When I last posted I was working in Scotland and had a very nice flat in a village called East Calder. I used to fly up from Leeds/Bradford airport to Edinburgh on the very early Monday morning flight and back on the more reasonable Friday mid afternoon flght. I had decided it was time to resurrect the Strange Devotion project that I had originaly started at the end of 1981. I had a few synths and a laptop in the spare bedroom and was busy writing and recording whenever I got the chance. However as the IT project I was working on got nearer to the go live date I had less and less time in the flat and then once the project did go live my time in Scotland was over.
I moved all my stuff back home and joined an IT project based in Leeds. As far as Stranged Devotion was concerned this was not good news as the latest addition to my familly was now sleeping in my old studio and there wasn't (and still isn't) anywhere else in the house I could use instead. So for the last year and half my synths have been stuffed into wardrobes, attics and drawers with very few chances of them getting to see the light of day.
While Strange Devotion was in this limbo period I was still thinking about music all the time and decided if I bought another bass I might be able to get more chance to play it than I my synths. So some months later and nice new Sandbrg made its way from Germany to my house and I did get to play it ocassionaly and even managed to record a brief demo track with it.
Not much happened after that until I got back from a nice relaxing holiday in Spain, this summer, to find that I had had a number of emails from people saying they had heard the original Strange Devotion demo tracks.
It's always nice to get such emails and I realised that not only had I been neglecting Strange Devotion from a musical point of view, but the website I had registered while still working in Scotland still only had a holding page and I had also done nothing about transfering the 2 videos I have made from tape to disk.
So, spurred on by those emails, I bought some software that would help me get my website up a bit quicker then having to type html straight into vi and got to work getting the videos onto disk.
The website is now up and running (although still not finished) and both the videos are finally up on YouTube.
I am also in the process of filiming a new video to go with the track Confusion, which I recorded in Scotland and mentioned about in the previous post.
Towards the end of my time in Scotland I was thinking of buying a reel to reel tape recorder so I could see if the master tape containing the original Strange Devotion demo had survived. I didn't know whether it had been recorded on a 1/2 track or 1/4 track reel to reel, but I felt pretty confident that it was most likely done on a 1/2 track and had even, unsuccessfully, bid on a few Revox's on Ebay.
So while I was busy on the website I also managed to find somebody who would be able to transfer my reel to reel master onto cd and finally let me know whether the recording had survived or not. The guy doing the transfer only had a 1/2 track recorder, but I was now 100% sure that is what the tape would be.
He rang me to say teh tape was in god condition and the recordings had transferred to cd with no problems.
The first time I played the cd I was astounded to hear something completely different to what I had recorded on it. My first thought was that the guy had put someone elses music on there, but as I listened I could hear my track muffled in the background. The second track seemed to have come out with no problems. I ended up thining I had lost my first track somehow, but posting a question about it on this forum solved the mystery for me and I am now the proad owner of a 1/4 track reel to reel tape recorder.
The same forum helped me track down the make and model of drum machine I had used on the original Strange Devotion demo and within a few weeks I had picked one of those up on eBay too.
So,now that we are up to date I have decided that this blog will have a slight change of direction. I recently realised that the Strange DSevotion website didn't have a news section with full RSS capabilities. Adding one at this stage would be not only be time consuming, but probably beyond my abilities, but a blog already provides rxactoy what I would need. So from now on this site will just contain Strange Devotion news.
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