Monday, September 15, 2008

Pipefest 08

Saturday 13th September 2008 - location here:



in Lancaster Uni.

A day with Martyn Joseph......




and his long time followers (he hates calling em' 'fans', thought thats really what we are :-)

Began with a great session of him talking about songwriting - as he stated, it was a condensed version of his much longer (over a couple of days) kind of thing he does in Canada, and at Greenbelt during his Rising sessions. This time there was no real time to invite other songwriters up to the stage to play stuff, but instead, he played a few numbers and talked through them, and took questions from an enthralled audience on (mainly) the business of songwriting. He writes everything down, that his secret he tells us - notepads - mp3 recorder - laptop - even the simplest idea goes down, to refer back to at a later date. How right he is when he says that you come up with ideas so often, and you say to yourself, yes I will remember that for later - only for it to disappear into the ether from whence it came when you try to remember it.......
So, capture it during its birth - catch it before it falls no less..
My question to him here was how does he manage to put aside the time to follow this up - to go back to these ideas later and craft them into songs - as he told us earlier - for him songwriting is not a 9-5 type of job for him (though he did acknowledge that for others, it was or could be).
I can't remember the answer he gave - the secret to finding that time to knuckle down and work some sense from the ideas in notebooks and from mp3 ideas - the word discipline was mentioned though, and remembering to set time aside just for this.

After this session he invited those who were interested up on stage (well, no stage but 'up the front') to have a check out of his gear setup, which is way cool!
Lots of Boss FX pedals, a lovely DD-20 Giga Delay at the heart of his sound, which is also beefed up by a very interesting use of an Octaver pedal, for those lovely deep bass tones




We then broke for lunch and it was time for Martyn to introduce us to a very special thing he is involved with, more of that in my next blog, also to come will be a craftily recorded version of him suffering a forfeit at his team losing the quiz (yes there was a quiz....) in the form of performing an old Abba tune (for which he will not thank me for posting!)

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