Somewhere - "live" on radio 2004

[JimN]

I am not a great one for uploading audio files, but I came across this whilst sorting through my audio archive hard drives and wondered whether:

(a) I might improve the audio with a bit of tweaking, and

(b) it might be of interest here.

Back in 2004, I got in touch with Radio Kent to see whether I could drum up some publicity for ShadowMusic South-East and to my surprise, was asked if the station could do a Saturday morning programme from my house. I agreed (after a quick domestic consultation) and the programme was done. I recorded it off-air on basic FM tuner feeding a personal computer and still have the file(s).

As part of the programme, Spencer Scott, Mike Beer and I each played a Shads tune live on air (to a backing track, of course). If I recall correctly, Spencer played Apache, Mike played Wonderful Land and I played Somewhere. I hope I've got those titles right (I know the third one is).

The playing-in of backing tracks was a bit primitive. Although the programme was going out in stereo from the station, the signal from the house back to the studio was pure mono, via a couple of hand mikes held by the presenters, Paul James and Paul Harris. So for the guitar tracks, the BTs were played on a Sanyo CD ghetto-blaster and the guitars through my Vox AC30, with one mike picking up both sound sources. I can't remember what we did for echo - possibly we used Spence's Alesis Q2 with EFTP, or it might have been my Magicstomp with STLS patches. Whatever the echo was (and I wish I could remember), for my track, I definitely used my 1965 Burns Marvin and a DeArmond tone/volume pedal.

Because it was in mono, I have remixed the track against another copy of the backing track in stereo, and hope I have them in sync.

The sound quality on the presenters' mikes was a bit flat - throughout the programme, you can hear immediately when studio announcements are made that the response is better. But this might have been something to do with the big antenna sticking out of the top of the station's OB car, parked on the front lawn.

Anyway, here's the track..

https://clyp.it/hsbyyqq4

[kevinr]

Very good Jim excellent feel and that sound was just so analogue! loved it.

[LONGPLAYER09]

Very nice, & not very long after SMSE started (12 Aug 2003) .