30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Nine – Lights on Barkhouse

I thought I’d take a pew while I sung this one.

I re-discovered a great post last night by the great Tom Taylor:

http://scraplab.net/youve-either-shipped-or-you-havent/

which I’ve always bourne in mind when doing these videos.

I worry sometimes that the production quality isn’t as good as it should be, the guitar work isn’t slick enough, that I fluff a line or I come in off-key. And there’s an argument that maybe I should have spent a year practicing the guitar before I started doing this project, a month recording each performance so it was of a similar quality to a studio recording, a few hundred pounds on better equipment to record the performance at the maximum fidelity, several hours per video tidying it up so it looks really, really professional. And, no question, it would have been nice to have had the chance to do that.

Except I wouldn’t have done it. I would have got side-tracked. I would have found the pressure of fitting it all into an already busy life with family and work commitments too much to handle. Sometimes, you have to ship. You have to get the job done, however you do it. Something is better than nothing. You have to trust that people can see what you’re aiming for and give you credit for it. This is pop music and you get points for trying.

That isn’t to say I’m not going to work hard trying to improve how I do things, especially the performance. But I’m working on the theory that if the sound is passable, and you can hear the vocal and you can hear the guitar, that’s enough to get the idea across. Anything else is a bonus.

A quick note about the song:

I grew up in a village called Shelley about six miles south of Huddersfield, on a street called Far Bank, which was known locally as Barkhouse. Hence Lights on Barkhouse!