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
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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!
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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I’ve continued to write/record/upload ever since, growing slowly albeit growing.