I have a new album with the CD replicators at the present, should be ready in about two weeks time.
I’ve tried to make it a celebration of music from my home town of Omagh and have had great support from Ryan O’Donnell on bouzouki and Arty McGlynn on guitar as well as the special guest appearance of Seamus O’Kane on bodhran. The album was recorded in Omagh too.
Murrough O’Kane has again done a great job with the art work and the website. Samples can be listened to at http://www.flutemcglinchey.com
If you wish to pre-order, please go ahead and I will get the CD out to you as soon as I have copies in my hands.
Thanks very much for your kind words. It really is a great album, so you must be very pleased with it.
I have added to your website [http://www.flutemcglinchey.com] the Special Offer, where if someone wishes to buy both your albums; “The Boys of the Town” + “Unearthed”, they only have to pay the Postage and Packaging for one album, to save them a couple of bob.
I hope the short MP3 samples I have cut up with the fade in and fade outs gives people visiting your website a fair reflection of how great this album, and indeed both albums actually are.
Please excuse my ignorance, I have never gotten into the download thing!
I had planned to make it availiable through the http://www.irishtradtunes.com site. Would that be OK or should I make plans to make it available through itunes too?
I think CD baby sorted out digital distribution for me the last time.
I’m fairly new to the download side of things myself, but it has become the most common way for me to buy music now. Because I have ipods and an iphone, I have to say iTunes is the method of choice for me; I’m sure I can figure out the irishtradtunes site…hadn’t been there before…but I’m confortable with the iTunes process, and that is where I tend to look first.
I went and listened to all the sample clips on Paul’s website. The playing is clearly superb, but, bar I think one clip, they all sounded like they’d been recorded down a well or in an aircraft hanger - huge, echoey, very obtrusive reverb effect. It wasn’t a fault of my playback gear. I don’t know if it was from a natural acoustic in which the recording was done or whether it is a studio applied sound-effect, but it is clearly deliberate and pervasive. I’m afraid that on the strength of those samples I won’t be ordering an album I initially thought I would because the chosen sound effect would drive me potty very quickly.
Sorry, Paul. My loss in most respects, I know, and of course these things are a matter of personal taste, but why, oh why not a natural (or at least more nearly so) sound?
Jem thats a terrible statement, you must have some fault on your end. I’ve listened to the samples through 3 different pieces of apparatus and even plugged my trusty headphones and I find the sound faultless and natural, definitely NOT echoey or pervasive.
I don’t think it is a terrible thing to say. It is how I hear it and my opinion/taste is such that it makes the indubitably excellent playing unlistenable for me in more than small tranches. There’s nothing “wrong” with my playback gear - just fairly basic computer speakers and an ordinary sound card, which cope just fine (at a non-techy, non-super hi-fi level) with all sorts of other recordings in various formats and genres of music. I’ve just listened back to all the new album track samples again, and all bar track 7 (in the short samples published) are as I described, and not in a something-wrong-with-the engineering/playback way - I think I hear what I’m supposed to be hearing.
Clips of other fluters - from YouTube, MP3s stored on my computer, etc. - all sound “normal” right now, this-evening - so no aberration of my gear. I also had a listen to some of Paul’s website samples from his older album, and they generally seem to be somewhat less reverb-y, but not by much. Clearly this is his taste in his recorded sound. Fair enough. Many like it that way; I can’t bear it. The occasional track for a special effect, well, maybe OK, but not the whole bally lot.
If he has done his recording in a boomy acoustic space like a large and totally undamped-by-furnishings church, that would be one thing (and one likely to give his sound engineer the eebie-jeebies), but it seems to me (I’m not any kind of recording engineer) that the instruments are pretty closely miked, so one would not expect so much natural reverb to get as prominently recorded as is the case here even in such an acoustic environment. I think it is a desk-engineered effect. I like and respect what I’ve heard of his playing and wish I could hear these albums without the mega-reverb/presence effect.
I’m not trashing anyone or being super-critical or destructive, nor trying to put anyone off - nor do I expect/flatter myself anyone much will be put off by what I have had to say. I am giving Paul some appropriately expressed critical feedback, and it may possibly engender an explanation from him here - which e.g. a written review in a magazine would not. When one has a legitimate critical observation to make and/or a rational opinion to express, one does not do the artist any favours by failing to express it by way of some misguided attempt to give them (uncritical) support.
Definitely lots of reverb on the slow air; probably a bit more than most on other tracks, too. Not to everyone’s taste, but so what? Was the style okay with everyone? How 'bout the settings, or tune choices? Probably not.
Just because we can post criticisms here, doesn’t mean we must.
