Well, we have arrived and are starting to get things together. I’m not going to start judging and commenting again until I have my music room with the proper monitors set up. I have at least got the bubblewrap off them now, but there are stands to make and wires to sort out. It won’t be long, because I have some spoken word recordings to make very soon and I need to be up and running in days. Cheers Dave

There’ll be no more comments from me for a while. We are moving house and since I’m a bit a of a squirrel when it comes to collecting ‘stuff’, there are one or two things to do in the next month or so. Cheers for now. Dave P.S. One more week of packing to go- then who knows how many weeks of unpacking!

I was just thinking that maybe my favourites list was getting a bit long, so maybe I should just run down it and delete anything I was not too sure about. I looked through the list and there are nearly 150 songs on there, and do you know how many I deleted? NONE! Judging on here, I’ve found nearly 150 new songs that I love.(actually I lost count) Just to say thanks everyone! Cheers Dave

It’s difficult to know what to say if a song is really badly performed, and it’s a horribly banal song, recorded sounding as if it had been sung, out of tune, out of time, in a tin bucket. Luckily I’ve only heard a couple of those on here, and maybe the kindest thing is to say nothing and move on. I have sometimes commented that the artist is not giving himself (it’s nearly always a young man) a fair chance of getting some votes because of:-

• the two minutes of E minor chord strumming before the vocals start.
• the wobbly vibrato that covers every semitone in the octave on each note.
• etc. etc.

So really, I’m immensely glad that the standard is so high on here. To be honest, I’d stand more chance myself if it were lower!

Cheers

Dave

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not Simon Cowell, but I see the comments as serving a different purpose from most commentators.

As I see it, far more people than just the artist see the comments. So one of the things I try to do is to encourage people to LISTEN to the track- all the way through, not just a few seconds.

Sometimes though, there are simple things which could be done to turn a good song into a great record. Sometimes they are technical things like mastering levels, or poor mixing decisions. Sometimes they are artistic opportunities that have been missed, phrasing problems that could have been changed by substituting a word, or an obvious fill that could have been played.

In pointing these out, I’m hoping that the artist will go back to the studio and come back with a version of the track which is worthy of them.

I would never want to knock someone down. The difficulty comes on those rare occasions when I find the whole track to be beyond hope. I’ll talk about how I deal with that next time.

Cheers

Dave