What can you find here - and how did it happen?
Not just three brothers. Three other things that came together to produce this project at this moment.
I had made vague starts before, but these three things together meant that it actually got under way in 2008 and I made upwards of 100 recordings in that year.
One. The microphone. I wanted to improve my singing. There's room for it. With sufficient distance in time between recording yourself and listening you can learn from what you hear, instead of just being embarrassed. I ended up buying a digital microphone with memory card. Brilliant. Even recording as mp3 there were details I wasn't used to coming through.
And another thing - I found I could use the microphone - the recording bit of it - to convert tapes to digital tracks.
Two. The tapes. I was tidying up - something that is always necessary, but doesn't always get done - and unearthed a number of old tapes. So old they were on spools. Interesting. Mostly pop songs - badly recorded
and not improved with time - my background when writing essays for my weekly supervision at Cambridge. But there were recordings from various family sessions. Those of interest I converted. Most of the stuff I just chucked.
Three. The guitar. The third thing that gave the project momentum was the Western guitar. I've always sworn that I couldn't play Western guitar. The neck is too narrow for my fat fingers. The techniques I've worked out for the Spanish guitar don't really work. The strings hurt my fingers. And so on. And then Kurt, having a guitar too many lent (or was it gave) one to me. Do I really want this, I thought. But it had a nice crisp mellow sound, so I thought, give it a go. And I haven't looked back. I've been exploring the new possibilities since - what do the old songs sound like with this behind them?
And so this got under way. And because websites are now within the reach of anybody, no matter what their means or technological prowess, I found that this was the right place to put it.