New album and new sessions!

I've not posted for a while, but I've busy planning away all sorts of things for you, so I hope you can forgive me.

First off, I will be announcing the release date of my new album this week! It won't be far away, but I won't be releasing it straight away as I want to build some momentum and put on some crazy competitions for you all leading up to it! I get hold of the CDs tomorrow. It's an exciting day!

Also, I have a busy extended weekend of great gigs lined up. Im heading to Village Coffee on Saturday afternoon for my usual 2-4 chilled out slot, before driving down to Chesterfield in the evening for the first ever 'Sam Draisey Sessions' on tour at The Commercial Inn in Pilsley. Joining me will be Alex Vann, Elliott Burton, Natch and Brains for Breakfast, some of my favourite acoustic players from the midlands who I have shared a stage with many times. I'm really excited about the whole thing! Then from there I head to Sunday night and my brand new open mic at The Albion in Wednesfield. Last Sunday was the first one, and even though no-one else played it still went down really well and had a good audience. If you want to play in front of them, just turn up on Sunday for an 8:30 start. Then on Monday it's my stalwart open mic at The Hartley Arms in Wheaton Aston, which apparently is getting some advertising on Kic.FM in the lead up. Again, all welcome for a 9pm start. Finally on Tuesday we have my 'Sam Draisey Session' at The Robin 2 in Bilston. I'm really excited about this as the confirmed acts are Moseley based band 'SYLVIA', Punk Ukulele player Dan 'Salty' Salt,  the lap steel and Americana stylings of Pete Boddis and the frankly excellent Dominic Malin. I can honestly say that these guys are some of my favourite artists from around the Midlands (there is so much talent in this region. it's amazing!) so don't miss it. It's free, and again, if you want to share a stage with them, it's open mic too. Get there from about 8 to avoid disappointment!

So that's it for now, but it won't be long before more posts appear with details of my new album, competitions and gigs coming up for you to enjoy. I always want to make it worth your while reading this blog, so I might even have a competition just for blog readers!

See you over the weekend, I hope!

Sam.

the final moment.

As any engineer worth his salt will tell you, there comes a time in a recording project when you have to sit back and say 'you know what, I can't do any more to this. I'm just messing, fretting over tiny little nuances and sounds. I'm starting to make the record sound worse than it did yesterday!'

Well, I'm finally at that point. I've mastered, listened, tweaked, listened, tweaked again listened again and then tweaked some more and now I'm finished. Finished I tell you! I'd be working on the artwork if my laptop hadn't died, but I've got a few ideas for it. The long wait is over. I can confirm, I WILL be releasing a new record soon! Yeah, I know, they are all old songs. But they are new recordings, new arrangements and new ideas. And by Jove I'm excited about it!

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A Narrow Escape

My open mic nights have been suffering a little recently. As you know, I lost the night at The Woodman a few months back, but to add to that The Three Stirrups in Brewood closed just before we were set to put another night on there. I only heard about it because the landlord at The Hartley Arms told me. Still, I bare no grudges. I know the pub was really struggling and the boss there would have had much more on his mind than letting me know about the closure.

But then last week's Robin 2 open mic, my newest and most exciting venture, had a relatively poor turnout too. The standard of musicianship on show was very high, as usual, but the attendance was not as good as previous months, and all of the events so far have not yielded huge profit margins for the venue. So when Mike from The Robin phoned on Wednesday, I was fearing the worst, and I was even more fearful after the conversation, where I was given 2 days collect my thoughts and promotional ideas before making a judgement on whether to take the night forward.

I am, however, pleased to say that after some pleasant negotiation and compromise, 'The Sam Draisey Sessions' at The Robin 2 are safe for the time being. Moving forward, I am going to need to try and get more people in to the nights, possibly to perform but more-so to watch. But that is the fun in promotions, is it not?


A nice, relatively happy little story for you there. I'm back at work and returning to normal after Easter now, so I should hopefully be back in the studio soon. I've given myself until the next Robin open mic to finish the album mixing. Wish me luck!

Hope you are well, and to see you at a gig soon :)

Sam.

The Ilfracombe Incident

I've not been in the studio this half term week, instead I've been off on a few different excursions, some music related, some not.

As a side note, I went to play at the open mic on The Sabrina Boat in Shrewsbury on Tuesday night. though it was pretty cold, I'd recommend it to anyone when the weather gets warmer. Open mic on a boat is great fun!

Onto Friday and we see the main purpose for this blog. I had agreed to play some live music at an old football friend's wedding in Ilfracombe, Devon at a place called Tunnels Beaches. The place is amazing by the way, but that's not the point of this story. It's a 400 mile round trip, and I was looking forward to getting out on the road and feeling like a 'proper' musician again. Having Kayla with me only made this an even more pleasant experience :)

As the car was going to do a lot of miles, my dad gave it a once over before we left, making sure it wasn't going to run out of oil or water or anything else that could be prevented by a simple 5 minutes with the bonnet up. We then set off on our long jaunt down the M5.

Unfortunately for us, the M5 is a very popular motorway for people wanting to head to the south coast for the bank holiday weekend. So about two hours into our four hour trip we got stuck in  crawling traffic for a hour or so. That's where the fun started.

It seems my little car, recently topped up with just too much oil, does not like traffic (who does??) and began to get a bit impatient. And by impatient I mean warm. Very warm. So warm in fact that it cut out on the outside lane of the motorway just before Bristol, approximately 100 miles from where we were going, and indeed the same distance from home. A quick phone call to my dad, the AA and then the police followed before the 40 minute wait with only my worrying about not being able to fulfil both a musical contract and a favour for a friend and the unsavoury jeers and taunts of passing motorists for entertainment.

In typical defiant style, I decided to try the ignition 'one more time', and a with a choke and a rumble Zigfried (Ziggy, for short) jumped into life. I managed to manoeuvre myself onto the hard shoulder, where a further call to the police cancelled our rescue and we made the decision to continue on our journey. The next 100 miles left us unscathed and we arrived with just enough time left over to set up and get changed before hitting the stage. I don't remember much about the performance other than an overwhelming sense of relief for getting there at all! Most musicians would announce upon their arrival that it was 'a pleasure to be there'. I felt like that on a number of levels!

The journey from Bilbrook to Ilfracombe took six long hours during which I thought my only mode of transport had been irreparably destroyed 100 miles from home. Was it worth it?

You're damn right it was.

Studio Diary Three - The Arduous Task

Sorry it's been a while. I'll level with you, I've been out enjoying the sunshine. I hope you have too :)

Today I finished tracking for my re-release album. All that's left is a spot of guest vocals on one track and the microphones can go back in the box! Though I won't speak too soon. The only reason I hadn't finished sooner is because I had to go back and correct a juvenile mistake.

Without boring you with software related details, I set up 4 microphones to record my guitar, made 4 tracks for them on the computer, then told all of those tracks to record the signal from THE SAME MICROPHONE! So I ended up with 4 identical tracks of guitar sound that wasn't a true or even remotely palatable depiction of my guitar on it's own. I had to go back in and re-record the guitar parts for the two songs I did this on (yes, I made the same mistake twice!) and record the vocals on said tracks today before I could move on to the next stage of the process.

Then another technical hitch happened. My computer's disk drive refused to have any CDs anywhere near it. I mean literally. It was like trying to spoon-feed a full child. I even tried the 'here comes the aeroplane' trick. It wasn't having any of it! It's rejection meant I couldn't listen to any reference tracks easily, and also incurred a painstaking CD ripping and file transferring afternoon.

But after all that, these are the albums I have chosen to go through at first before I start the mixing process, just to get my ears used to the style of music I'm dealing with and maybe to pinch a few techniques from and tip a few hats to more established artists who do what I do. This won't be the last of them, but for now, see if you can name them all from their CD labels. Then let me know who you think is missing!

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll hopefully be able to get down to mixing in the next few days, and update you accordingly.

See you soon.

Sam.

Studio Diary Two - The Overwhelming Hand-Cramp

Today was my second big stint in the studio (I was in for about an hour yesterday and got another two guitar tracks down). I spent all afternoon finishing off the guitar parts before going back to the first song to start to add in extra sounds and instruments. These included some kick drum, snare and cymbals, though not all together, as that would make me a drummer! It also included some extra lead guitar, so I dusted off the old Epiphone Sheritan from its place decorating the bedroom wall and plugged it in.

When I moved on to ukulele was when the hand cramping started! I've chosen to add uke to a song that's in Bb, and so all the chords are either barre or have strings being covered by one finger. This requires extra squeezing and, coupled with my inability to overlook minor mistakes and fret buzzes, left me to abandon the instrument halfway through take 8 (ish). Oh well, I'll get back on it tomorrow!

One of the coolest things that happened today was finding the 'missing' sounds in some of the songs. That is, some of the songs felt like they were just going through the motions, like they didn't have that extra something to make them different or special. It could be something seemingly small like a shaker of me tapping my fingers on a snare drum or cymbal, but when I add it to the rest of the track it just adds something and seems to bring the whole thing together somehow. It's one of the most exciting parts of tracking in the studio.

I'll hopefully be back in tomorrow and with a good stint I might just finish most of the tracking. Depends how long the uke part takes to nail! I'm sure you'll hear all about it!

Studio Diary 1 - The Miraculous Radiator!

Today was the big day. Today I started recording the guitar parts for my upcoming 'back catalogue' album. This involved breaking down all my current recording setup, moving next door into Ed's music room and setting it back up again. This actually took longer than I thought it would, but once it was finished, it looked ace! in fact, I took a photo.

Once it was all set up and ready to go, I then changed my guitar strings and cleaned my guitar in preparation. Once that final part was finished, I started the meticulous process of recording guitar parts for my songs.

When I'm doing my own production, I'm a stickler for perfection. That is, my performance has to be perfect. A bum note, a buzzing string, picking the wrong string at the wrong time or an over-zealous strum can easily lead me to re-do a take. This was a problem today as it is really cold in there, and cold hand (and arm!) lead to more mistakes, especially with added dynamics, like strumming too hard to catching the wrong strings. However, I found the perfect solution, one that I used to use when I recorded in my loft, and had forgotten about...

My portable heater! Ironically that bad boy was with me for the original recording process for some of the songs that are going to be included on the new album! It's pretty old and can click and creak from time to time, but it helps to save more takes than it ruins!

So, aided by the heater, I managed to get guitar parts down for four songs today, two of which had two different parts, so six in total. I'll be working tomorrow in the middle of the day, so hopefully get some more recording done after that. I'll keep you posted :)