Vince Dean

The Baroque Blues Band

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In 1965 my uncle George bought me a copy of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul’ – I still love that album
In 2022 I said to Bunty ‘I want to make an album as good as Rubber Soul before they nail down the lid’. His reply was positive. If the writing is good enough, such a task could be possible; as long as I stopped singing and recruited people who couldThrough good fortune, Lincolnshire residents, albeit Chicago born Arthur and Minneapolis born Delmore, have radio-ready voices, as well as being multi-instrumentalists. Lola Hart, from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, also a musician/singer with a radio-ready voice and, even more than this, someone who can write a killer song in her sleep. Additional to our group, entered Northampton’s folk hero Andrew Wintersgill. Andrew and I have been writing and playing together since the early 70’s and eventually all five of us bought into ‘Project Rubber Soul’Previously, my seemingly endless recordings over the years, even the ones working with Bunty, have produced interesting but unprofessional sounding work. Quite often cringing amateurism, full of mistakes, poorly played, sung, mixed and mastered. Tapes and CD’s that nobody plays after a cursory skipping listen – CD’s that sit in a drawer for a while, until usefully employed, suspended in the garden as bird scarers or, more likely, binned. Certainly not records that one might play in the background at a dinner party or when friends visited for beers and suchlikeThe objective of making a ‘Rubber Soul’ whilst refusing to settle for anything less, required numerous re-takes and stringent discipline
The discipline of getting the timing right for all of the band, always. Everybody playing and singing in tune, always. Everything in audio balance, alwaysA major contributor to this discipline is the technology - the Apple Macintosh ‘Logic Pro’ which is a joy to work with, supported by the latest Ai tools that enhance musician performance - correcting, augmenting, embellishing - often for free over the Internet and finally, the availability of Ai mixing and mastering, to make a final product that sounds like it was recorded at Abby Road and could have been produced by George MartinAlmost four years later, ‘Drop Down Blues’ falls ready for releaseSo, is it as good as ‘Rubber Soul’?This is difficult to assess - being as good as ‘Rubber Soul’ is subjective and based on individual preference. Logical reasoning might suggest that being as good as ‘Rubber Soul’ can never be a meaningful measurement, on any level of appraisalI think it is though. Says Vincent, marking his own homework
VHD

The Baroque Blues Band - The Return Of The Electric Guitar

The Baroque Blues Band - Art Of Fugue

The Baroque Blues Band

Vince Dean

My Grandmother bought me a used guitar, complete with case, a copy of "Play in a Day" and all from a Sunderland second-hand shop - it was 1959.Initially obsessed with The Shadows, I ended up hooked on what we used to call 'Rhythm & Blues' - the music of John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Lightnin' Hopkins, heading backwards towards Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake and the like.An obsession with the music of Bach was dominated by a comprehensive inability to play any of his music properly. This unselective passion for Bach's music shows no sign of deterioration. Quite the reverse in fact, but as so many of us musical aspirants have, I was forced to leave the main-line, taking a less significant, although more heavily populated, branch-line towards the smaller villages of Folk and Blues.Thus it was folk-blues that reeled me in during my mid-teens. The British guitarist Davy Graham stood out for me, his music augmented by folk-influenced originals like Nic Jones and The Incredible String Band. Mostly acoustic music and mostly played finger-style.Although no stranger to the Telecaster and ES330, acoustic music dominates, as I reach for the J45 nine times out of ten.I am not a good guitar player, lacking consistency, making mistakes, wayward timing, possessing of a flat, tuneless voice that can't be improved upon, even by the wonders of today's musical technology. Apart from performing solo in folk-clubs, I shan't sing or make solo records from now on, with The Baroque Blues Band becoming the vehicle for the songs.Writing is what I do. My indulgent and isolationist lyrical activity, augmented by composing small music to frame the words. Sometimes a modicum of orchestration, often baroque in the sense of ornate but quite limited, as folk-blues music tends to rely on three chords, or does mostly.I started recording music in1965 on a second-hand mono Fidelity reel-to-reel tape recorder, which played at a speed of three and three-quarter inches per second - the domestic standard. This had me lending 'albums' I'd made to friends, for their appraisal. They may have found this more tiresome than rewarding, one reflects.Eventually the purchase of an Akai 4000DS Mk II in my mid 20's allowed for 'sound-on-sound' recording. A stereo machine or a multitrack machine in mono, meaning you could play a guitar on a track and then listen to the track on headphones whilst recording the bass on another track, and your vocal on another. Actually, it was the same track, with each overdubbed track diminishing the higher frequencies as it all got a bit muffled the more tracks you added. Great fun though, and with an Akai 4000 you could make reasonable quality cassette copies from your 7.5 inches per second reel 'master'. So friends and colleagues could suffer the indignity of having to make sometimes polite and probably disingenuous endorsements of one's musical ramblings.As affordable technology developed, 4-track cassette recorders came in and then gave way to digital 8-track machines. This machine-based technology evolved into the Apple Macintosh computer-based GarageBand and its big brother for the professional (!) - LOGIC Pro, and how marvellous it has been for us writers and musicians.Despite these advances in technology, everything I produced sounded amateurish. The first Baroque Blues album is probably the only exception but even that CD is plagued with various technical shortcomings and reverberation issues.Although this amateurish stigmata has plagued previous recordings, I am pleased to report that The Baroque Blues Band's new album 'Drop Down Blues' is, for the first time, wholly untypical. Twelve predominantly folk-blues songs recorded in Logic Pro, containing no obvious mistakes, the songs are in tune, are in time and the whole album is well balanced, having been mixed and mastered by an outside professional facility. An album that sounds radio-ready, because, after all these many years, it is...Vince Dean
Stamford
2026