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TRIBE PENDRAGON..... WEB-BAND

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2007-11-05
By: pendragon
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THE STORY OF TRIBE PENDRAGON SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM FOR MUSIC LINK Well it all started just over a year ago. An idea that took a little while to grow, but somewhat like a bushfire, which starts from a single spark, it fanned itself into a mighty and all consuming being. “In a Heartbeat”, even the name of the project proclaimed it’s self and became inescapable. My first experience with a ‘music site’ was Soundclick.com, where I discovered the fantastic ability to record a track in my studio, upload it to the site and within a few hours see that people on the other side of the world were listening to my song! One of my favourites, because of the exchange of reviews on songs between members, became a site called Mixposure. Before long I had become an ‘old hand’ at the OMD game and was active everyday on the ‘forums’ exchanging ideas and reviews with a multitude of diverse musicians. Some of these folk were absolutely brilliant, playing music that was of an astounding quality .The most incredible fact to me was, they were all unsigned independent musicians! I suddenly realised that I was NOT alone. The first moment that I started to realise what we had on our hands with “In a Heartbeat”, was after completing the song “Calling the Spirit” as an “over the internet workshop” project on the Mixposure site. About 20 members of the site worked together over the Internet to listen too, and add comments, on each and every move of the faders in my studio. Mix after mix [I think I would have done at least 30 altogether] was pulled apart, analysed, commented on and generally beaten into a final mix that the majority felt had the sound we were after. Bearing in mind that some of the members were listening on average equipment, while others were using top of the range studio gear, the end result was amazing. From this combination of talents we achieved a remarkable thing…. a sound that worked everywhere! During this process one of the participants, Lady Leeta or Tamera, from the other side of the planet in the USA, suggested that a violin would sound really good in the piece. Tracy Lundgren [music composer] was adamant that it should be a Native flute sound. Me, I liked both ideas, so I went looking for samples on the Internet of the sounds we were after. It was then that it hit me, there was a real, living, breathing Native American flute player right there on the site we were working on! Going by the musical name of Earthsongs, Arthur Kills Straight was the very best player of the instrument that I had ever heard! No violin player on site though, so I went looking on the Internet, and low and behold came across Ian Cameron [efiddler.com] one of the most stunning players I have heard in all my years of hanging around with folk and gypsy music players. What was more Ian has an online business where he will record violin parts to tracks that you send him and sends back a “naked” violin track for mixing. I have to tell you, this blew me away! All of a sudden the scope of what could be done musically was no longer dictated by who happened to be available at a local level. What’s more is that the standard of playing was World class. Incredible! I had become aware that there was a growing number of musicians collaborating over the Internet using Mp3 128 kbps files. While the music itself was often really good, the production values often let them down. When I realised that I could work with Mp3’s as my GUIDE tracks and that the final files I worked with could be 24 bit data, [which is the music industry standard quality] either sent by mail on a data CD or transferred over the net using Yousendit.com and a broadband connection, I felt that somebody had just handed me the keys to a Very Sacred Place. Thus began my search for musicians to create a full album of high quality music, over this amazing thing called the Internet. A drummer in Germany, another in the USA, violins and cello from Canada, a percussion creator from the UK, keyboard players living hundreds of kilometres away…. sitar…tabla, the list goes on and on. Combining these wonderful players with the local group that I was in at the time, the entity now known as “Tribe Pendragon” was born. Along with it came the realisation that we were about to create a WORLD FIRST, the very first album ever to be created over the Internet, using players who had never met, never spoken with each other and certainly never played music together! One of the early members to appear was Tracy Lundgren, a songwriter and singer living in Newcastle [Australia] a four-hour journey from my studio in Canberra. Tracy first contacted me to tell me that she was drawn to some of the songs that she had heard the original ‘Tribe’ do on an earlier album “Message Stick”. She said she felt that what we were writing about struck a chord within her. When I went online and had a listen to HER work, that chord became a whole lot more complex and musical! I just love her song writing and she has the most stunning vocal ability’s. Truly magical. I was at that time finishing an album of “Sacred Chant” music, which eventually became ‘Divine Nature’ [Ninewells Music] with an amazing singer Natalia Christiana. I asked Tracy if she would like to collaborate on a couple of tracks. She would email me these fantastic track ideas, some complete and others in an embryonic state. At that time I was in a strange place with my own writing, I hadn’t written any English lyrics for ages [Sanskrit words are great but…] I was in that dark place all writers know…the dreaded block! A very scary, soulless, ego sapping, land of fear. Maybe I had ‘lost it’, maybe it was never really there, maybe all I had been doing was being grossly self indulgent with my time and the very limited funds that were our income. Thanks must go to my partner Nancy who goes every day to a government job, to earn the money for us to survive on. I have dedicated the song Beautiful Friend [written by Jukka Malmberg,] to this fantastic woman. Tracy later would play me the most beautiful of songs, “Mother Me”. Again I was hopelessly, musically in love. I was becoming more and more aware that something really special was happening. For much of my life I have believed in the concept of synchronicity, one event leading inexorably to another. To some, a rather fanciful concept, to me a phenomenon that time and time again has appeared in my life. It was as if this album HAD to be born! Don’t get me wrong, it was no easy process, there were times when I would not sleep for 18 hrs, sitting zombie like in front of my ancient CRT monitor, hacking files into sync because Id forgotten to tell a musician half way across the planet to give me a ‘header count’ to synchronise the files with the backtrack. At one time I was on Skype with Peter Generous [don’t you just love that name?] a great drummer in the USA, ‘beat boxing’ an idea and choosing snare and bass drum sounds over a computer telephone line! Two studios thousands of miles apart on opposite sides of Planet Earth, in perfect harmony [though a tiny bit out of sync,] Peter is the drummer on several pieces, including being the ‘kit’ player on Peace Child. Things were also happening at a local level. I approached two musicians that I had worked with on their own albums, asking if they would like to work on this project. So entered into the fray, Ernie Van Veen[Child of the Wind] a brilliant acoustic ‘roots’ guitar player and Donovan Gall, one of Australia’s premier drummers. With the musical input from these and others, the album started to take a ‘shape’. All of the songs and instrumentals were from a wide, genre defying sound scape. The combination of Ian Cameron [violin] Arthur Kills Straight [ Earthsongs] Ernie Van Veen [acoustic guitars/slide] Tracy Lundgren [keys and vocals] Donovan Gall [drums] John Coates [Bass] myself [vocal and harmony] and Natalia Christiana [vocal] along with the multitude of other musical contributors [see credits], allowed the sound of Tribe Pendragon to emerge. From where? Who knows. That esoteric question is still beyond my understanding after 30 yrs of recording music. JUST UNTILL WE CAN UPLOAD SOME MUSIC, HERE IS A LINK TO OUR SOUND:<a href="http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=764305">http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=764305</a> David Pendragon

11/06/07 10:32:40AM @dicarlo-productions:
HEY DAVID,

MY OTHER HALF GOT HERE BEFORE ME!!!!!!!!!! LOL
JUST WANTED TO 2ND THE WELCOME.

PEACE,
D

11/06/07 10:28:50AM @omm:
HEY BRO,

GREAT TO SEE YOU HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

JUST WANTED TO STOP BY AND WELCOME YOU.
THIS IS A COOL SITE.
HAVE FUN.

ALL THE BEST,
OMM_DICARLO

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TRIBE PENDRAGON..... WEB-BAND

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