< Originally posted to my music blog - 11/02/08 >

Hey folks, another one of my solo tracks this time and again it’s something a little different. The track is called Take Me Home, it’s quite an old tune really. I wrote it back in my music college days about 10 years ago. This version was recorded a year or two ago in France.

It started off with the little piano intro and kind of grew from there. They used to have a lovely old Steinway piano in the college I attended and I would often sneak into the concert hall to play on it like a naughty school kid. A piano is something I’ve always wanted to own and I hope that one day I’ll get to have one in my house. For now I’ll have to make do with electronic ones.

We did have a piano in our house at one time when I was younger. It was an old upright that my dad got from a family friend who did household removals. I’ll never forget the immortal sight of watching my dad cutting the banister off the stairs so we could get the piano into the house. He stuck it back on later but it was pretty funny, like something from one of those old silent movies, a gang of blokes trying push this piano up some stairs As for the piano itself, sadly what we didn’t realise was it hadn’t been tunes for about 80 years and it was pretty much knackered. We got an expert out to tune it but he said the tuning pegs had corroded and it couldn’t be done. We got it a bit more in tune but it was never quite right, somehow I think it added to the charm of the thing… even if you needed ear plugs to listen to it.

My dad always says it was the most expensive free piano ever

Anyway, back to the song. It was originally meant for just piano and vocal but when I recorded this I couldn’t find a decent piano sound I liked on any of my synths. I decided to use an electric piano instead, it’s a Fender Rhodes type tone. I programmed an electronic beat to give the tune a little momentum and I even used a heartbeat sample as part of the rhythm so listen out for that. Finally I added some other classic 80’s sounding synth pads, a bit of acoustic guitar and it was done.

It’s a little different sound to normal for me, very electronic but I like it and I think it works pretty well. Let me know what you think.

Hope you like it

Dan