FAQs
What instruments to you play?
I play guitar, bass and piano (barely), any other instrument you can hear in my songs are most likely VST instruments recorded with a MIDI keyboard barring some percussion.
Can I cover one of your songs on YouTube?
Of course, go ahead.
What is your accent?!?!
It’s a weird Newcastle/Durham/Darlington hybrid.
How do you record music videos by yourself?
With huge difficulty! First, the song must already be complete before you even think about recording a video. Before setting off, I create a copy of the song which has a long count in so I can later match the audio with the same tempo. I’ll list the regular stuff below:
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2 x Canon EOS M50 with a 22mm f/2 pancake lens (plus a dummy battery which can use an external power bank)
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Power Bank and a bluetooth speaker that can blast the count-in track so the lip sync is the best I can get it.
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Tripods and foldable chair
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Acoustic guitar with gig bag (hard cases will exhaust you)
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Backpack with survival gear (I normally head out far away from anyone)
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iPad/iPhone for controlling the Canon remote control software
The biggest difficulty is operating both cameras and setting manual focus up (auto focus is trash on Canon camera’s) - one wrong adjustment and that’s a 4 minute~ video unusable.
How do you come up with a song?
When I was writing/recording “So Very Far From Home” I decided to record the entire process from start to finish, you can find that video here to see how frustrating it can be at times!
It generally starts with just playing around on acoustic guitar, just coming up with something I think sounds cool and then just trying to sing some kind of melody over it that doesn’t completely suck - the only exception to this being “For Miles and Miles”.
After the song is written I plan out where I want everything to be placed in my head, trying not to clash any nearby frequencies, you can see this in the image below:
How did you get into making music?
I was a very shy kid, not very sociable at all. When I was around 11, my mam took me to a karaoke night run by the husband of a work colleague (because I didn’t really have friends at that point). I didn’t sing for the first 5 times or so but then I started singing swing songs like Mack the Knife and Beyond the Sea.
They seemed to think I was okay which was a massive boost to my confidence, not long after I recorded myself singing a cover of Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers and put it on YouTube.
When I was 18 I bought an Epiphone EJ-200CE semi-acoustic guitar and started writing relentlessly trying to get better, the first song I was able to do was “A Horse with No Name” by America which was 2 chords. Most of what I came up with sucked but whatever I completed, I uploaded to YouTube.
Eventually, I started getting song requests after people got around to hearing my swing covers like “Come Fly with Me”, “Ain’t that a Kick in the Head” and “Fly Me to the Moon”.
Some of my music was included on an in-game radio station in a popular mod for Fallout: New Vegas called Fallout: New California which got my original music a lot of exposure.
I’ve continued to write/record/upload ever since, growing slowly albeit growing.