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- A good pal of mine while living in London was music producer and recording engineer- Tony Chapman. Tony and his partner Paul owned a recording studio called Enigma Group Services in the Eastend of London and when he switched from analogue to digital sound reproduction, he sold me two 19 inch rack-mountable effects consoles. One; a Korg SRV 2000 (sampling reverb) and the other a Roland SDD 2000 (sampling/sequencing delay - but soooo much more). I'm convinced my technique improved each time I used them because of the challenge of maintaining time to digital presets.
For a few months they sat in the room in my partner Sue's Mum's house, where I would occasionally plug them in and play the guitar through them into a Gorilla 50 watt amplifier with the inbuilt distortion cranked to max. Eventually I decided they'd be safer and indeed more functional if they were stored round at Andy's. So, they became a semi-permanent installation at his folk's house on King's Road, Upton Park. On my days off work from the railway I'd call by with my electric guitar, effects pedals and picks for a damn good jam and musical thrashing.
I'd been messing around with the open D chord structure, hammering on C's, B#'s and E's but try as I might, I couldn't think of a chord to switch to and every one I tried didn't have the wallop I was looking for. Andy asked me what I was playing and I showed him. From that simple sequence, Andy built the entire piece of music. Click here or the ^ title up above to listen to Famous Blue Raincoat - Journey's End / The Only Waltz.