title:
artist:
released:
genre:
song with no end -
dave stafford
1998
active / ambient
Dave Stafford, August 2010: With the “Circulation” album completed, I once again took stock of my musical position.
For a number of years, I had been fully focused on mostly looping of one kind or another, or on Crafty guitar related projects such as The Dozey Lumps or my acoustic/looping album “1867”.
So it was either acoustic guitar, or ambient looping -
That was what characterised the second half of the 1990s for me, and I wanted to clean up some other musical loose ends by addressing the one type of music that got pushed aside during all this Crafty and looping activity – the ordinary SONG.
Originally, before I attended Guitar Craft, and before I got interested in looping, I had been an “ordinary” guitarist (as opposed to a “Crafty guitarist” or an “ambient looping guitarist” which was what I was for most of the 90s). I wrote ordinary “songs”, but I didn’t really have the proper tools then to record or release those songs.
But I did have one or two older “songs” kicking around, that I felt were worth releasing, I felt, and still feel, that they have musical value. Then, also, there were…other musical items that had no logical “home”.
Items of varying types: an unreleased Crafty acoustic piece; an unreleased old standard
tuning acoustic piece; an electric guitar Dave Stafford version of a Dozey Lumps
song; a really old vocal number from the late 1980s; an electric guitar piece – the
first piece I ever recorded with a “whammy bar” guitar; a pastoral, Genesis-
The obvious thing to do then, to tie up all these “loose ends”, was to create an EP that contained them all, everything that “didn’t really fit” onto my normal releases, which to be fair, were mostly about loops and looping – so regular “songs” really didn’t fit.
So that is what became “Song With No End” – a sort of a fond look back at the previous 20 years (roughly, 1978 through 1998), collecting together pieces that probably should have been, but never had been, released for a number of reasons.
The EP is arranged into sections, beginning with the only acoustic piece, and also, beginning with five instrumental pieces, and then the last four pieces are the vocal works. Almost by chance rather than by any real design, too, the vocal works are arranged chronologically, oldest first, newest last.
It’s a bit of an unusual arrangement, and in the space of four songs, TWENTY YEARS goes by in the blink of an eye! “Happening More” is a piece from about 1978 or 1979, I am not quite sure which – while “Waiting For The Moment” and “All Is Forgiven” are both from around 1998 – with “Dreamswept Sea” as the odd man out from the year 1990. Some very long, long spells there where I simply did not create any “normal” songs.
I’ve done other vocal work, but the vast majority of it remains, and will remain,
unreleased. There are only two other vocal tracks in the ENTIRE catalogue: one, from
that very first “Saffron Matted Voids” single, the double A-
So it’s a sparse output indeed, six songs featuring vocals in twenty-
Hence, vocal work really takes a back seat to instrumental, with a ratio of over
99% instrumental and less than 1% vocal.
“Song With No End” happens to contain four of the six currently available Dave Stafford vocal tracks, so if you are interested in that side of things, normal “songs” (well, somewhat normal!) than this is the EP for you.
Having said all that, sometimes, as on “All Is Forgiven”, something remarkable happens, and for one song, for a glorious three and a half minutes….I ***AM*** a vocalist. But guitar will always be my main musical focal point.
GALADRIEL
The EP starts out with what is very probably my very first, or if not the first, one of the very, very earliest, compositions in the new standard tuning. I wrote this at a Guitar Craft course, and it utilises the convenient fact that if you make the right chord shape, you can have THREE beautiful ringing “A” notes on your top three strings.
It’s a very, very simple piece, and it’s a piece of which I am extraordinarily proud. I still play this piece to this day, and at the last course I was on, in February 2009, almost exactly 20 years after “Galadriel” was first composed, I was fortunate enough to be privileged to teach “Galadriel” to a guitarist I know from Mexico, he really liked the piece and in fact, he actually created some variations for it that we performed privately during the course.
So “Galadriel” has had a long and fruitful existence, it’s been around since about 1989 I would estimate, although it’s strange that it never became a Dozey Lumps piece. During the time 1988 through 1992, pretty much any piece, idea, riff, chord pattern, whatever, that either Bryan Helm or myself came up with, ended up as a Dozey Lumps song. But, not so, “Galadriel” – she always existed separately, as a unique example of a Dave Stafford guitar solo.
Normally, the piece is performed solo (no bass part). When it came time to record
it, I decided to add the bass part, which was made up on the day. I very much like
it arranged like this, and the SOUND of the bass notes is just perfect, when it comes
in, it’s so deep and powerful -
So, a picked pattern of continuous A notes starts the song, followed by a wistful, climbing melody that plays against those constant, beautiful A notes – a pause, a little riff, and we are back to that melody – this time, the bass follows – then climbs carefully down, and then pulses along with the slowly retarding A notes to a beautiful, perfect finish.
I love the simplicity, the piece just WORKS, it’s short, it’s what it is – and I think it’s absolutely lovely – one of the best pieces of music I’ve ever composed and recorded, because it just came out, naturally, not planned, not overworked or overcomplicated – it just IS.
“Galadriel” is a beautiful little piece of music, and a brilliant start to the unusual musical document that “Song With No End” absolutely is.
PREBENDARY
This is another oddity, a “solo” version of a Dave Stafford song that was originally composed, arranged and performed by the Dozey Lumps. Again, around 1989, while the Lumps would play this at most performances, it was a staple of our live repertoire, I sat down to record a very different version of “Prebendary”.
You can read the full story of how the song was created by visiting the entry for
“One Lump Or Two?” by the Dozey Lumps, basically, this was a piece for two guitars,
there was a basic “pattern” that played throughout the piece, with various configurations
and re-
For some forgotten reason, when I went to record it “solo”, I used a different approach,
instead of the main guitar beginning on a low A note on the fifth string, I used
a harmoniser to pitch the part up, so it’s played two octaves up from where it would
normally sit pitch-
Then, playing along to this high pitched backing track, I added in the harmony variations, I am not sure how many, it sounds like I layered many guitars on, first, the normal pitch one, starting on the low A as the standard version does, comes in, and accompanies the high pitched one throughout the song.
Then, the first harmony, a descending figure comes in on the left side, alone – followed immediately by stereo guitars playing the THIRD harmony part, which is just another variation / inversion of the basic scale.
The whole piece then moves up, and up again, harmonically, as is intended, and the solos begin, they are pretty much note for note the same as the ones on the Dozey Lumps version – the only difference being the lovely harmonics and sudden quiet, a hush, when the piece suddenly comes to a very precise end.
CRAFTYPORTER
This is a strange piece of acoustic guitar music, played on my Ovation 1867 before I ever went to Guitar Craft, so it’s actually in old standard tuning. It’s just a tune made up on the spot, because for the first time in my life I had an acoustic guitar – and I wanted to record it!
So this is unusual, because it’s reason for existence is that I wanted to try the 1867 in the studio, see how it sounded – and – it sounds good!
I just improvised a chord progression, recorded it, ran the tape back, and played
quick acoustic lead guitar along with the chords – voila, instant “song”. I actually
like the result, its casual, happy, relaxed, positive – just an all-
SONG WITH NO END
Now we go back into the mists of time, I would have to actually look this up to see just how old it is, but I would say it’s one of the first, serious guitar pieces I ever sat down to intentionally record. I worked on this for days and days, it was extremely difficult, I wanted to create a certain mood, using the ebow melodically along with normal lead guitars, and all of this melodic and harmonic information overlaid on a very precisely picked backing guitar.
Reverse sections meant a lot of tedious turning over of reels, testing out different reverse lead guitars, but eventually I ended up with a set of overdubs that I was totally happy with.
I like how the piece pauses, as if for reflection, and moves gracefully, very slowly, very deliberately, from melody to melody, some parts hopeful, some sad, some moving, others simply beautiful.
The piece has a naivety, an innocence about it, it’s just pure, it’s real, and I
love the sound of it. It’s definitely inspired by early Genesis and Anthony Phillips,
but with the twist of the ebow as the lead instrument – well, ebow, and then those
beautiful, beautiful reverse guitars – like the ones that come swelling up at about
5:25 -
Then, the final ending, where the ebow just sticks between those two notes, the picked guitars slow – and the pastoral, beautiful mood that is “Song With No End” is finally over.
Given that the available technology was very limited, I am very, very proud of this piece, especially the way I have worked the ebows and reverse guitars into an interwoven pattern, and how the piece flows, pauses, flows, pauses – pauses again, slows, and then suddenly, is gone – like a reverie, or a meditation, that suddenly ends – and all you are left with is that feeling – “I wish that had gone on FOREVER….”
I think it creates a very unique and spellbinding mood, that just draws you in with
it’s innocence, naivety and beauty -
BE SEEING YOU !
After the pastoral loveliness of “Song With No End”, we now jump forward many years, to the early 90s. I have the temporary loan of a drum machine, something I still have never owned to this day, and of course, I didn’t really know how to operate it.
But I persevered, I worked out what to do, and I created a rather primitive drum track, and got it recorded. Then – I just built up the song out of riffs and guitar parts that I found as I went. I had this Fender Katana guitar that I had got for cheap, and it was my first whammy bar guitar, so I really wanted to record something using the whammy bar – and “Be Seeing You!” is what this whammy experiment became.
A strange rumble of reversed whammy bars sounding more like a small explosion than sounding like guitars, suddenly breaks the peaceful mood left by the preceding track, “Song With No End” – from the quiet and meditative to the rocking melody and wild whammy bending of “Be Seeing You!”.
A mixture of reversed and forwards guitars set up a mood to the pulsing drum machine, and then in comes the riff, each version of the riff having a slightly different ending, sometimes a quick whammy, sometimes a descending whammy – lots of variations.
We move through one verse, with a connecting section following consisting of a very
long, convoluted riff…which then resolves back to the main riff -
Another connecting section, this time with some wah effects, and some reverse guitar
mixed in, the piece builds up suddenly, until the massive, roaring, uber-
The solo slows, moves upwards in a very strange way, a bizarre reverse whammy, another
mini-
HAPPENING MORE
Now we get our first vocal piece, and this is a very, very old piece of music, from about 1979, so it will have a very different genesis (not to mention production ethos!) to most of the songs on this collection At this point in time, I had no synthesizers, no rack mount effects, no drum machine, no looping devices; and Guitar Craft was 10 years away in an unknown Dave Stafford future.
So how I created a track this complex is still beyond me, but I know for a fact that
the main backing is completely reversed. The only source of “drums” I had was the
built in Hammond drum module on my Hammond H-
So then I just overdubbed more forward organs, creating a basic chord structure on top of my mostly percussive, reverse backing track – but the backing track is awesome, because I am just soloing madly away on the Hammond, which sounds amazing reversed during those first verses!
Then came guitars, more guitars, crashing distorted guitars, which at 1:22, when the vocal ends, the rhythm guitars come down so, so hard, really just blazing a way to the finish.
A lovely thumping, repetitive guitar takes the place of a real bass, at that time, I tended to just play a “fake” bass part on my guitar, and it works really well in this case.
The vocal is very serious, very intense, but I am singing through a tiny Boss flanger, a stomp box no less – so a microphone plugged into a stomp box flanger and then into the deck. I think that flanger really does the vocal justice, it really makes it, it takes what could have been ordinary and really fills it out, it intensifies the emotion and I think it was an inspired choice.
Strangely, I think that the rhythm guitars near the end went on LAST, I had all the
lead instruments done, and wasn’t happy – and adding in those distorted chords was
again an inspired idea, because it really filled out the piece -
This piece is so unusual, that despite its great age and rather unusual pedigree,
it needs to be present here to represent a musical path that I might well have gone
down had looping and Guitar Craft not come along to...divert me. We have a sort
of Peter Hammill-
The end of the piece is really lovely, some distant guitars are still feeding back, very quietly, whilst forward and reverse organs drift about, gradually thinning out, just a beautiful juxtaposition of sounds, chords, riffs, melodies – a tiny arpeggio peeks out from underneath the blanket of forward and reverse Hammond organs, then….”Happening More” eventually comes to an end.
DREAMSWEPT SEA
Fast forward now to 1990, eleven years later, we move to our next piece, “Dreamswept Sea”. This is a piece with perhaps an even more unusual genesis than most, in that what I had was, a very solid and moving lead guitar solo – but no “song”.
During the Luxury Yacht sessions, while we were recording some of our Dozey Lumps repertoire with Tom Freeman on the drums, Tom and Bryan and I would “jam” and improvise in between the takes.
I took the tapes home, and there was this one solo that I REALLY liked, I felt ALL
three of us played REALLY well on it – I was playing in my best sort of Andy Latimer-
So I have this solo – but that is all. What do I do with it?
I took it back to the studio, and thought about it. Then I had a notion – what if I were to “attach” a keyboard and vocal “introduction” that would “lead up to” the solo, and the solo became then the “rest” of the “song”?? Could I even do that?
I tried several things, but eventually settled on what you hear today. So I constructed
a drumless, synthesizer based “songlet”, recording first the keyboards, getting the
music right, and then overdubbing the vocal. Lots of flangers on both the synths
and the vocals, to give it a “dreamlike” feeling, which I believe works OK – a lovely
descending cascade of organ notes into a nice delay sound – a brief reverb-
All I had to do was “attach” the already complete solo, and the piece was nearly finished. One last touch was to add a big reverb to the track in certain places, to assist the overall sound a little bit, but especially during the last minute, so that as the piece fades away, the reverb level increases dramatically, which creates a lovely, almost hazey effect on the track.
At the 2:05 mark, when the solo starts to wind down, the reverb comes up dramatically, and the song fades away into a massive wall of incredible reverberated sound.
I also believe that I “added” in additional synths at the end, to produce that glissando like effect as the song fades away, so the live section at the end is about 98% completely live, except for one or two little pieces of synth added to enhance the sound, and the additional reverb for the fade out – otherwise, that’s Luxury Yacht improvising like mad, and sounding amazing.
So we can now credit properly Tom Freeman on the drums, and Bryan Helm on synthesizer, without them this piece would simply not exist.
I really felt that the solo, and the amazing performances of both Tom and Bryan during that solo, warranted the effort to create and blend that solo with another piece of music to construct a “song” within which to present the solo.
I feel that it works fairly well, given the strange idea of attaching a new piece of music to the FRONT of an existing piece – that’s a bit odd, but in the end, it came out very well, and I would bet that if you didn’t “know” it was made up of two separate parts, you might not even realise…it sounds reasonably “natural”.
The guitar solo itself could not be more real, that was the state of my lead guitar
playing in 1990, and I am glad that I actually managed to capture that musical snapshot
of where I had “got to” by 1990 – making progress, a little overt, a little too “in
your face” perhaps, but, supremely over-
WAITING FOR THE MOMENT
Well, now, we leave the distant past behind COMPLETELY, and fast forward a long, long way, all the way up to the year 1998, another eight years forward in time, for the next two, the final two, vocal works presented on “Song With No End”.
I believe it would have been not long after the release of Bindlestiff’s “Late” album, that I was just experimenting in the studio, and I still had various tracks that Bryan had mailed me for use during the “Late” sessions.
One of those, an unused drum track, had really caught my ear – a remarkable looped drum solo with a lot of really cool “live” content, including strange white noise events, a smacked conga that “explodes” into a massive reverb room – this piece of Bryan’s being a very, very complex and creative soundscape, I just loved it, so I decided I would try to overdub it and have it as a piece on one of my albums, perhaps.
So I started work with the existing very percussion-
I realised that it was really a complete entity in itself, and it didn’t “need” much
– that it was a ready-
So, that is what I did.
I think that first, I just started laying down scratch vocals. If I got something good, it stayed on the tape, until I could improve it (if I could). Very quickly, within minutes, I had created the entire set of lyrics, which I scribbled down onto paper quickly so as not to lose them, so then I just said to myself – right, self, I am just going to SING these lyrics.
So I did, I am pretty sure this is one take, a very early take, I have the words scribbled down on paper, and I am just singing along to the drum track.
The only part that I had to re-
That done, all that remained was to add in the ebows, which I wanted to do in such a way that they complimented the new vocal, the drum track, and tied the whole piece together.
So, going back to the start, I just started laying down ebow, section by section. I wanted in particular to make a strong entrance, which meant learning the opening section, and repeating it until the “tricky riff” (beginning at 0:24) came out just prefect.
It’s quite, quite difficult playing the energy bow “quickly”, but if you work at it, it can be done. So I start with a long, sinuous sound, with mysterious bends – a whip sound, another long note, and then I am away on that very tricky, very fast ascending figure ending in a very quick slide down.
Cue: vocal. So I worked out that ebow piece so that it would end just before the
(already-
Then I moved to the next section, creating ebow riffs and melodies that basically filled in any “blank space” between words, verses, or lines. Again, a carefully planned “long note” (beginning at 1:34) – which slides up and then again meets the next vocal perfectly – and at the same time, by pure chance, Bryan hits one of those amazing “conga” reverb “pops” so – you get this amazing transition from ebow to vocal to POP – and then the song goes on.
More dangerous, low pitch, bendy ebow accompany and dance around the existing vocals,
some of the most difficult and fastest ebow I’ve ever recorded, I just really wanted
to push myself on this track, and I feel I really did reach a new place in terms
of what you can do with an ebow -
Another lovely, wandering solo, changes to a single, perfect, long note (beginning
at 3:20) which SLOWLY fades away…then an amazing bending ebow re-
At 4:40, the ebow makes a really dangerous move, a harmonic bent up by waggling the string up above the nut, on the head of the guitar, at the same time the vocal begs “no matter how I entreat…” – then, a determined, powerful burst of ebow followed by – silence.
The drums start to go through strange rhythmic variations, and then, the ebow returns,
and begins another amazing series of mini-
Credit must now be given to: Bryan Helm: drum machine, live drum machine, drum treatments, synth bass, synthesizers, synthesizer treatments, loop and loop treatments.
ALL IS FORGIVEN
Another piece from 1998, and the last vocal piece I’ve recorded to date, beyond the odd rehearsal or demo for fun in the studio – “All Is Forgiven” is another very interesting piece of music, featuring a special vocal effect technique that I think works very, very well indeed.
This is, remarkably, yet another Bryan Helm piece, where he has taken an excellent drum sample, and played beautiful, beautiful organ and synthesizers over it, creating this beautiful, amazing backdrop, that just practically BEGGED me to play over it.
But what to play? I wanted to work quickly, as I had on “Waiting For The Moment” so I limited myself – one stereo vocal track, one stereo energy bow guitar part – that’s it. And if I recall, I only had two tracks to do it on, so in this recording, on the master, Bryan is on two of the four tracks, and BOTH my vocal, AND my ebow, are on the other stereo pair!
All the rest of the sound -
So again, it started with vocals. I just started singing, but I was singing live into the reverb, so I could get those super long vocalisations by cranking up the reverb level really high. Again, very quickly, the lyrics came, but as I sang, I started really altering the reverb levels – so DURING THE TAKE, I would shut the reverb ALL THE WAY OFF, and sing very close to the mike – which gave a lovely, close, intimate sound – then, for the opposite effect, I would suddenly crank the reverb level up very high, and back away about a foot and a half and sing quite loud – so suddenly, I am not close, I am far, far away, and totally ethereal.
At 1:14, you can hear that ALL reverb has been removed, and I am right up, very close
on the mike, as I sing the vocal through up to about 1:46 – then, suddenly, back
to heavy reverb – which then allowed me to sing the SUPER long “All……………………………” which
I could not have done in the close, reverb-
A short space, and then the ebow comes in (remember, it’s on the SAME TRACKS as the vocal, so they could not “overlap”) – sinuous, winding, down to that awesome low note at around 2:57, and then moving into a really lovely circular figure at 3:13 that really sounds nice as the piece fades gently away.
I treasure “All Is Forgiven” , it’s serious, it’s lovely, I think in some ways it’s the best vocal I’ve ever done, the ebow solo at the end is well done, but most of all, it’s that amazing backing track again, a pleasure to build on and I think the end result was well worth it.
I will never forget the amazing feeling of singing the piece live, having to move
back a foot and a half to sing the heavily-
I also like the lyric, so it’s most unusual, because normally I always dislike something about a vocal performance, but in this case, I am very happy with it all – lyric, delivery, effects, sound, quality – and I love the outro solo as well – just a wonderful experience, and a happy, reverent way to end the “Song With No End” extended play experience.
Credit must be given once again: Bryan Helm: Drum sample, synthesizer, synth bass, loop, treatments.
Except as noted on the individual tracks, all other instruments, voices and sounds on this record are by Dave Stafford.
Inspired by the vocal technique and lyrics of both Peter Hammill and Daryl Hall, or maybe an odd amalgam of the two, Hall singing a Hammill lyric perhaps, there is something almost spiritual about this piece, it just sounds brilliant, and I am inordinately proud of “All Is Forgiven” and I hope that it will be heard more widely in future.
I don’t know where the words or the tune came from, but I wish this would happen more often.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Song With No End” ties up my loose ends, it brought the 1990s to a close, so I could approach the 00s with a clean musical slate, leave all the disparate and different musical styles behind, and move forward clearly into an unknown musical future.
Sometimes it helps to clear the slate, to review all the extra pieces, the what-
Or so it seemed to me then, in any case. I am glad that I stopped to make this record before moving forward, because if I had not, much that is good might have been lost.
Please see the entry for “The Autoreverse Sessions” to read what happens next -
notes from the guitarist’s seat:
quiet... peaceful... ambient music. pureambient music.
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