I’ve been writing music for most of my life. I recorded a collection of demos on a Portastudio in the late 1980s and early 1990s and have continued to record ideas in more recent times using GarageBand on a MacBook.
I upload my music as Alex Annesty; there are far too many Phil Chapmans out there already!
I started recording some rough, mostly single-take demos during the 2020 Covid lockdown and uploaded a few to SoundCloud; you can listen to a selection here:
It Fades Away
The outro theme and lyric evolved from a bit of noodling around on the guitar in January 2023. I developed the song over the next few weeks and recorded the demo over several months. It was a very slow process, due to many family commitments, which kept me out of my little home studio.
I knew right from the start that this was a song about dementia. My wife had been diagnosed with young onset Alzheimer’s in 2021. As so many people find out, dementia has a major effect on the day-to-day lives of those living with it, including their family and friends.
I’ve An Idea
‘I’ve An Idea’ is built around two unrelated musical snippets I’ve had kicking around for years; a rhythm guitar chord progression and a lead guitar riff. The ‘whistling theme’ originated from a bit of noodling on the guitar in 2015; it spent the next five years as ‘Riff Number 1’. The main chord progression dates back to 1992 and bore the title ‘I’ve An Idea’ right from the start. It wasn’t until early 2021 that I hit on the idea of transposing ‘Riff Number 1’ to the same key as ‘I’ve An Idea’ and combining the two. The rest of the arrangement came together very quickly after that and I completed it in one day, recording the initial demo straight away.
The Buccaneer
‘The Buccaneer’ resulted from my experimenting with an open-G guitar tuning; I came up with a chord progression and the rest of the tune and other instrumentation popped into my head. Thanks to GarageBand I was able to get it recorded before I forgot it.
This Time
With ‘This Time’, I set out to write a doo-wop inspired song and to try a bit of vocal multi-tracking. Having recorded lead vocals, bass backing vocal and two backing harmony vocal parts I decided to have a go at doing a four-part harmony guitar solo; the backing vocals need filling out with additional parts to create a big sound (similar to that on ‘It Fades Away’). It’s all very unrefined, has a completely dry (and rather dodgy) lead vocal and needs re-recording from scratch, but I managed to get the basic idea down.