Ross Cooper’s blog

The non-adventures of Ross, Sally & Boo

Looking for some new music?

OK it's the last day of 2009 so I thought I'd share a few albums (well mp3 downloads) that I'd discovered over the last year...

If you're looking for some relaxing ambient chill out music, check out Lemongrass "Ambient Land" EP or Kiln "Dusker" both of which are great for playing in the background while you're doing something else. If you want something a little more in your face, check out The Fireman "Electric Arguments" (yes, Paul McCartney does electronica too!)

Favorite finds from abroad include the wonderful Miss Li "Dancing The Whole Way Home" (intelligent funny Swedish vaudeville pop!), David Byrne and Brian Eno "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today" (nice to see these guys working together again, and the best David Byrne album in a while IMHO), The Kooks "Inside In / Inside Out" (a great album from a pretty young English band), The Fratellis "Here We Stand" (another great new-ish English band). My absolute favorites right now though are Snow Patrol "A Hundred Million Suns" (the best thing to come out of Ireland since U2 many decades ago) and Elbow "The Seldom Seen Kid" (the best thing from my old home town of Manchester for a long time). Honorable mention's go to Liam Finn "I'll Be Lightning" (Neil Finn's (Crowded House) son Liam proves that talent really does run in the family with this great album - makes me wish I lived in New Zealand!), Radiohead "In Rainbows" (worth the album price just for the stunningly beautiful track "House of Cards") and The New No 2 "You Are Here" (George Harrison's son, obsessed with old 60's TV show "The Prisoner" and the post 9-11 western world - scary!)

And finally, the Americas. Want to listen to a great American bar band? Check out The Hold Steady "Stay Positive" (start with the song "Sequestered in Memphis" and if that's your thing, feel free to buy everything else they've done - I did!), Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson "Break Up" is surprisingly good, I hadn't listened to either of them before. Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey "Here And Now" has some of the best harmonies since The Jayhawks, while The Weepies "Hideaway" is full of angelic girly vocal goodness and some great melodies. If youre more into rap check out Lupe Fiasco "Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor" (especially the great 60's throwback track "Daydreamin' (Featuring Jill Scott)").

That's all folks. Have a great New Year and see you in 2010 :-)

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Fender

Fender by Ross Cooper  

Lately I've been selling off a lot of my old music gear from the Mellotone days, and using the money to set up a new minimal solo recording rig. The sound I'm getting is great so I thought I'd stick out a quick demo mp3 :-) This is a mexican made Fender Strat going through an Apogee One into Ableton Live 8 running on a quad core 27" iMac. All amps modeled by Native Instruments Guitar Rig... I'm hoping this will turn into a song at some point, but for now it's a nice little sound montage.

NEW: Added some bass, organ & indian instruments - ooohhh ;-)

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Tomorrow

Written & recorded by Ross Cooper.

About: A song that I've had written for a while, but only just around to recording - spurred on by a few new gear purchases that had to be justified by actually doing some recording! Ended up being one of my favorite mixes I've ever done, nice and loud with a nice separation between all the instruments. Lots of layers of vocals, guitars & hammond organ - always a winner :-)

Lyrics: Doesn’t matter what you think you know, if you don’t know where you want to go Tomorrow. Doesn’t matter what you think you’ve seen, if you don’t remember where you’ve been Tomorrow. And I’m here to tell you Don’t give up on the past. # Doesn’t matter all the books you’ve read, if you don’t understand a word they said Tomorrow. Doesn’t matter all your hours in church, actions dictate your worth Tomorrow. And I’m here to tell you the bible’s not the only book in the world # Doesn’t matter what you say, it’s who you help along the way Tomorrow. You have to learn that what you do, effects the world, not just you Tomorrow. And I’m here to tell you Don’t be a douche-bag oh no

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New songs up on iTunes

If you use iTunes, do a search in the podcasts for "Ross Cooper" and now as well as my old Mellotone stuff, you'll find a new podcast called "Ross Cooper's Acoustic Demos" which has a bunch of new songs. It's just me & my 12 string guitar, thrashing out some new ideas... 

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Beatles Revolution

I'm blogging from the Mirage right now where Sarah & Tony brought us to the Beatles bar 'Revolution'. The Cirque du Soleil show 'Love' is here so the whole casino has Beatles stuff everywhere. I'm off in search of the Blue Meanie...

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Dayglow

Written & recorded by Ross Cooper.

1/22/08 Update: I just put a new version of this track out. Click above to hear it. My Ableton 7 discs finally arrived so I could use the EIC sample library to add a whole new acoustic middle section to the song! This is kinda how I imagined it in the first place but didn't have the sounds... until now.

About: This track is a bit more upbeat than City of Apes, as I was trying to make something a bit more danceable. Again all the sounds I created from the waveform up except for the drums (Ableton's Drum Machines) and the lead sound, which uses Ableton's Tension modeling synth.

FYI: I learnt some cool new tricks for adding an Exciter like effect this time around, so I re-mixed City of Apes with it too. it doesn't sound incredibly different, but does a nice top-end shine and a little separation which makes the vocal samples easier to understand. If you'd already downloaded that track before today, you may want to go get it again! :-)

Note: You can also see what other people are saying about this track on the Ableton Music Forum here.

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City of Apes

Written & Recorded by Ross Cooper.

About: My first attempt at really using Ableton Live 7. Apart from the drum & vocal samples, every other sound started with me hand generating the waveforms, building a sound and it's effects (midi as well as audio) from scratch. There's then a lot of use of Live's randomization capabilities in the loop playback so that every playback is subtly different. I also have to hand tweak certain things during the playback in order to make the mix work. I'll talk about some of these techniques in upcoming blogs...

Note: You can also see what other people are saying about this track on the Ableton Music Forum here.

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1000 days

Written and recorded by Ross Cooper.

About: Just a little song I wrote for my girlfriend Sally on our 1000 day anniversary together. I wanted to write & record a song in 1 day, but it ended up taking 2 days to get it sounding how I wanted it to.

Lyrics: You take what you want. I get what I need. That's the price of love and it's heavy indeed. | You never would have thought, and I couldn't have believed, that you and I would stampede. | 1000 days into love. 1000 days is not enough

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Machines

Written and recorded by Ross Cooper.

About: An instrumental that I created with Native Instruments Reaktor. Its a sound collage influenced by the old french 'musique concrete' movement of Pierre Schaeffer. I generated about 40 minutes of random sounds and then spliced them together in (hopefully) interesting ways. Definitely only for the more adventurous listener!

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Mississippi

Time for another song posting on YouTube, and this time it's one that I wrote. "Mississippi" is the first song I wrote after Mellotone broke up and it's probably got the most complicated chord changes in any song I've ever written. You may even notice me flub one of them near the end if you watch carefully ;-) ha ha

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