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First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to anyone who reads this. This year has been a busy one, although I managed to avoid the mayhem of releasing a 12-track CD, which I achieved last year.

For the first time, I was able to get two songs through to the Semi-Final stage of the UK Songwriting Contest and am still waiting to hear if either has been selected as a Finalist. The songs, “Classical Trance” and “Trance Mission”, are both entered in the Instrumental category and, as such, are up against opposition from classical, jazz, blues, orchestral and pop instrumentals, among others. For this reason, the Instrumental category is considered to be one of the most difficult to win. Becoming a Finalist is also considered to be very difficult in any category with less than two percent of songs making it through. I wasn’t aware of this in 2020 when “To Andromeda and Beyond” was a Finalist in the EDM category, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore.

“Trance Mission” also gave me my first track which was accepted on Beatport, which claims to be the world’s largest DJ store for electronic dance music, so that aspect of my journey appears to be going in the right direction. I am also in contact with other EDM producers in the Luke Bond group on the social media platform, Discord, where we exchange feedback on each other’s music.

I am currently working on an orchestral track, “Tempora Mutantur (Changing Times)”, which morphs into EDM and back in just over three minutes. The time signature changes from 6/8 to 4/4 and back and this represents a new direction for me. I have received some encouraging feedback for the piece on SongU, so hopefully you will like it when it is released, probably in January.

My aim for 2026 is to carry on with the EDM theme, probably in the Trance genre, but I want to include contributions from my ROLI Seaboard 2 keyboard, with its emphasis on MIDI Polyphonic Expression, and from my Kontakt 8 library, with particular emphasis on sampled orchestral instruments. That combination, which I believe to be unique, should give me something different on which to work. Watch this space.

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Creating electronic music requires that you are reasonably proficient in modern computing and technology. The use of DAWS (digital audio workstations), the requirements of a music studio, and even the necessary administrative tasks of registering, releasing and promoting your music online require a certain level of tech and computer knowledge.

In other posts, I mentioned that I worked previously in scientific and medical image and data analysis and used computers for implementing techniques like spectral analysis and early experiments with AI. All that was done, however, using specialist computers that used the UNIX operating system with the C/C++ programming language, and not the systems designed by Microsoft and Apple. It was therefore a bit of a learning curve understanding the ins and outs of various incarnations of the Windows operating system. I have friends and relatives who use Macs and swear by them, but it not something that I have ever considered – the price alone puts me off.

Getting the hang of the Windows system was one thing, but understanding audio software and plugins was quite another. I also like to make visuals to go with excerpts of the tracks (called shorts or reels depending on your preferred social media platform), so that involved learning the technology for photographs and videos. Even learning to distinguish between file extensions like vst, aax, au, ini, mp3, wav, jpeg, tiff, mp4, etc., may be easy for the youth of today but is a bit of a learning curve for older guys like me. Knowing what to do with them, when they don’t work in the way you want, is quite another story.

Then there is the hardware. Buying the correct cables (TRS or RCA, 1/4 inch or 1/8 inch, balanced or unbalanced) and the correct connectors (USB Types (A, B, C, Micro, Mini) And USB Versions (USB 2.0, 3.0, 3.2, 4)) can also be a bit of a nightmare, not to mention the bigger items such as speaker monitors, microphones, headphones, and audio interfaces. Even when you feel like you are getting on top of it, something odd happens which can take ages to fix, while getting a delivery of an item or buying one from a shop can be a nerve-racking experience, wondering if that, indeed, is what you actually need.

In the end it is quite gratifying when you get everything to work. Fortunately, there is online help in the shape of manufacturers’ help pages, user forums, social media specialist groups, Google, and even AI bots to provide you with the information you need. To be fair, it can be fun at times.

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After I graduated from Glasgow University in 1967, I moved to Edinburgh where I became an astronomer for three years and four months. I was a PhD student at Edinburgh University’s Astronomy Department which was based, not at the University itself, but in a section of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

In these days, the spectra of stars were obtained using a telescope linked to a diffraction grating which acted as a prism spreading the spectrum onto a photographic plate. The plate was analysed by having its density along the spectrum plotted on graph paper by a machine called a densitometer. Absorption lines, caused by elements in the star’s atmosphere, produced a dip in the graph which could be measured by drawing a line along the top of the recorded graph and counting the squares on the graph paper caused by the dip. From these values the abundance of elements in the star’s atmosphere could be estimated.

The densitometer was also capable of producing a paper tape of the graph’s values and this could be read by a computer, which, in those days, filled an entire room. My PhD supervisor realised that by using this method it was possible to compute the absorption line measurements. My project was to help him do this, apply the method to a real astronomical problem, and write a computer program to calculate the abundances of the elements from our measurements. By doing so, we were among the first globally to analyse spectra using a computer.

Over fifty years later, while I am still interested in astronomy, I have developed a keen interest in music composition and production. We now have computer software called a digital audio workstation (DAW), where we record audio or MIDI tracks on our PC or laptop for each vocal or instrument involved in the creation of a piece of music. We display these tracks as horizontal bands on a timeline and can also display the frequency spectra of the sound of each track at any point on that timeline. By manipulating these spectra, using a technique called equalisation (EQ), we can help separate the sounds of these vocals and instruments, so that they sit comfortable in the mix. Indeed, EQ is considered to be one of the most important factors in mixing a piece of recorded music.

As a music producer in my early eighties, I often get asked how an old guy like me manages to handle modern techniques like EQ. I find it quite a difficult question to answer without giving the history of my early life. Like many older people, I sometimes struggle with modern innovations like QR codes and robotic answer machines. Fortunately, for me and my passion for music production, EQ is not one of them.

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I have blogged in the past that tracks like “Levels” by Avicii and “Titanium” by David Guetta featuring Sia started my EDM journey. These songs, however, appeared pretty late in my love of music.

Although I had liked a few songs in my childhood, I was fortunate that my adolescence coincided with the birth of rock’n’roll. The charts were full of songs by the likes of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard and the Everly Brothers. It was a great time to develop a serious interest in pop music.

I had started to learn to play the piano at the age of five, taught by my talented brother, Robert, and had managed to keep it going off and on. I had advanced to playing Mozart’s Sonatas and would often play these at after-school parties to the appreciation of the adults present. It was about this time that pianist Russ Conway burst onto the scene with UK number one hits “Side Saddle” and “Roulette” and a top five hit with “China Tea”. I quickly learned to play these – quite well, if I say it myself – and played them at the after-school parties. All of a sudden, there was considerable interest from some schoolgirls present and Mozart’s Sonatas were sadly a thing of the past.

My interest in pop music developed and I soon accrued a great selection of records which led to invitations to parties, which had now moved to the evenings and beyond. I had a particular liking for the Everly Brothers, Neil Sedaka and Del Shannon who were successful at the time. I particularly remember one party where I turned up with just one single to the dismay of the hostess. It was “Please Please Me”, which had just given the Beatles their first top ten hit. I told the assembled party-goers that it was the only record they were going to need.

My interest in pop music continued through the sixties with acts like the Beatles, the Kinks, the Hollies, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds and the Turtles, and into the seventies. It peaked again in the eighties when, for seven years, I became a part-time DJ in Gosport, Hampshire. It was a pleasure playing records by Madness, ELO, David Bowie, Queen, the Police and Michael Jackson. I also enjoyed playing most of the New Romantic music. I spent a lot of time in the British Newspaper Library and on my Tandy TRS-80 computer compiling a database of the pop charts as used by the Guinness Book and was in discussions with the Official Charts Company when it formed.

The nineties saw me step away from DJ-ing and, although I still followed the music and kept the charts up-to-date, it wasn’t quite the same as before. That is, until I heard “Levels” by Avicii.

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In February 1963, when I was eighteen years old, I was invited to a party by a girl. I was used to getting invited to parties, not because of my good looks or outstanding personality, but because I had the best record collection in our group and could bring the music with me. On this occasion, I turned up at the party with only one record; it was “Please Please Me” by the Beatles. When I arrived at the party, the hostess looked disappointed that I had only brought one record but I announced that it was the only record that they were going to need.

This particular song had just entered the NME Top Ten and would go on to be a number one, although that fact is not recognised as the “official chart” uses the charts of a music newspaper that no one ever bought. It was not the Beatles first hit; “Love Me Do” had scraped into the Top Twenty but had largely passed everyone by.

So what was it about the Beatles, and “Please Please Me” in particular, that was so revolutionary? They lined up as a foursome with whoever was doing the lead in front, very much like Buddy Holly and the Crickets. The harmony style in the main chorus was very much taken from “Cathy’s Clown” by the Everly Brothers; the change to falsetto and screeching “oohs” were similar to “Only the Lonely” by Roy Orbison and “Tower of Strength” by Frankie Vaughan; all previous number one hits in the early sixties. It was simply the fact that they took the best of what was around at the time, adding their own brand to create something which, as a whole, was both unique and original.

Even before the explosion of tribute bands that now exists, individual artists and groups unashamedly copied other artists and groups. Then we had impersonators, most notably of Elvis. Some of these enjoyed some success but none were lasting. So how much of the work of others should influence us and how much invention is needed in order to make an original brand.

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is a phrase which has been used more than once to describe innovations in science and other disciplines. It is not problematic to use others as an influence but I would suggest that you need three things to call it your own brand. Firstly, let yourself be influenced by more than one artist or group. Combining attributes in this way, gives you a new take on what you produce. Secondly, you need some sort of inventive spark which makes you different. Finally, you need to develop your style with time in new directions. Most household names in the music industry have followed these steps.

The combination of influences, originality and development is the takeaway message for today. It’s far from easy, but realistically it’s the only way to get to and stay at the top.

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One of my early problems when making EDM was the learning process that went with it. You can listen to Avicii, David Guetta, Armin van Buuren, Skrillex, etc., but how exactly do you go about creating the music and the sounds that you associate with them.

I started off by reading the appropriate books. Two books that I would highly recommend are “Dance Music Manual” by Rick Snoman and “The Secrets of Dance Music Production” by Dave Felton et al. The latter features tips and tricks by several authors at “Attack Magazine” which specialises in EDM. If the philosophy behind EDM music is of interest then “The Creative Electronic Music Producer” by Thomas Brett is well worth a read.

There are also many tutorials on producing EDM on YouTube; indeed the Thomas Brett book has a whole chapter on them. These days, most involve some sort of financial commitment. I have used YouTube tutorials extensively but generally to solve problems or find out how to do certain tasks such as side-chaining and resampling. Watching an expert create a masterpiece was something that I eschewed until recently. This was a conscious decision as I wanted to create my own style and not follow anyone elses.

I recently felt tempted to try watching a master at work but was discouraged by the multitude of so-called experts who wanted to make me become an overnight sensation. I was looking for someone who could help me become competent in a genre of my choosing. I narrowed it down to two genres that I found appealing: trance, especially uplifting trance, and chill-out EDM. The latter is somewhat ill-defined in the literature, so trance it was.

Finding an approriate teacher, even in a specified genre, is not easy. As I looked around, the name Luke Bond kept cropping up. Luke had worked with and produced a single with Armin van Buuren and had good reviews as a teacher, so I thought I would give him a try. I downloaded a set of Serum 2 presets which Luke had designed and found them to be excellent. Luke offers two courses, a comprehensive trance course and a shorter course on uplifting trance. I had no wish to be sitting watching YouTube for hours on end, so I settled for the shorter course which I have just finished. I have since purchased a second set of Serum 2 presets from Luke.

The main problem I had with the course is that Luke uses Ableton Live to make his track. This was not unexpected as most EDM producers use Live these days. I have tried but never really managed to get my head around Live, much preferring to stay in my comfort zone with Cubase. One of the things that attracted me to Luke’s course was that he stated that his methods could easily be transferred to other DAWS like Logic, FL Studio and Cubase and, so far, I believe that to be the case.

I didn’t intend this blog to be an advert for Luke’s course but rather to be a record of my journey in finding a suitable course and managing to avoid the pitfalls of not-so-reliable offers that you find on social media. It is not always clear which are scams or even well-intentioned but sub-standard and it is always wise to do a bit of background on the teacher and to make sure that he/she is the person actually delivering the course.

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When you release a single, you often have to choose one or more genres. This request can come from a variety of sources including your performing rights and performance organisations, your distributor, and the platforms streaming or selling your music. If you are on platforms like Bandcamp and SoundCloud, as well as the standard streaming platforms like Spotify and Amazon Music, this can involve doing this several times.

There are several problems with these lists. For one, they are extensive and involve a great deal of scrolling, which means that your preferred choice is easy to miss. They are also pretty inconsistent. What you choose on one list is often unavailable on the others. There are also many genres that you have never heard of previously, e.g. Antideutsche, Atmospheric Doom, Arunachal Indie. Some of the lists suggest that you choose multiple genres which adds to the confusion. There are also genres that you feel you should avoid such as “Easy Listening”. Surely, your latest release is better than that.

I am old enough to remember when there was classical, pop, rock, folk, country, R&B, gospel, jazz and show music – and little else. Then, subgenres such as ska, glam rock, and disco started to appear before the start of the explosion somewhere around the late seventies and early eighties. This explosion continued through the intervening years until now, when you have to be aware of at least some of the new genres that keep appearing. Electronic music, for example, gave us subgenres such as EDM, which in turn had subgenres such as Trance, which again had subgenres such as Uplifting Trance. I am sure that Uplifting Trance, itself, has many subgenres, although I am not aware of any.

The burning question is how important is your choice of genre on these platforms. I imagine that Spotify wouldn’t put your track anywhere near an EDM playlist if you answered “Easy Listening” as your choice, but how much more it matters is not exactly clear. As such, you might spend two minutes or an entire morning deciding without realising that you should have spent more or less time on it.

Which brings us to the next question. Given that there appears to be a near-infinite number of choices, should you start a genre of your own? It certainly won’t help you answer the question, but it might give you a new-found credibility. Unfortunately, “Other – please specify” is not usually a category.

Oh well, for our new release on this particular platform let’s just choose, say, these three genres, as they are roughly appropriate, and just hope that at least one of them will appear on the list of the next platform.

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With several medical procedures and tests for both Roberta and me and a week-long visit from our son’s family who live in the south of England, it has been quite a month that has seen the usual blog date being considerably delayed; at least I made it before the end of the month.

From the music point of view, things have accordingly remained fairly static, although I have managed to get my hands on a few gems in the shape of plug-ins to add to my Christmas upgrade purchases of Cubase 14 Pro and Kontakt 8, as well as the synthesizer, Massive X. These more recent purchases have included another synthesizer, Serum 2, the EQ plug-in, FabFilter Pro-Q 4, as well as the long-awaited upgrade to the chord arranger plug-in, Scaler 3. All of these are upgrades which have been released recently although the Serum and FabFilter plug-ins are first time purchases for me. The things you can do with these software items are truly mindboggling.

With more medical tests in the offing, it may be mid-May before I start to reap the benefits of my new software; however I cannot wait to get started. My big drive will be the creation of new sounds which I hope will be original and exciting. I will also be using the ROLI Seaboard RISE 2 keyboard and Lightpad Block to include MPE in my creations. Health permitting, the future is indeed bright.

With all that’s been happening, this month’s blog is, of necessity, shorter than usual, but hopefully this will be a one-off.

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I have delayed the issue of this month’s blog by one day to see if my PRO (Performing Rights Organisation), PRS for Music, had managed to get its act together with regard to registering songs. In December, they announced that they were working on upgrading their registration process with a view to accelerating the process and improving the accuracy of royalty payments. They promised that this would be completed by the end of January. It is now well into February and the process is still incomplete. While it is still possible to submit new works and amendments to current works, it is not possible to receive or view relevant codes which are necessary for releasing new tracks.

PRS for Music, which is the sole PRO for songwriters in the UK, consists of two bodies, PRS and MCPS. Both societies, which are for composers and lyricists, cost £100 to join. When you write a song, you are advised to register it on the PRS database. PRS then issues you with codes, such as a Tunecode and ISWC code, which are unique to that song. Your composition rights are then protected by PRS, while MCPS looks after your mechanical rights, e.g. for releasing on CD.

If you are a recording artist, you should register with PPL, which is free to join and looks after your performing rights. When you make a recording of a song, you should register that recording on PPL and link it to the appropriate composition on the PRS database. When you release that recording through your distributor, in my case Songtradr, you need to inform PPL and give them what is known as the ISRC code, which is unique to the recording and also identifies the composer. At the time of release of your track, you should inform PRS of the release and provide the ISRC code. You also receive a UPC code from your distributor which serves as a bar code.

Basically, if you want to get paid, you need all of these codes to release a track. While PRS is not issuing Tunecodes or ISWC codes, you cannot perform the linking process with PPL if the version of the song you are releasing needs registering or updating on the PRS database. I do not record other people’s music or the whole thing could become even more complex.

I am not aware how others are coping but, in my case, I wanted to update details on the database of the song “Jukebox in My Head” prior to its release as my next single. It now seems that, for my next release, I will have to use another track, “Through the Darkness”, which still needs a little work but has a relevant registration on the PRS database.

Who said that all of this was going to be easy.