Piano

A Spaceman Came Travelling….

15th December 2016 by Nicky Havey Leave a Comment

Ho ho ho! I have another Christmas treat for you following on from last week’s “Walking In The Air Remix”! Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback and a big thanks to Marcus Tee for putting the track in at the end of his Drum Culture mix. You can check it out here.

Another Christmas treat?

You better believe it! First though, let me flex my poetry skills and tell you how I got on to making this cover of Chris de Burgh’s “A Spaceman Came Travelling” with my friends a few years ago.

Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the flat,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a cat,

The decorations were hung on the walls with care,

FL Studio was open but the playlist was bare,

The musicians were thinking, “What song shall we make”?

“A Spaceman Came Travelling – do our own take?”

Thus this cover was born.

Back in 2013, I lived with a talented classical musician called Charlotte Rose, who is one half of a lo-fi acoustic duo called 55BPM. Lydia Pickering, who makes up the other half of the duet, studied in the same department at University as me and we’d spend many hours moaning about our PhD’s! When these two ladies combine, they make some lovely chilled out music, which you can listen to here.

Anyway, after many hours in the “recording studio” (i.e. our living room in a block of flats in Birmingham), we managed to get all of the individual elements in place and had a song structure that we were happy with for the cover. I’m sure the other residents in our block of flats LOVED hearing countless recordings of trumpets, violins and the like! Alas, it was worth it 🙂

Charlotte and Lydia combined to create the vocals, guitar, bells, trumpet and violin sections whilst I added in the FX, drums and synths.

As Christmas 2016 was fast approaching, I realised that our cover song needed some fine tuning and with a final polish from the Audio Animals, it is here for all to enjoy!

We hope that you like our take on the classic Christmas song from 1975! You can download the full track in high quality here!

Merry Christmas

Nicky & 55BPM 🙂

Time for a Drum & Bass Christmas

10th December 2016 by Nicky Havey 6 Comments

Hello everyone! I hope you’re really starting to get in to the “Christmas spirit” by now! I’m certainly hearing more of those “Christmas songs” on the radio so there’s no escape from it 😛

In fact, I was at a work’s Christmas party last week and up popped “Walking In The Air” sung by a young Aled Jones, which prompted me to write about a remix I began way back in December 2011. It had remained hidden for a long time but I decided to finish it off once and for all (the producers know this dilemma I’m sure)!

But why this one?

As a kid at Christmas time, I would be subjected to a multitude of children’s Christmas programmes and one of the most iconic of them all was “The Snowman”. This is an animated cartoon in which a young boy builds a snowman in his parents garden. When everyone else has gone to, the Snowman comes alive and takes the boy on a magical journey through the lands. You can watch the full episode here. As the magical journey happens, the famous “Walking In The Air” song begins and you join in this adventure. It’s a really moving song that stays with you.

I wanted to put my own spin on it, blending harder influences with the dirty bassline and rawer drum beat but keeping the spiritual atmosphere from the original with my own melodies. I would say that the part of the song between 3:50-4:35 is probably my personal favourite bridge in a song I’ve made.

I hope you enjoy the remix, I have to admit, I was a bit nervous when I first posted it and still am now as it is slightly controversial. Alas, I’m a Drum & Bass artist and I want to share my creations with you 🙂

You can get the free download here

Thanks for listening

Nicky

Do you want a free track? Read on.

26th October 2016 by Nicky Havey Leave a Comment

Greetings everyone! It’s about time I brought back the free download poll for you and in time for Hallowe’en as well! Normally I try and do a spooky track but instead of giving you a trick, it’s time for a treat 😛

So, what treats have I got in store for you this month? Believe it or not, I have actually put together a little secret playlist, exclusive to anyone who is reading this article. You can have a listen to tasters of all 20 tracks available for voting below:

If you haven’t been involved with these before, then this is what you need to do:

Listen to the songs in the playlist,
Select as many of the tracks you would like from the list below (they are all mastered professionally by the Audio Animals),
Click “Submit Your Choices” and,
The track with the most votes at the end of the week will be a free download (if there’s a tie, then it will be decided by a high tech “names out of the hat” approach)!

What are you waiting for?? Happy voting 🙂

Nicky

Reflections – Rounding off the Drum & Bass EP

17th September 2016 by Nicky Havey Leave a Comment

Ah, Reflections, I have finally got round to writing about you and telling the wonderful people all about your deep meaning. Join me in this blog and find out about the Reflections song and EP, some 9 months after it was released with Allowance Records. Let’s get to it!

Reflections – The Song

There are some things that just stick in your mind and I remember the reason behind the creation of this song well. Reflections came about after a conversation with a good friend of mine who goes by the name of Wordy (around December 2014). The topic moved to the big transition I was going through in my life at the time. I had decided to leave Birmingham after 9 and a half years and was in to my final month, tying up all the loose ends and such. It was in that phone call we both started going in to a deep reflective mode and looked back at all we had achieved. I do love a good reflection (that’s why I don’t look in the mirror heyooooo)!

After the phone call, I went straight to my music studio to harness this powerful emotion as I began working on the song. The deep chords emphasised the nostalgic feeling that the 9 and a half years were drawing to an end and the chirpy ‘piano’ melody representing my happiness with what I achieved at University. I worked quite hard on the second breakdown half way through the song to really get that “distant” sound as if to say, “cheerio” before bringing the main beat back one more time for that final “hurrah”!

Having said that, it’s also a future thinking track where I look back on these times (and look forward to the big travelling adventure I had already planned) to help drive inspiration for other dreams later down the line.

Reflections – The EP

Honestly, the whole EP is a bit of a mish-mash of introspective songs I made in 2015 but they all came together to tell a story!

2015 – Looking forward to the year ahead (when I wrote the track at the beginning of 2015!)

Dreaming – Thinking about the epic journey.

Black Hole – Feeling a deep sadness after coming back from travelling.

Skyway Meadows – A song for one of the highlights of the travels.

Reflections – Looking back at all that I have done and using it to fuel future inspirations.

Finally!

So there we have it, the Reflections EP, another mini-loop of my life in 2015 presented to you in 5 Drum & Bass tracks and released by the wonderful team at Allowance Records back in January 2016!

You can get the full EP by clicking here.

Thanks to all who have supported my music and got involved so far. What was your favourite track of the EP? Do you feel inspired by any of the stories from the blogs? Let me know in the comments below!

Take it easy

Nicky

Nostalgia – Meadows In The Sky Parkway

20th August 2016 by Nicky Havey Leave a Comment

Greetings everyone, I hope you’re well!

It’s been a while since I checked in to my backlog of tracks and as I am feeling nostalgic today, it seemed quite fitting to share “Skyway Meadows” with you. I could just simply say, “This is the 4th track of my Reflections EP, I hope you enjoy” but you know that’s not my style! Each song I produce generally has a story behind it but this has something special at the end 🙂

Inception

No, not the movie (although it is one my favourites) but rather how this track was born. I did a spot of travelling last year and one of the last places I visited in Canada was Meadows in the Sky Parkway. At this point in my adventure, I had been travelling through USA & Canada for nearly 50 days and I was getting that feeling of “I’m going to miss this” (as I’m sure everyone does when they are coming to the end of a holiday)! Anyway, I digress….

Pop My Mind

When I came back from this epic adventure, I received an e-mail from Pop My Mind creator Oliver Squirrel, asking me if I had created anything new recently. Pop My Mind is a creative platform where anyone can create anything in response to a theme or from other artists in the community. Click here to check out the website and get creative!

As I was feeling sad and reflective, the song was born and without any real interruption to the creative flow, I submitted a clip to the Pop My Mind website, where, to my amazement, it got featured in their first exhibition back in 2015! I also found out that the track got Oliver’s Auntie in to Drum & Bass which is pretty cool too 😀

It’s definitely a platform I will try to get more involved with (sorry Oliver for not being a frequent creator on the platform). Those who have been following me for a while will remember my 5th Highlights podcast, which featured creations from artists in the Pop My Mind community but I will return with another special in the future I’m sure 🙂

Skyway Meadows

If you have worked out how the name of the song came about, give yourself a pat on the back! I rather cleverly just swapped some words around from “Meadows in the Sky Parkway” and made a new word up in the process (Skyway?!) to end up with the track name – Skyway Meadows, which you can buy here.

Listening to it now takes me back to this wonderful place I was lucky enough to visit last year. Thanks to Jacob for being an awesome tour guide in Canada when we were out there. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday trip and I particularly enjoyed our deep conversations on the long drives between destinations.

Fate or coincidence?

As I was writing this blog, I had a flashback to something surreal that happened on the Canada trip. As we were making our way to a campsite at Wells Gray National Park, Jacob told me that another tour group were going to be joining us. Deep down, I was hoping it would be a previous tour guide, Jay Burleson (hilarious man), from a trip I did in USA the year before but the chances of that were nigh on impossible, what with the hundreds of different tour guides doing hundreds of different tours in various countries at hundreds of different dates…

Anyway, we were making our way over to the next campsite and needed to stop off in some remote supermarket in the middle of nowhere to get supplies. I was on fruit purchasing duties and as I was picking the juiciest oranges money can buy, I heard this man shout out “NICKY!!!! IS THAT YOU???”. I naturally sh*t myself. Who expects that in a supermarket?!

So I look up and I can’t believe my eyes as it’s Jay!! That unmistakable beard with one of the most epic bison hats you’ll ever see left me stunned and, with juicy oranges rolling all over the floor, the smiles rained down on both of our faces. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, it was on my birthday as well so in true Walt Disney style, my wish came true. We stayed up late in to the night, chatting and chilling around the camp fire, remaining in astonishment as we did so. I mean, that’s just incredible how that happened and I had to share the story with you!

I hope you enjoyed this blog entry, leave a comment if you have an amazing story or trip that you’d like to share in the comments below!

Take it easy

Nicky

And the winner is….. York – On The Beach (Nicky Havey feat. TigerPaw remix)

30th April 2016 by Nicky Havey 3 Comments

Whether you’re a believer in fate or not, the story behind this next free download gets more surreal the more I think about it! Pull up a chair (which you probably already have) and let me tell the tale of how this remix came to be as it’s so much more than just a case of “here’s another track for you.”

From the beginning

When I first heard “York – On The Beach” about 16 years ago, it was the CRW remix on the Ministry of Sound Ibiza Annual (2000). I was really in to trance back then and instead of doing homework, I would be listening to these anthems, which was a lovely and welcome distraction 😛 The atmosphere of the breakdown, the use of the guitar sample from “Chris Rea’s – On The Beach” and the great energy it provided meant I was hooked on this song for many years.

Drum & Bass remix?

Fast forward to about 2011 when I started experimenting with music software, York’s On The Beach was one of the first songs I wanted to have a proper go at remixing. After having a long look around the internet, YouTube and SoundCloud, I couldn’t really find a drum & bass remix of this song, all I could find were club version remixes. I plucked up the courage to contact York after searching on Facebook and via his website (in 2012) and I knew it was a long shot asking for stems and getting a response from one of the big names in trance music but if you don’t ask, the answer will always be no, right?

Contact!

To my amazement, I promptly heard back from him. He said he would try and dig out the stems but he made the original a long time ago and many computers had been used since then (with all the pc upgrades), so whatever he had left, he sent over. Of course, I was beaming with delight at this point and, using a combination of cutting samples from the CRW remix, the stems York sent and my own style, I had made something that I was pretty happy with but felt that the sound quality wasn’t right. At this point in my music production “career”, I didn’t even know what mastering was and I was using in-ear headphones to actually get the balance of sounds right… laughable now really!

Something’s Missing

Events outside of music (i.e. my PhD, yes THAT again) and inside the music scene dictated play for the next 18 months (up to the end of 2013). I was part of AirPlus Recordings and at the time, I wanted to see if I could get the remix released with this label. How naive! Unless you get permission (in writing) from the original artist, you can’t release a remix – copyright infringement anyone?

However, a new song evolved from it all. I was speaking with TigerPaw, the owner of AirPlus, and he said that he would make a guitar melody himself that we can use to put in the song, take out the “On The Beach” samples and I can slap in some female vocals from a royalty free sample pack. The remix had now transformed in to a collaboration, which we called “Something’s Missing” and it got released as part of my first ever LP – AirLove.

Rewind the clock

I later decided to leave AirPlus as it wasn’t right for me at the time to release music, though I am still good friends with TigerPaw. All of my tracks from the AirLove LP were uprooted and I decided to go back to that “Something’s Missing” track. It didn’t feel right as the foundations of the song were for the “York – On The Beach” remix. The core of the song was still there but now I had an amazing guitar riff from TigerPaw to play with. I asked if he’d be happy for me to use this still, I apologised to York for taking FOREVER to get back in contact and I started to work on it again.

Mastered

Around the middle of 2014, I started getting my tracks professionally finished off by the Audio Animals and I could see the huge benefits of doing that. It wasn’t until September 2015 that I felt I had got the remix to a suitable point and TigerPaw was happy with it also. I sent it off for mastering and when it came back, I forwarded it on to York just before the new year. I thanked him for his patience seeing as it had been close to 4 years since I actually first contacted him about doing the remix! He downloaded the song and that was the end of it…. or so I thought!

Fate?

Earlier this month (April 2016) I wanted to start something new on my website. I used to give my music away for free up until getting signed to Allowance Records (March 2015). However, as I am releasing my original tracks now, I thought I would look back at all the remixes I have made so far and give the power to the people to vote for which one they would like FOR FREE. The first poll has recently just come to an end (earlier today) and I want to thank all of those who took the time to go through the list and make your votes count!

Last night, the “York – On The Beach” remix was in the lead by one vote and it held out for the victory – see the poll results below. What I wasn’t expecting though was for York to actually post the remix up on his Facebook and SoundCloud page last night! I had no idea that was coming and I certainly didn’t get much sleep due to my excitement! He either knew the poll was running and the remix was leading (which is highly unlikely, let’s face it, I’m no mega star here and it was just a fun poll that I didn’t tell him about) or there’s some amazing things that happen independently and align themselves for a brief moment!

Poll results April 2016 — Winner of April 2016 Poll: York – On The Beach (Nicky Havey remix)

Click here to go to my SoundCloud page and get your free download!

Thanks to everyone who got involved, I hope you enjoyed the story and the remix too!

Same again next month 🙂

Nicky

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