Couch Boy Music

New music for a new year from Couch Boy! Apologies for the relative quiet of the last few months.

File this under ‘work in progress’ (for now anyway). Whatever was holding me back from working on music has disappeared and I’m back in front of Ableton Live again.  The track is heavily influenced by The Marcels version of Blue Moon but it is very much a piece of electronic music.

I hope you like it.  If you download it, please leave a comment. Ta!

Couch Boy – Bah Dang

I promised this a while ago.  It’s a dub version of The Shadows’ 1961 hit, FBI.  I was reminded of this after seeing Cliff Richard on the telly the other night talking about his forthcoming reunion tour with his famous backing band.  Despite being influenced quite heavily by Hank & co, I won’t be rushing out to buy a ticket (however my mother might

Here’s some tv footage of the original

Incidently, this was also one of the first tunes I learned to play on the guitar.

Couch Boy – FBI (dub version)

My friend Mark (aka Telekom) had one of his tracks included on a recent electronic music compilation, released on Twoism records. It’s rather good, imho. Follow this link to buy/download:

http://www.twoism.org/oneontwoism/3/index.php

An old song updated with beafed up beats in 2007.  This was one of my first ever electronic compositions, if my memory serves me right.  Originally, I used the software Fruityloops (must have been circa 2001) and Ableton Live was used for the update.

Started this track when I was travelling to London a few years ago.  Didn’t really start to make any sense until I added the static sound in the background.  This was produced in Linux using the command cat /dev/mem | oggenc -rq 1 – -o computerthink.ogg

Now you’re thrilled to bits, you can listen to the track, as it were:

http://chrismackie.co.uk/mp3/couch_boy-train_tech.mp3

Time for some more original music.  Been working on this tune for a loooong time. Started this is Reason way back and finally got it together in Ableton recently (i.e. this year). BTW, my work-rate is only going to slow down…

Anyway, this is a scratchy techno track, influenced by the sound of morse code (no, seriously).  And you should download it before I ruin it with this description:

http://chrismackie.co.uk/mp3/couch_boy-message_to_you.mp3

A recent performance of a very old song indeed. I think I have old recordings to go with this song… somewhere.

Back to music production after a break. I’ve been manipulating some of the recordings from the We Dance, Wee Groove performance at the Scottish Youth Theatre in November. At the start of the show – whilst people were arriving, I would improvise on the guitar (with lots of delay) over a reggae drum loop. At the close of the show we’d use of same loop and I would do some scratching over it, using some samples of a certain person (who shall remain nameless – he gets too much publicity)!  I used the Ms Pinky system to make this happen.  Dave Boyd provided some additional live percussion.

Anyway, I pulled some of the highlights together in Ableton with some additional sounds to make a complete track.  Here is the result:

Couch Boy – We Dub, Wee Groove

Hope you like.  If you download the track, please leave a comment.

Thanks.

More acoustic stuff. This is a song I wrote last year, inspired by a friend of mine.

This track has components that have been kicking about for a while.  The 12-bar guitar part and the electronic backing have recently been married to the verse and chorus.  I’ve performed the acoustic version out and about for a while now but the version below is definitely my favourite.

Couch Boy – Africasea