The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
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Kim's Music CarmineAn album by Kim o' the Concrete Jungle. Track List:
1. I Can See It In Your Eyes 
This one came out of my attempt at the Fifty Songs In Ninety Days challenge in 2012. I actually didn't make the fifty song target this year. I'm not too bothered, though, because for this album I was aiming for quality rather than quantity. That's the real challenge for me now, because I've finished the whole fifty songs in previous years. Now that I'm used to recording with Zynewave Podium I wanted to stretch myself, and do something that was: 1) full of VST instruments; 2) eclectic, like a Beatles album; and 3) completely mad. I think I partially succeeded. Birdy Likes a Blue certainly has some mad lyrics, deliberately defying interpretation. The Ghost of Spring features the Sound Bytes Hurdy Gurdy instrument. It's certainly eclectic, with everything from the late night jazz of Satiated Jills to folk, to seven minute long epics, to balls-out rock. Death Of Strangulated Goose introduces my new, real-life saxophone -- I'll certainly be stretching myself learning to play it. This album also features my new Epiphone EB-3 bass on quite a few of the tracks. I also wanted Carmine to be the best sounding album I've ever done, and I spent quite a bit of time mixing the tracks. I'm happy if I can make each new album better than the previous one, and I think I've succeeded in going one better than Monument and Scream Fish. In the meantime, Allans Music in Australia got into a bit of trouble and changed hands. I bought sooo much stuff in liquidation sale it's scary. So my next album after this should be substantially better, now I've got a bunch of new gear. You can download Carmine from my Bandcamp page. The advantage of bandcamp is that you can download mp3s, or you can get high-quality .wav or .flac files. Scream FishAn album by Kim o' the Concrete Jungle. Track List:
1. Study In Red 
This is an album full of songs I wrote a very long time ago. Now that I'm a bit older, a bit wiser, and have better equipment, I've updated and re-recorded them all. There are a few notable tracks on here. The Birth of Liquid Desires is the first track I ever uploaded on the internet, so if you've heard my stuff elsewhere, you might be familiar with my original version. If you compare them side by side, you'll see just how far I've progressed in the art of recording over the past decade. My voice has changed over that time too. Blood On A Portrait Of James Gleeson is notable, because it's a song you will never hear me play live. That's not because I don't like it, but because I cannot physically play the guitar part all the way through. To try it is to cripple myself. On this recording (as on the original demo), I've constructed it one phrase at a time, with plenty of rest in between. If you listen to it, you'll understand. James Gleeson is an Australian expressionist artist who painted some rather disturbing images in his day - hence the theme of the song. The original Scream Fish album, which I still have on a cassette tape, was rather shorter than this present version (because back in those days, you could get away with an album that only had ten tracks). I've combined it with the unfinished project I was doing at the time my Tascam Portastudio died an ignominious death. That album would have been called The Dream, and most of the song titles would have been inspired by Salvador Dali. Tracks 7 through 10 all come from this doomed project. When I Was A Grasshopper Child was a genuine lost track until I recreated it here. That leaves Severed Head as the odd man out. I included it here because its dark subject matter matches the tone of this album. But it's older than the other songs by a good few years. In fact, I wrote it when I was seventeen. But unlike Grasshopper Child, I didn't have to reconstruct it from memory because I still have the original demo. Basically, I've demoed every song I've ever written. The only reason I don't have a demo of the very first song I wrote at the age of seven is because I found it embarrassing as a teenager and wiped the tape. Everything else, apart from a few accidents and lost tapes, I kept. You can download Scream Fish from my Bandcamp page. For now (and while-ever setting up a paypal account is not worth the hassle) it's free to listen to. Kim's Drum SamplesI've made a set of one-shot drum samples of a Pearl MSX kit available here, so all you home-recordists can download them and use them. They're 24 bit samples in the .wav format. They're optimized for the Softdrum LTD VST sampler, because that's what I'm using at home. It's a nice simple drum sampler that gives you twelve slots and lets you use up to four velocity layers, so it's well worth checking out. Now, these drums samples were recorded quickly. I was at the rehearsal studio doing band practice, and the other guys decided to leave early. Since we'd already hired the room and the kit, I decided to make good use of the left-over time. So I set up my portable recorder on a stand about a meter off the front of the kit and sampled one piece at a time. Easy! But such a primitive setup did cause a few problems. For one thing, the snares sounded a bit dull. I fixed that with some EQ. Also, without a dedicated mic, the kick drum came out sounding a bit woolly, and tended to get lost in a mix. I fixed that by mixing it with an electronically generated sub-bass sound, to bring out the bottom end. Both improvements are included in the download package. But the kit as a whole is still at bit strong in the lower midrange. For best results you might want to notch out ~300Hz. So why would you want to use my whack-ass drum kit? Well, let's compare it to the commercial kits shall we? Commercial drum kit sample libraries are meticulously recorded. They use the very best available drums and set them up well. They generally record in top-notch drum rooms, and use tens of thousands of dollars worth of microphones. The results are hi-fi, pristine, and perfect in every way... too much so. Put them in your home recordings, and they'll stick out like a sore thumb. They're never going to sound like they belong in the same recording as the guitars and vocals you recorded yourself in your basement at home, with your cheap Chinese microphones. Not so with my drum samples, recorded with a single microphone that's picking up a lot of the room. And the kit is a cheap hire kit about as doggy and badly set-up as you can get. In other words, it's exactly the sort of kit you'd expect to hear in a home recording. It sounds real. It's much more convincing than a pristine, perfect kit. But in spite of the single mic, and the roominess, and the beat up old kit, it's actually not a bad recording at all. The digital field-recorders you get these days make ridiculous good, high fidelity recordings. And by coincidence, the place where I did this just happens to be one of the best drum rooms in Sydney (and no, I'm not going to tell you where it is). So, if you can wrap your head around the idea, these just happen to be exceptionally good recordings... of a dodgy kit with a single microphone. You're getting the best of both worlds. Oh, and a little postscript. If you wonder why I'm giving this sample pack away instead of keeping it to myself, it's because I don't use these anymore (well, except for some of the cymbals). I went back and had a second go at recording the same kit in the same room, only this time, avoiding the flaws in my first attempt and getting many more samples. So don't go thinking I'm being overly generous here -- I'm still holding out on you. :-) Kim o' the Concrete Jungle - MonumentAn album by Kim o' the Concrete Jungle. Track List:
1. The Caveman Likes To Rock
I was quite pleased with the way this album turned out, so I decided put it out there. You can download Monument from my bandcamp page. The Music PageThis is the page where I'm going to post all my music. I write so much music that I have created several virtual bands to contain it all. These are Kim o' the Concrete Jungle, The Mortal Taint, The Mojo Liberation Front, and Creighton Keane. Each band has its own style. |
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