Thursday, December 16, 2010

The SOAR VAULT

Some of you would have heard me refer to The SOAR VAULT (TSV) during some of our shows and i'm here to tell you some more about it.
TSV is where all the songs and parts of songs that weren't completed when they were begun, live. Experiment looks after TSV as he gathers together most of the song output of the three of us, dates them, collates them and then knows how to find them when we need them. That's the clever bit.
SOAR go and pluck something from the vault every now and then - because we have a lot of affection for stuff in the vault, even some guilt for the maybe-good-songs that we have neglected. Two good examples of how useful TSV is are our songs, IN THE WINTER and KANSAS SKIES.
I always had a soft spot for IN THE WINTER and it irked me that it was in the vault still. So sometime last i took it out of the vault and tried again. I started out with just the chord and lyric sheet and to my horror i had forgotten how the chorus went. OH MAN - bad moment. Oh yeah, we do have mp3s of everything so the problem wasn't terminal or anything. But what i did instead of going off and finding the mp3 was to just grab the guitar and start to sing it - surely the chorus would come to me :) But, it didn't! But a new one did! WHEEEEEEE. And so, the IN THE WINTER we sing now is out of the vault and into our shows. The guilt is gone and another song lives.
Experiment's song KANSAS SKIES is another example. Around the same time he sent me this song, that i'd never heard, saying he thought it had the makings of a good song but it wasn't finished because he hadn't been able to write a chorus for it. HEY PRESTO. We write a chorus and another song is saved from the vault, and it is now one of the songs i most like to sing.
I don't even remember half of my stuff in TSV let alone what must be in it written by Charles and Ex. Two weeks ago i was merrily listening into Charles as he finished our show at the ground venue of The Colour Factory when out of the vault popped a new song written by Charles and Experiment. I hadn't heard it before. It was complete and i think it has many interesting and lovely melodic things happening in it that i cant wait for it to be finished and become a regular song in our shows. It was called LIVING IN A WORLD. I'll link a rough mp3 version of it to the heading of this post if you are curious to see if you hear what i think i hear in this song.
OK just a few more things. How many songs or parts songs are there in the vault? I don't know. Maybe EX will add a comment to this post when he reads it but my guess would be maybe 50 almost complete songs, and 200-300 bits of songs. And this is before we even start to count EX's instrumental catalogue! I wait to see how far out i am.
And where did they all come from? Well as i said earlier Experiment collected them as they were written and recorded. There have been periods when we wrote lots of songs and then a bunch of years when we hardly wrote any. There is a bunch of stuff from the times when Charles and Ex were quite prolific and worked together on songs and an assortment from each of three periods when i wrote lots of stuff.
We love TSV and we are almost as happy to find songs from it to bring into our shows as we are to write new ones, and we kinda like the mix.
Thanks for reading.
Hugza 
Bright

3 comments:

  1. We as fans are just as happy you bring the old and new to your shows! It is a wonderful mix.

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  2. it's a constant joy to hear all of the songs you so sweetly bring into our lives bright old are still new to someone a perfect combination that makes for fantastic entertainment

    Hugs
    Caress

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  3. As The "Keeper of The Vault" let me share some memories, facts and figures with you all.
    I am a music gatherer..always have been and when it comes to my own music doubley so. Of the three of us it seems I am the only one capable of collecting, storing and more importantly remembering and retrieving our archives! I have a memory for music so it is very natural for me to collect it all. Basically as Bright touched upon "TSV" contains any ideas we have recorded from a song's inception to the finished product. These can be from 30 secs in length up to 10 minutes. Some can sound extremely professional while others are "rough" at best and especially ones from many years ago when cassette was the state of the art, things can sound rather ordinary.
    Currenty "TSV" contains approx 310 Soar bits of music. There are also around 100 bits of music from just Charles and Me (from before and after we joined up with Bright). Approx 80 pre Soar Bright Bits & then there's about 550 of Experiment's "Experiments" either songs or Instrumentals, yes 550!. Remember only about 120 of all of these "bits" have ever been heard in SL!!! This year alone "TSV" has collected a further 140 bits!
    So will there be more music from "Soar".. you bet your bottom dollar there will be.. both brand new and from "TSV".. I know of at least 6 or 7 "Classics" that I will be talking Bright into re-recording next year for your listening pleasure. So folks the Soar Journey has just begun!
    Experiment (Keeper of TSV)

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