what's it all about?

there used to be this joke within eve & the garden that my feeling on jigs and reels were that they were the musical equivalent of paperweights - tunes that happened when you trying to write something else (proper music for instance).

so i wrote this tune as a piece of musical sarcasm.  however, it backfired on me, as everyone seems to really like the piece, and even i can't help but thinking it would make quite a good christmas single.

this piece is about those times when you can feel yourself hiding in the shadows of happiness.  when all the evidence around you says that you should be more positive than you are being, but that something just holds you bubbling under the desire to smile.  this piece is for times like those.  when there appears to be no reason to be unhappy, but you are.  any pop psychologists out there - you have my email address. 

instruments & tone sources

i have just one word - bouzouki.  this interesting little beastie first entered my arsenal a few years ago.  i bought it one afternoon from hobgoblin in crawley and was playing it in an eatg set that evening, having only learnt how to tune the flippin' thing an hour and a half earlier.  but i love it as an instrument.  it has a gorgeous 'happy' tone, so what else could i have called the track.  it still makes an appearance in the live set, and seems to be quite a popular distraction.  i still have a way to go with it, and the particular one i have does not have hugely stable tuning, buts it's okay. 

the rest of the track:  percussion loop from the zoom 234, clave, djembe and talking drum based; a detuned squier bass line, down to D.  the squier goes really wobbly when drop tuned so it makes a very cool folky sound.  it was put through a dbx mini-comp for quite a fat sound.  all the guitars are the ibanez through a zoom 2020player unit.  the amp sim on this unit isn't great but it does the job.  the end drums are again live played off the zoom 234.

production comments

what i call the 'daylight reverbs' (very open space high end) are supplied by an alesis wedge unit, which is an awesomely programmable reverb unit that i don't use anywhere near enough.  the dbx mini-comp was predominantly replaced by the joemeeks, but i still use it from time to time to beef up bass sounds a little.

the track was originally recorded onto the vs880, and was quite early in the recording timeline.  it was transferred to the mac and into DP mostly through an spl vitalizer, and i think in some places i overcooked the top end just a little.  this happened on dark city as well, same process, same unit and i think that's one of the important lessons i've learnt through this album is that psychoacoustics can be very easily overdone and have to be constantly watched and referred back to your original.

otherwise, this track was pretty much as it was put down and engineered.  i did very little else to it really.

all together now - 'so here it is merry christmas everybody's having fun.....'