Hi Folks, hope everyone is well!
After five years!!! away from Frost I am very excited to be involved in Clouda with the genius that is JEM G and I thought it would be nice to let you know what I've been up to.
After the Dream Theater dates my daughter was born and with that and my new job running the music performance course at Kidderminster College I decided to 'retire' from music making. (Another little girl followed in 2011)
In 2012 Rob Reed asked me to play on the 'The 27 Club' and I was so pleased with how that album turned out I have suddenly found myself back playing and again. This year I have already recorded stuff for Jem's latest as well as another album due out later this year. I'm playing and recording this week with Julie Slick from The Crimson Project and the incredible Steve Lawson.
I have another Prog project in the works too.
I have set a new website which has tons of stuff up, a facebook like page and I have recently set up a bandcamp where I'm putting up some of the more experimental stuff I have done over the years. I have put up my first solo album which contains some incredibly complex and dense music and another free EP of ambient a drum grooves.
If any of this interests you please here are the links...
Website
http://andy-edwards.com/
Facebook like page
https://www.facebook.com/andy.edwards.drummer
Bandcamp
http://andyedwards.bandcamp.com
I'm still very proud of Frost, there is no other band like it! hello to Jem, John, Nathan and my old mate Craig Blundell, I wish all the best, and all the best to everyone here.
Andy T. B. Edwards
Hi Andy, good to hear from you.
Thanks for the update will check out your site and your bandcamp.
All the best :)
I missed the very start of Frost* ( how remiss)...but in my head you've not been away... Your you-tube stuff is awesome...mentoring the future xxx
Hi Andy and welcome back to the Frost* family! 8)
It was great to hear you back behind the kit on The 27 Club and see that you'd lost none of your talent in the interim. Looking forward to getting Clouda whenever that comes out.
"tons of stuff up"...that sounds more like my kind of output! ;)
Wondreful to see/hear you back at the kit, recording even more. I was made up with Rob first let slip that you were on the throne for T27C and then to see/hear you working with Jem again...top stuff.
Looking forward to seeing and hearing all of it. Keep smiling.
PS, have you retired from little girl production now? ;)
Excellent! Good to see you around!
Yes Pedro, I don't there is any more room in my house!
Jem has sent me just 1 minute of the Clouda stuff and it sounded awesome! A massive sound, very electronic sounding but still the Jem sound.
Yes, I have quite a few things in the pipeline but don't want to spoil the surprise.
I must mention again Rob Reed who has really helped me get back in the game again. Rob is a bit of a genius I think! and I think his time has come. Kompendium was fantastic, 27 Club was one of the best Prog albums out last year, (and there was some really fantastic stuff released- MoonSafari, Steve Wilson, Hacken, Maschine etc etc).
I hope to be doing a lot more with Rob, watch this space as they say.
Please 'like' (I hate that term!) my facebook page so I can keep you up with the stuff.
The return of the prodigal eh? :D Good to hear from you, and I'll be checking out your stuff... looking forward to what you and MrG have been up to... :)
Ha, this post was a nice surprise. Great to hear from you sir, and all you're up to. Thanks alot for the update. I've just got in to Magenta myself and I keep hearing great things about Rob Red, so i'm verry excited to hear you played on his album. Look forward to hearing all the new stuff and i'll shal certainly "like" your page. :)
Nice to have you back on here Andy - we've missed ya! :)
Quote from: Andy Edwards on March 31, 2014, 08:33:34 PM
If any of this interests you please here are the links...
Good to hear from you. Excellent news.
Interested? Maybe :)
Excellent update, thank you Andy!
It's really good that you're getting back into recording a bit now. And excellent news for the UK prog scene :)
Hi everyone.
I have added a a number of new albums up on my bandcamp. I have just added an album called Zen Riot that I recorded with a drummer called Alex Thomas who has played with Badly Drawn Boy, Squarepusher etc.
I remember that Jem was a fan of this album, and when I left Alex was considered for the drum position and only didn't end up doing it because clashes with other gigs.
only recently Jem referenced this album when talking about the Clouda project. It's pretty out there but I hope you like it....
http://andyedwards.bandcamp.com/album/zen-riot
All the best to you all
TBE
Hi Andy. Just bought it and listening now. :) Out there as you say, but i'm enjoying it, and it's really interesting to read the ideas behind it and how it was recorded. Its a little gripe of mine that now a days everything is done in such a standardised and comformist way. Even in prog! Although the music is often varied and thought provoking and outsanding, recording methods are so polished and conventional and you can hear the evidence of the digital beast which has taken us all over. I certainly couldn't call Zen Riot Conventional in any sense. OO, my head just exploded. Great stuff mate. Gonna check out some of your other stuff now. :)
Thank you Tigermoth.
I really appreciate anyone buying my music, it is a real honour.
I agree whole heartedly about modern recording methods. Digital recording has been a revolution and none of the albums I have made would exist without it, but digital recording should have opened up recording methods, especially for drums.
We can record drums any place at any time. On my solo album 'The Twitch' the drums are recorded all over the place. in some cases I recorded drums for studio tracks live on stage.
In terms of production, 'Zen Riot' is an immense recording project. I think it was something like twenty mics running for about five hours. We had mics in tubes in a skip outside my studio!
The big enemies of modern drumming is replacement, quantisation and compression. These are great tools in some situations but they have become de rigeur in the studio nowadays.
But for me, the fact that the drums can thru room, mic placement and tuning have a unique sound, that the time of a real drummer bends and wavers (used to be called feel) and that the drums have a wide dynamic is what is good about them.
it's these things that we focused on when we did Zen Riot. I know Jem is exploring drum sounds a lot on the new Clouda project, it's definitely an interesting area.
I have recently recorded an album with two bass players, Steve Lawson (incredible solo looping bass player, check him out) and Julie Slick from Crimson Projekt, Adrian Belew. we recorded it live and I played an entirely electric set up through a guitar rig. the sounds were nuts.....
interesting stuff. It's really interesting to hear about different recording processes. I have two hand held olympus recorders and whilst playing some genesis stuff the other day we had two drum kits and verry limited micing options. So I just did a bass mic and snair mic for each kit, then I set one of the olympuses up between the kits to capture all the ambient sounds, then I took a line out of the desk in to the other olympus. Afterwards I mixed the two recordings together and got some verry usable results. Perhaps not the thing for an album recording, but as you say using new digital technology to record in a different way and making it easier to capture sounds in different places. All that said, on the album i'm about to put out I played all the drum sounds from my keyboard which I know in many drummers eyes is hericy! :) But then I suppose it's sort of out of the box, cos how many prog artists would contemplate not using real kit? :) Anyway, i'm off topic. Bad boy. Just listening again sir and it really is great stuff. :)
How to record with 2 mics
http://therecordingrevolution.com/2011/01/10/the-glyn-johns-drum-recording-method/
:)
Brilliant. Never heard that method before. I'm all in favour of more minimalist methods like that, especially working on a budget as I generally have to do. The daft thing is people tend to always assume that more is better, but this is so often not true. Sometimes the simplest and less faffy ways make for bigger better more natural sounds. Thanks for sharing, really enjoyed that.