Robin Harbron

This song is a 7 minute epic – a story about mind-controlling aliens, featuring a great kazoo solo, and some fun harmonies. I like it!

I believe this was recorded during the living room sessions at my dad’s place. I just found out that Quarters was recorded on Oct. 4th, 1995 (my sister’s 21st birthday) though this date seems a little late to me. I’m not sure if this was before or after.

Cross-Eyed Stare is one of a quadrilogy of songs – all strange/goofy story-songs written by Darren that I hope I can find. Darren is probably on guitars, and certainly on vocals, kazoo, background vocals, and maniacal laugh. I played bass, and joined in on the maniacal (thanks, Richard) laugh.

Listen to Cross-Eyed Stare.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you folks (especially to Alex). I had run out of pre-mixed music that I could get in .mp3 format with the equipment I had at home, so I took a break over the holidays.

Exactly 8 years ago today, my C-64 demo group PSW released a C64 demo called 12th Day. If you want to watch it but don’t know how, leave a comment and I’ll help you out.

I had a good time with friends and family over the holidays. Some of the major events/activities included:

I see WordPress 2 is out, so maybe I’ll upgrade to that soon. And more music should be arriving very soon, since I picked up a bit of gear from Richard’s house that will allow me to computerize some of my old 4-track tapes.

This is pretty much my favourite recording besides the North and the Sea stuff, and a couple Richard Pepper tracks we helped out with. Darren did drums and vocals, I did guitar and bass.

In some ways this song was very much a preview of what was to come in NatS. Darren had written the lyrics, and had a very rough version of the song worked out on acoustic guitar. A lot of Darren’s best songs are pretty simple musically at first, but they have strong structure that makes them a lot of fun to spice up. In this case, I had a guitar riff or two that seemed to fit, and Darren reworked the melody around it.

I thought we had just made the best song *ever* when we finished recording this. Darren and I drove over to Ron’s in the Monarch – I think it was a Thursday because I seem to remember meeting him in his church parking lot – and we listened to it in the car. I think Ron’s comment was something like “the drums are mixed too low” or something else equally deflating 🙂

Of course, he was right – there aren’t enough drums in the mix (no kick drum at all, I think, though maybe we used a drum machine for a substitute – real snare and cymbal anyway). We’re also not all that tight.

But I still love the song – catchy melody, fun and thoughtful lyrics (it’s another Shroom-take on relationships), great guitar tone (abusing Shroom’s little amp again, but by this time I had my own 6-string electric) and I’m still really proud of the bass and guitar riff, especially the sliding stuff and the couple breaks after choruses.

Listen to Quarters (On The Sidewalk).

I’m not totally sure if this is Darren and me playing, or just me. For sure I’m playing bass, and maybe Darren is on guitars, or it’s me multi-tracked. Maybe Darren will remember.

Petra was one of my favourite bands in the late 80s and early 90s, and this was one of my favourite songs. I spent a whole bunch of time practicing this song from the piano songbook of “On Fire”. Too bad the guitar wasn’t tuned so well 🙂

Listen to Somebody’s Gonna Praise His Name Name (Instrumental).

I’ve been looking for another one or two Heads Up! tracks, but can’t seem to find anything except this instrumental by Ron, and only Ron. If you don’t like it in the first minute or so, the next four minutes aren’t going to do anything new to change your mind.

Maybe Ron or Darren can find a tape in an old shoebox or something that contains the couple missing tracks. I’m thinking of at least “Heads Up (It’s Your Chance)” if nothing else. The embarrassment we feel over Power or Headhunters is nothing compared to the potential of this missing rap/hip-hop “song”.

If not, well, that about wraps it up for Heads Up! Next we’ll be moving on to some co-op stuff between Darren and me.

Listen to Unnamed Instrumental. And if you really want to, here’s me experimenting with my bass and a distortion pedal, along with a drum machine. Don’t expect much with any of this stuff.

I had a few different recordings of this song to choose from. None of them were perfect. I chose this one because Darren doesn’t stray into his Ernie voice much, and it’s the only one with a “guitar solo”. Like all our stuff, this is very high on the cheese scale, but at least it’s trying to say something.

Ron wrote the music (except for the intro of course) and played along with Casio. I’m not sure who’s responsible for the lyrics. I think my only contribution is the out of tune mumbling during the chorus.

Listen to Power.

Just one more Heads Up! track left, I think, and then we’ll have to move on to some Robin + Darren stuff without Ron.

This song is more than a little bit quirky. Like, a lot quirky.

I believe at one point there was the idea that all our songs would contain “Head” in the title somehow. I don’t think we got very far with that, but I’m pretty sure the overall sound of the music Ron had made combined with the “Head” idea got us going with the “Head Hunters” idea. I’m pretty sure everyone contributed lyrically to this, and all three of us sing along. I think this was my first good chance to prove that I could sing, and I completely blew it.

Listen to Head Hunters.

Another instrumental. Too much bass in the mix, and not enough skill in the bass, though I’m surprised I held on as well as I did, and didn’t get lost. Ron does some neat piano stuff that sometimes can be heard over my noise and the Casio-rhythms. Shroom has some cool less-is-more single note guitar stuff, kind of saxophone-like. And his ending note is really cool – good tone!

Listen to Too Long Blues.

Week 3 (week 6 if you include all the vacation I took) of my parental leave from work is almost over, and I haven’t accomplished many of the things I had hoped to.

In total I wrote about 11,000 words between my two NaNoWriMo novels, way short of the 50,000 word target for the month of November. How’d the rest of you do? The bright side is that’s 11,000 words that I never would have written otherwise, and I got some valuable insights into writing. I also got some encouraging comments from friends about the stuff I’ve shared so far, and that’s great.

I also didn’t complete my Commodore 64 game entry for the 2005 Minigame Competition. But it does show some promise – maybe I’ll get it together for the 2006 compo which sounds like it might start early in the new year.

However, I have been accomplishing other stuff:

Spending much more time than usual with my family, including being more involved with their schooling (bringing them to swimming, gymnastics, piano lessons, etc.), watching Star Wars Ep.1-5 with them so far, finishing reading all 5 books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to them, and taking various combinations of the kids on errands.

Teaching guitar to one group of kids, and C64 BASIC programming to another couple of kids.

Sorting/cleaning my geek room in the basement, though it seems like days of work have hardly made a dent. I assembled 4 more big book shelves last night, and already have them nearly full (with stuff other than books).

Played through a bunch of PC games I had bought cheaply over the last 1.5 years and never played. Far Cry, Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, Bandits: Phoenix Rising, Knight Rider – good fun, and now I’ve had my fix for a while.

Fiddled with a number of other programming projects: worked on a bit of a BlitzMax game, worked on my C64 port of the Atari 2600’s Cosmic Ark, learned a lot from the Metal Warrior source code, and surely some other stuff I already can’t remember.

And more blogging!

This next Heads Up! track is some good fun. I’m pretty sure the song is the demo on Ron’s keyboard – no idea what the title is, maybe it has the word “Lake” in it? No offense intended to Ron if he is actually playing this!

Darren adds his unique guitar style, and you end up with a very memorable track. I’m not sure what to call this, so how about: Casio Meets Shroom.

And anyone have any idea what this snippet of song after Ice Ice Baby is? I think it’s saying “I’m a Beero”. Have a listen: Ice Ice Beero.