Crash, Bang ..Fuck it

Well, I was going to be telling you of the Anti-Christmas tune I was going to write and then post the finished song but everything has gone a bit tits up. I was learning a B Minor barre chord especially for it as well and then the worse thing happened, my PC crashed while i was recording the bass line, well, I thought it had crashed, what transpired is that the hard drive gave up the ghost toppled over after too much beer and said night night - no hard drive and therefore no music.
There was no back up as this drive was the back up while I was cleaning off the rest of my 'puter. Never mind these things happen, it has just set me back recording for a while as all the demos bar those online are now gone. Everything I had recorded was on that drive so its going to take a while to get back up and running again.
In the meantime I will be trying to learn these damn barre chords and swapping between chords I don't know too well namely Bminor and C. I can play a C but cant swap between other chords and C unless its an A or Am - best i get on YouTube and see if there is a way that will make my life less difficult.
In the meantime here is the last of the three demos that have been put up on Soundcloud, its a bit slower than the other three that have been put up here and actually involves a small amount of lead work which is repeated at various point thru the song.



Please feel free to download this or any other track from the soundcloud page. If you use this in a radio show or podcast - please credit me and and let me know - Thanks Russ Crimewave.

Riot In Progress

Rather than clog up the Urban Fallout Soundcloud where you will find three of my tunes I decided to have my own account so I can upload whatever I want, when I want. Instead of repeating the same tracks here I have uploaded a demo version for a song called - R.I.P. Riot In Progress.
The lyrics for this song were originally written for The Warriors who I played bass guitar  for until recently. Not knowing if it was ever going to be used or not and after a couple of aborted attempts at rehearsing it, I decided to rewrite the tune and demo it up myself. This was demoed at the same time as Still Called Scum and another as yet unreleased song. I sent it to a few people and got quite an entusiastic response from it other than the usual "yeah, its alright" response I was accustomed to with whatever I sent out for opinions. After writing a couple more tunes and playing this a few times I decided it was not good enough for what I wanted so it will not be going in a live set or for that matter on a CD or vinyl at a later date but i thought it was worth hearing so here it is.



Please feel free to download this or any other track from the soundcloud page. If you use this in a radio show or podcast - please credit me and and let me know - Thanks Russ Crimewave

 I am not going to be posting this out on various social network sites but please feel free if you like it

Internet Radio Play

After posting the last two tracks on the internet - Facebook and Google+ mainly but various other places as well, I had a nice suprise. I was actually asked if it was Ok to download one of the tracks and play it on a radio station. I had no problem with that and didnt think anything of it. Then I got sent a link to Stench Radio and clicked and looked at their playlist - fuck me, there I was, number three on the playlist alongside such luminaries as Oiz II Men and Argy Bargy. To say I was a bit chuffed was a bit of an understatement, over 100 plays on Reverbnation and played on an online radio in the space of a few weeks, things were looking up. Maybe my guitar playing isn't as bad as I first thought.

Here is the playlist from Stench Radio

If anyone else wants to play my tracks please feel free but let me know or send a link thanks.

Generation iDiot

After posting Still Called Scum on the internet I wrote a few other songs, mainly a load of crap but a couple of good songs came out of it and I posted them to a couple of people I knew to get some feedback from them and to see if I was heading in the right direction.
The thing about sending them to your mates is that they will do one of two things, tell you the truth or lie profusely just so they don't upset you or piss you off in any way. Luckily I have mates that will be brutally honest and they said that with a bit of work the new songs could be really good. I decided against posting them on the internet as they need to be worked on a bit before I did so and set about writing some more.
My changing of the chords on an acoustic was getting better, it still wasn't good as I was missing strings, hitting bum notes all over the place and still couldn't play a C or F properly. But I was going to damn well carry on and would get my fingers round those two bastards sooner or later.
I was playing electric guitar as well, swapping between them so that I could play on one what I played on the other or so I thought. Nope, i found it easier to play barre chords on the electric and open chords on the acoustic, I was struggling with  barre chords on the acoustic but was going to persevere.

Generation iDiot came about one afternoon while I was in a pub trying to have a conversation with someone who insisited on checking their phone and using it pretty much contstantly. Its pretty frustrating when you are trying to say something and the person you are talking to is texting or in this case updating their status on Facebook while in the middle of  a conversation. How frustrating and annoying and more to the point - bloody rude. The other thing that annoys me about modern technology is people taking ipads to gigs to film the gig. You're at a gig to watch the band or whatever not to stand there watching the entire thing thru an ipad whilst filming the gig - show some respect please.
I mean who takes an ipad to a gig ... this bloke obviously

Like the previous song, Still Called Scum, this was entirely played and recorded by myself, I even managed to work out some harmonics on the electric to give it some dynamics, rather than a straight forward chordorama thrashalong song.





Please feel free to download this or any other track from the soundcloud page. If you use this in a radio show or podcast - please credit me and and let me or Urban Fallout know - Thanks Russ Crimewave

Still Called Scum

I used to play bass guitar for a fairly well known Punk or Streetpunk band until damage to my right hand prevented me from playing bass and I had to leave or go into retirement as I put it. The damage wasn’t bad enough to stop me playing completely but enough to stop me playing what I loved in a live situation - my bass.
Frustrated at the thought of not playing again if it got worse, I went to the Doctors showed them what was wrong and what caused it and the result was that there was nothing they could do. It was not bad enough to have an operation on it to sort it out, until it got worse. I didnt want it to get worse, it was bad enough as it was. No more live bass for me - I was gutted.
I was miserable as sin not playing my bass. After a week or two I started messing about on an electric guitar I had at home and found that I could sort of play a normal guitar without the damage getting worse, which was a result, so I set about learning to play one properly.
Not being able to play guitar very well in the first place was one of the factors in me picking up a bass many years ago. The other was the fact that I had a one thrust in my hand, told I was shit at guitar and  I was playing bass in a band whether I wanted to or not - seemed like a good idea at the time, so I did.
Many years later and I'm back where I started, playing guitar very very badly.
Basically, I know how to tune a guitar to play it with one finger and plenty of distortion to cover up my inadequacies and had managed to play second guitar in a band for a while before it came to an end but actually playing proper chords was a bit alien to me.

I set about learning some basic chords in Summer 2013 and to make life difficult for myself, decided I was going to learn the whole lot on an acoustic (as averse to an electric) guitar. I didn't have an acoustic guitar and not being able to afford to buy one, I did what any musician in my situation does ... I blagged one.
Having never picked up an acoustic before, I was a bit surprised when I worked out the shapes fairly easily, moving between them tho, that was going to be the bugger. I have rather large hands that are used to a bass guitar, 2 less strings and I only had to use one finger at a time, now I had to use all of them together and on six skinny strings and a smaller guitar neck, I figured the easiest way of learning how to play proper chords would be to write a song.

I have been writing lyrics on and off for years so that wasn't going to be a problem. I knew how to construct a song as I had learned that in the few bands that I have been in so it wasn't all alien just the chords and moving between them bit.
I had also recently started using a new bit of music software, or D.A.W. to record stuff onto so it was going to be a whole new learning curve from start to finish. So I set about writing some lyrics and tunes. Very clumsily and very very basic. E, A, D, F, C, G were the chords I learnt first and badly - I still cant play the F or C or change between them very well, the E  generally turns into Em (one less finger you see) and the A gets barred (1 finger instead of 3) but i struggled on for a month and it started to get easier but only a bit.

This song is the result of my first efforts and this was recorded in August 2013.



Please feel free to download this or any other track from the soundcloud page. If you use this in a radio show or podcast - please credit me and  and let me or Urban Fallout know - Thanks  Russ Crimewave

This was and is  the start of a different journey for me which I am going to share from time to time.
I will be sharing songs, lyrics, photos, pictures, thoughts, ideas and basically anything that I think is  relevant along the way.  If you want to praise, heap ridicule or just say something then either comment or don't. Cheers