I said on here recently that we’ve been getting down some ideas for new material, and perhaps this is a good opportunity to explain how we work.

The writing process for our next album is already differing hugely from everything we’ve done before. Our first two were composed on guitar, and by the time Dan got round to demoing the songs, he already had a pretty good idea of how the final piece would sound. This time, though, we’re aiming for an all-round more collaborative effort, and all we started with was a small collection of riffs. Here’s three of them from an as-yet untitled song:

(If there’s a big gap or unintelligible code above, try here instead.) So, what hi-tech piece of equipment were these fragments recorded on? I’m almost embarrassed to say, but… Music 2000 on the PlayStation.

One.

The PSX.

Yes, with all the powers of modern laptops being able to run a full studio, Dan’s preferred method of making sure he doesn’t forget riffs he comes up with is Music 2000 on the original Sony PlayStation. Still, whatever works for him. (It’s a pity he didn’t use a Sega Mega Drive, because then the headline of this article would have been a lot cleverer.)

Anyway, once I heard the riffs, I figured out the notes on a keyboard and played them onto a MIDI track in Cubase:

From here it’s easy to copy, paste and otherwise alter the individual bits, fiddling around until we’ve strung them together to form some sort of structure. To help, we programmed in a simple repeating drumbeat:

At this stage, verses and choruses are beginning to take shape. There’s a vaguely Eastern flavour to the sound, so we decided to play on this a bit when figuring out the best chords to suit what we have. We also gave the tempo and key careful consideration.

Here’s a full mix of the song as it stands – although when we say “full”, we accept that there’s currently no guitars, bass, vocals or percussion, and it’s only a minute long… This is just us sorting out the basics using only MIDI instruments:

And that’s a very early snapshot of a Home Guard song in the making. As you can hear, the main riffs are now on piano; ultimately, they may be the vocal melody, or return to synths, or become guitar or bass lines… Who knows? In fact, nothing at this point is considered “final”, but hopefully this post has been an interesting insight into how we work.

Theoretically it shouldn’t have worked, but it did: we’ve managed to snag one of those new-fangled usernames for our Facebook page. So from now on, you only need to remember www.facebook.com/thehomeguard, rather than the horrific old http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Home-Guard/33098994258 (which still works, incidentally). I’m sure you’ll agree that this is rather more convenient!

In truth, we’ve never really exploited Facebook to it’s full potential, partly because it’s not really aimed at musicians. But if you head to the above link, you can:

1) Click on “Become a fan” at the top to register your support for us,

2) Listen to our music and/or sign up to our mailing list under the “My Band” tab (this is a ReverbNation thing),

3) Listen to our music, dedicate tracks and “Click to iLike” us (if you use that app) under the Music tab, and

4) Click on “Suggest to friends” (just to the left of our Wall) to help us find new fans.

The theory is that if you recommend our music to your friends, they’ll recommend it to their friends, who will recommend it to their friends… and the cycle self-perpetuates until world domination is within our sights! (Or we sell a few CDs. Either suits us.) Many thanks to all who help to spread our music far and wide!

Incidentally, I have a “personal” Facebook profile which I use for band-related stuff under the name of Homeguard Chris. If you really want to stay up-to-date with news of The Home Guard and/or contact the band directly, feel free to add me. I don’t use it extensively, but that’s what it’s there for – don’t be shy!

Every now and then a fan comes along and goes above and beyond the call of duty for no reason other than to help us. Some create a page or group in our honour, or make a video, review us on their blog, play us on their podcast, generally spread the word… Today’s top award goes to Rate Your Music user Sloonei for adding a shedload of detail – including album running lists, track times and artwork – to our entry:

http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/the_home_guard

Let’s hope the profile info gets the five votes it needs to be approved. Many thanks, Zach!

Things have been a bit slow here at Home Guard Headquarters recently, and to illustrate the point, here’s some good news reported a full six weeks late: our good friend Rodrigo de Sá seems to have taken a liking to our album opener Year Zero – so much so that he played it on his show! Right-click and “Save Target As…” to download episode 77 directly:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/cowboycantor/077.mp3

Those of you who have been taking notes will remember that Rodrigo produces the only podcast based in the Azores Islands. It’s still somewhat surreal to hear our own music being spoken about in Portuguese! You can keep up to date with the Cowboy Cantor programme at its official blog:

http://cbcantor.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, double-combo-bonus points to Rodrigo for recommending the same song to the Association of Music Podcasting. Guess what? Guest presenter Kimmi was impressed enough to give it yet another airing! Here’s the direct link to show 214 of AMPed:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/amped/AMPed214.mp3

Many thanks as usual to all involved! Once things are back to whatever passes for normal in the world of The Home Guard, we look forward to resuming more regular updates – but do rest assured that we are spending some of our spare time fiddling about with new material. Oh, and see those HMV links in the previous post? Broken already due to their site relaunch, so disregard for now. Ho-hum.

You’d think that we’d have something profound to offer in our first post of the new decade, but I’m afraid not. Instead, just a simple announcement that The Home Guard can now be found on HMV:

http://hmv.com/hmvweb/digitalProductDetails.do?ctx=70000500;8;-1;-1;-1&productId=11621917

http://hmv.com/hmvweb/digitalProductDetails.do?ctx=70000500;8;-1;-1;-1&productId=11623179

They seem to have overruled the artists and decided on their own album running order, but, y’know, whatever… We thank you in advance for your five-star ratings!

eMusic is one of the biggest sellers of mp3s not associated with major labels, not to mention a great excuse to start a sentence without a capital letter. Anyway, they’ve added (oh, you know by now…):

http://www.emusic.com/album/The-Home-Guard-Forlorn-Hope-and-Glory-MP3-Download/11741544.html

So if you’re a member, Forlorn Hope and Glory can be yours for only ten credits. And even if you’ve already got it, a five-star rating or a brief review of the album would go an exceedingly long way indeed – nothing beats a genuine recommendation in our experience.

Twitter is one of those ships we haven’t yet climbed on board, but that doesn’t stop others from using it to promote our music:

http://twitter.com/LindaOfficial/status/6514234332

http://twitter.com/LindaOfficial/status/6513614634

Short and to the point, like all good publicity should be – and being described as the best anything since Queen is just about the highest praise anyone can give us from my personal point of view! (I’m a huge fan.)

Many thanks, Linda!

Forlorn Hope and Glory is now available to users of Lala:

http://www.lala.com/#album/2810527644410722290/The_Home_Guard/Forlorn_Hope_and_Glory

who we believe have just teamed up with Google to make music playable from search pages. Can anyone in the US confirm this? The deal doesn’t seem to stretch as far as the UK.

Meanwhile, our latest album has also been added to Rhapsody:

http://www.rhapsody.com/the-home-guard/forlorn-hope-and-glory

Quite why Year Zero has a greyed-out play button will be investigated.

This is all a major turnaround: barely a week after being told by CD Baby that their new system had “brought things to a standstill” and that many companies “ask that we wait until they are ready for us to send more albums to them”, they’re managing to do what should have been done three months ago. I think it’s clear that somebody behind the scenes flamingoed up (one for all you Red Dwarf devotees), but they didn’t want to admit it for some reason.

Oh well, we look forward to being added to more online distributors in the near future.

Gracious appreciation to our good friend Mike, who saw fit to embed our song Sweating Blood on his MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/493427991

On a related note, we musicians have different features available to us, but it appears that MySpace Music has just hit the UK’s personal profiles. With this in mind, Mike has set up a playlist of our songs, and we presume that these can be shared between friends. If anyone else wants to do the same, or perhaps include us in a compilation of your favourite unsigned artists, we’d be exceptionally grateful.

Just a very quick update to let you all know that we’ve overhauled our MySpace page and at last got round to uploading some of our new tracks:

http://www.myspace.com/thehomeguardinfo

At the same time, our admittedly underused iLike page has also finally been graced with Forlorn Hope and Glory’s presence:

http://www.ilike.com/artist/The+Home+Guard

Which in turn means that you can get dedicating new songs on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Home-Guard/33098994258?v=app_5368451543

Above all else, though, we’d like to stress that from now on the one page we’re really keen to publicise is the new Bandcamp one:

http://thehomeguard.bandcamp.com

From here all are welcome to download our music for whatever price they’re willing to pay. And if you don’t want to pay, you can have it anyway – just please download it, and encourage your friends to do the same!