I’ve officially starting writing music for what will eventually become the third Masterless record.It feels great to have a clear vision in mind. I always have a strong idea for the themes I want to deal with before I start.

I often write on the guitar first but not exclusively. This time it was on six string. It started with an inspiration born long ago. Way back in 2010 as it happens. It’s a film I was inspired by. Yesterday started with a melody that I didn’t really know was going to go anywhere. I recorded that anyway. I also recorded a second guitar harmony line for that. It was just a doodle.

Today though things moved quite quickly with several parts simply coming out and falling into place. Essentially the entire structure is there for rhythm guitar with the main melody line carrying the song . This tune , I already know will be around six minutes long. There are still changes to be made so it may get a few seconds shaved off but I’m aiming to keep it relatively short compared to my usual efforts.

The relative perks of quarantine have been surprising. I’ve had strong focus in my physical training, been able to enjoy loads of one on one time with my son and get fired back up into playing my instrument to a strong level and begin the creative process mostly unimpeded.

I have to carve out small pieces of time here and there to make this work in the context of my day job and my duties in the household and so on but the main thing is that there is a routine and so it’s easy to stick to it.

Never thought I’d see the day where I was utterly grateful for routine. It is getting the job done though. All of the jobs.

I’m not going to say too much about the intended themes for this project but they do tie in nicely with what happens to be going on the world right now even though the seeds of the inspiration for the tone of the project and the main theme were already planted way back in 2010.

Rest assured , it’ll be heavy. It’ll pack a punch, have pace and yet will have a fresh spin that neither of the previous two offerings have touched upon.

The first two records were written with a “bag of riffs” sort of approach. With the lyrics being the main means of conveying the themes with the exception of a few melodies which may have been added late in the process to support the lyrical content.

This time , I’ll be writing everything from scratch starting with a blank canvas entirely focused on the themes I want to tackle , with a very clear sonic goal in mind. The short term goal, is knock out the skeleton structures of the tracks rapidly over the next couple weeks.

Then we’ll see what happens with the next phase of lockdown. From there I’ll hatch a plan on beginning to refine the arrangements. I plan to take my time on that phase and really polish and rehearse the material so it’s really refined when I finally start to track it This is to allow myself to really explore some new ground with the production side of things when I finally come to it. In sharp contrast to my previous efforts where I’d lived with completed tunes for so long I just needed to get them out of my system to be able to move on and didn’t care too much for perfection. This time , I’m going to damn well enjoy myself.

It’s entirely possible that tracking will only get underway towards the end of the year. So if you follow what I do please be patient. It’ll be worth it. For instance , this time I am aiming to have live drums featuring possibly my old mate from Andertons Music Co fame, amongst other things, Colin Bentham. He’s worth the time and effort to get on board. A truly fantastic drummer no doubt. There’s a chance of more contributors as well this time. I plan to scale this one up a fair bit.

A lot will depend on the isolation measures in the UK and how that progresses. I’ll post back here from time to time though and let people know how it’s going.

Stay Safe until then.

The second Masterless record Vendetta Unaccounted is mostly about vengeance and the feeling of having unfinished business to attend to. Little did I realise at the time , but that’s exactly how the process of getting this project done was going to feel like.

Writing for Vendetta started before A Darker Season was completed in 2006. In fact some of these tunes would have been part of that record except I couldn’t release a double disk for lack of funding and connections and they just wouldn’t fit on one disk.

Up to four or five tunes were already written and the remaining ones written between 2006 and 2008. Recording and first mixes took place in 2008 with target to release in 2009. That however was not to be…

At the time it had not been long since I relocated from South Africa to England. As such I was living under my father’s roof. He was also a musician and we often collaborated. So it was a win win scenario.

However, one early February morning of 2008 I woke to find my father hanging from his bedroom ceiling. He’d always warned us (his kids) that he would one day “cash out” as he called it. Preferring to go out on his terms rather than become frail and wither.

Unfortunately this turned my entire world on it’s ass and right then just when I needed it most the financial crisis of 2008 happened.I ended up selling my ’59 Reissue Les Paul and White Randy Rhoads RR24 you see below to temporarily patch up some debts .

The original tracks for the record were lost in the mess of trying to sort out my father’s affairs and get myself a place to live and to take time to mourn. Once the dust had settled which took years, I only had the first round of stereo mixes left to work with. They needed work which is difficult without having the instrument tracks. So I had to improvise…

The main issues were that the guitars simply weren’t up front in the mix. The rhythm section sounded fantastic though. So I overdubbed some extra guitar work over the top and re-recorded some vocal work as not all of that had been completed. It was nightmare to patch this thing back up with phasing issues and that type of thing plaguing the process.

From the time of my father’s passing to release it took 8 years to get that fucker done. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But there is only so long you can spend with the same cathartic material especially when it reminds you of one of the darkest times in your life.

Although from an audio perspective , it’s a bit messy sounding and there are some off notes here and there from the original scratch tracks , I’m still proud of the overall sound and of the songs themselves. They’re challenging to play and the album has a lot of cool stuff on it.

From here though, it’s finally time to start crafting something that’ll live up to where I am as a musician now and not something attached to who I was in 2008. Stay tuned for more as it is now definitely coming…

A Darker Season is a record made on a tiny budget with utterly rubbish gear available to me with the exception of my guitars. The record mainly deals with themes on organised religion and my views on it as well as general betrayal by those whom you depend on or love more than they will ever love you.

Around half the tunes on this record carried over from two previous bands that I was in. The arrangements however are very different to both of those band’s interpretation of the material. The other half of the material was written whilst I was still a part of the last aforementioned band but that band never played or contributed to them in any way shape or form.

That band you see, was supposed to have left South Africa together to forge ahead on a musical career with the prospect of touring Europe on a regular basis. That plan fell through , and so when I relocated to England on my own, I resorted to doing the one thing I could creatively on my own. Make records.

Two records were made in tandem. My project, and my Father’s record. A collection of around a dozen or so tracks he’d had sat on the back burner for decades.

As far as A Darker Season was concerned it was technically quite tricky. I only had a Boss desktop recorder system with limited track availability , so I had to do a lot of track bouncing to whittle things down in a manageable way. I had to rely on programming the drums myself bar by bar. Bass tracking and guitar tracking went pretty smoothly with the only exception being time constraints. Although I had no amp and ended up relying solely on digital effects to create the tone, I still feel the result was pretty reasonable considering.

Once the thing was mixed and mastered . I say mastered , but I mean mastered using that hard disk desktop recorder . Not Sterling Sound or something like that you see. Beggars can’t be choosers of course. I met a chap who was a friend of my sister’s who had some skill with graphic design and photoshop etc. He shot some portraits and helped me design the M style Logo with the crucifix embedded in it.

The Logo itself was actually inspired by a tattoo I have. Crucifixes hold a certain place in my heart you see and its not a bright one. When you get that shit force fed down your throat for years in a situation that you neither deserved nor created it tends to inspire an equal and opposite reaction.

The record was released a couple years later although it was published in 2006 and made available on disk to the public. Distribution for digital media came later. Not that it made a difference as people don’t buy records anyway anymore. And those who do have never fucking heard of me or Masterless. Still, to those who followed what I was doing , it was received very well indeed.

I think, like the Millennium Falcon, it sort of “has it where it counts”. The mix has balls to it, and the songs I think hold up well even though I could perform them way better now I’m sure. Still when I do hear it from time to time I mostly feel satisfied with what I was able to accomplish with pretty much nothing.

As I write this blog that record is now 14 years old. That’s unreal to think about.