well as swathes of delay, filtering and distortion. All good fun.The tracks are in a similar vein to the other two I’ve posted, although we’ve progressed through different styles as the jam went on. Most of it is improvised, except for the odd chord sequence we’ve been working on. Any comments would be greatly received. Cheers! 
TrackThree 
TrackFour
TrackEight
TrackEleven
TrackTwelve
TrackSeventeen

TrackOne This is the first recorded track of my (Craig, Manchurian, etc.) band. As you can tell, it features a drummer (my good friend, Al, who I tried to get on this thing), a pianist/synth manipulator (my good friend, Dave, who is nigh on a genius) and myself trying to play guitar. Everything is jammed, so bear with us while we search out ideas and phrases (or try to lock in with the 9/8 time signature in my case). However, we’re quite proud of the results of these preliminary sketches, which were recorded through the internal mic on my MacBook Air. The result is well balanced. A few comments about direction/sound/ideas would be appreciated. Cheers. TrackTwoObviously, this is the second one I want to show today. It’s quite different from the first. Dave swaps his piano for pads and (later) a dirty synth. The minor tonality is my favourite element of this song. Anyway, more comments would be appreciated. Cheers once more.