Hi Music Lovers,
Remember to pamper yourself a little this summer after all that hard work! There's lots going on with me (20 to be exact;). Mostly preparation of songs and recording.
Watch my informal Vlog (Subtitled for my students & learners of English) on YouTube (Please subscribe to my channel) or below to get the full update and insight into the songwriting process. Its been three summers and I finally get to work on music!
VIDEO:
Here's a Guitar Instrumental version of a track called 'Maybe'. I kind of grabbed a Santana sound to play with on this one. Let me know if you like it... It's helping me a lot musically to write instrumental versions of my songs.
SOUNDS:
Have a great summer! It looks like I'll be here in Barcelona most of August and then a couple of weeks in London for September.
PLJ (Peace, Love & Joy)
Zack x
PS. New website should be ready by the end of the summer and I'll be looking for gigs to play.
Here's the original Sound of Silence (Acoustic Version)
The song features Simon on acoustic guitar and both singing. It was originally recorded as an acoustic piece for their first album
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. in 1964 but on the initiative of the record company's producer,
Tom Wilson, it was later
overdubbed with drums, electric bass and electric guitar, all without the knowledge or participation of Simon & Garfunkel and rereleased as a single in September 1965.
[3][4] The single reached number one on New Year's Day 1966 and was included in the 1966 album
Sounds of Silence.
"The Sound of Silence" was originally called "The Sounds of Silence" and is titled that way on the early albums in which it appeared and on the first single release; only on later compilations was it retitled "The Sound of Silence". Both the singular and the plural appear in the lyrics. In his book Lyrics 1964–2008, Simon has the title in the singular.
Here's the same song overdubbed with Electric guitar and drums!
Paul Simon began working on the song some time after the
Kennedy assassination. He had made progress on the music but had yet to write the lyrics. On February 19, 1964, the lyrics coalesced, as Simon recalled: "The main thing about playing the guitar, though, was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight
echo chamber. I'd turn on the faucet so that water would run (I like that sound, it's very soothing to me) and I'd play. In the dark. 'Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again'."
[6]
Simon showed the new composition to
Art Garfunkel the same day, and shortly afterward, the duo began to perform it at folk clubs in New York. In the liner notes of their debut album,
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Garfunkel claims: "'The Sound of Silence' is a major work. We were looking for a song on a larger scale, but this is more than either of us expected."
[7]The duo recorded it for the first time on March 10, and included the track on
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., which was released that October.
[8] The album flopped upon its release, and the duo split up, with Simon going to England for much of 1965, partnering up with singer-songwriter
Bruce Woodley of
The Seekers. There, he often performed the song solo in folk clubs and recorded it for a second time on his solo LP,
The Paul Simon Songbook, in May 1965. In the meantime, Simon and Garfunkel's producer at
Columbia Records,
Tom Wilson, had learned that the song had begun to receive airplay on radio stations in
Boston, Massachusetts, and around
Gainesville and
Cocoa Beach, Florida.
[9]
On June 15, 1965, immediately after the recording session of
Bob Dylan's "
Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson took the original acoustically instrumented track of Simon & Garfunkel's 1964 version, and overdubbed the recording with electric guitar (played by
Al Gorgoni and Vinnie Bell), electric bass (Joe Mack), and drums (Buddy Salzman), and released it as a single without consulting Simon or Garfunkel. The lack of consultation with Simon and Garfunkel on Wilson's remix was because, although still contracted to Columbia Records at the time, the musical duo at that time was no longer a "working entity".
[3][9][10] Roy Halee was the recording engineer, who, in spirit with the success of
The Byrds and their success formula in folk rock, introduced an echo chamber effect into the song.
[3] Al Gorgoni later would reflect that this echo effect worked well on the finished recording, but would dislike the electric guitar work they superimposed onto the original acoustic piece.
[3]
For the B-side, Wilson used an unreleased track he cut with the duo a few months earlier, on which they had tried out a more "contemporary" sound. The record single "Sounds of Silence"/"We've Got a Groovey Thing Going" entered the U.S. pop charts in September 1965 and slowly began its ascent. In the first issue of
Crawdaddy! magazine, January 30, 1966,
Paul Williams, in reviewing the later album, wrote that he liked this B-side song which he found pure "rock and roll", "catchy", with a "fascinating beat and melody" and great harmony.
[11]
Simon learned that it had entered the charts minutes before he went on stage to perform at a club in
Copenhagen, and in the later fall of 1965 he returned to the U.S. By the end of 1965 and the first few weeks of 1966, the song reached number one on the U.S. charts. Simon and Garfunkel then reunited as a musical act, and included the song as the title track of their next album,
Sounds of Silence, hastily recorded in December 1965 and released in January 1966 to capitalize on their success. The song propelled them to stardom and, together with two other top-five (in the U.S.) hits in the summer of 1966, "
I Am a Rock" and "
Homeward Bound," ensured the duo's fame. In 1999,
BMI named "The Sound of Silence" as the 18th-most performed song of the 20th century.
[12] In 2004, it was ranked #156 on
Rolling Stone's list of the
500 Greatest Songs of All Time, one of the duo's three songs on the list.
Useful Expressions:
Pamper - to look after someone very well, especially by making them feel very comfortable or by giving them nice things
She had a whole evening in which to pamper herself.
Vlog - a blog that contains mainly video
Update - to add the most recent information to something such as a book, document, or list
The latest edition has been completely updated.
The database updates automatically when new information is entered.
Insight - NOUN British English pronunciation: insight /ˈɪnsaɪt/
a chance to understand something or learn more about it
insight into: a revealing insight into the mind of a violent murderer
provide/give insight: The research should provide valuable insight into the nature of this complex organization.
Grabbed - to take hold of something in a rough way
He grabbed the knife before I could get to it.
One of the men was grabbed and bundled into a car.
It looks like - It seems, it appears that
a couple - MAINLY AMERICAN a small number of things or people
There were a couple of things I wanted to discuss.
