Wednesday, January 13

I'm Recording A New Album! On My iPhone.


Hi friends, it's been a while.

Since my last post I've gotten married, and Amanda and I now have a wonderful two year old son, Rostam.



I've been busy with work, parenting and a graduate degree at night - too busy to perform or record music...

Until a few months ago.

I wrote a new song. Then on a whim, I tried recording it into "Garageband", a recording app on my iPhone. And to my surprise, I thought it sounded good. Much better than I had expected - great, even. And I've been sitting on twenty or so songs since my tour with Chris Sand 5 years ago, just waiting for an opportunity to record them.

Unlike recording on higher quality equipment, I don't need a lot of extra time to record on my phone. I can produce the track and record the vocals in the little stolen moments between appointments, on my coffee break, in my car. I've got 5 tracks down so far and I'm excited about the results. The final album should be 10-15 songs.

The sound quality is good - I mean, when Alan Lomax set out to record folk songs for the Library of Congress in 1946, his equipment certainly wasn't as good as the iPhone - but the production quality sounds a little canned, a bit cheesy.  Somehow it doesn't seem to interfere with the quality of the songs, to me there's a punk rock, DIY aesthetic to the thing, like when you used to record on an 8-track cassette station. As long as the song was good, the cheesy low-fi quality could even add to the appeal.

Well that's what I'm hoping for with this. I'm not sure if it'll be a digital download only or if I'll press CD's as well...several of you certainly have free copies coming your way, I've been getting a lot of musical love and support from so many of you for such a long time.

Oh, and I won't be releasing it under my own name...I'm putting it out under the name Chris has been calling me for years:

Muhammad Seven. 

The song you've been listening to is almost finished, titled "Working". (A little secret - if you right click on the player you can download the audio file if you'd like.)


Just to be clear - I am not actually playing any of those instruments, the vocals (lead and harmony) are the only live instruments on the track. Everything else I did on my phone, it looks like this:


That's it for now.  Stay tuned for further developments...