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Mark is in his sixth year battling cancer and 60th year playing guitar. "Life is short, love more and make more music!" Positivity and music go together beautifully.
These tracks are provided for your enjoyment but they are not available for commercial use without a written license. They are hosted on the Soundcloud platform using the paid version for unlimited streaming. You can listen to the tracks here or you can check out the whole streaming heap on Soundcloud.
The guitars, amps and various equipment used are reviewed on the "High on Technology" gear site.
MORE FROM MARK KING
I'm constantly working on songs and musical compositions. Most of the time I'm busy writing and working on new compositions.
All of the instruments are played by Mark King unless otherwise specified.
Mark plays DW Drums, Gibson, Jackson and Fender basses and guitars from a wide variety of makers.
PHYSICAL THERAPY
Currently I'm working on a huge body of musical works (over four hours runtime) which feature space themed titles. The tempos for these songs usually are between 40bpm and 80bpm, although some of the newest have tempo as high as 130 bpm. The last few years of health issues have helped me to create compositions that are more relaxing and thoughtful. I've used music as physical therapy to recover from surgical damage.
NEW DIRECTIONS
Cancer got in the way of everything. It can be crushing or liberating if you remain strong and positive in-focus. I'm blessed beyond words to have a wonderful creative partner and immensely supportive soul as a partner and best friend, Mary has literally saved my life twice in the last couple of years. We're in our 14th year producing music together and every day is pure joy. If everyone could experience the love we share there would be no bad stuff.
New Directions means no more unoriginal material. I'm on a mission to bring the far reaches of my imagination into the physical world.
SETTING SAIL
On this journey I'm creating music as a background for life, gentle, rhythmic, melodic and at times surprising; songs that take you through musical stories without human words. Long in form, where 7-minutes is a short song length, 10-minutes is not uncommon and many compositions are 15-20 minutes in length.
IMPROV
Each of my original tunes starts with the drums. I've gone to extremes to create the drums and percussion in my music. The dining room of our home features an 8-piece DW drum kit instead of a table and chairs, custom built tube mics adorn the kit instead of fancy place mats and silverware.
I'm blessed to have some local drummers who've been very helpful. After I create a road map for a tune I use multitrack recording to build up the full backing band which can include bass, organ, strings, brass, various percussion instruments, synthesizers, sub sequences, and arpeggiators with other digital sound effects. When the backing track finally sets my muse on fire I strap on a favorite guitar (or two or three) and begin improvising to discover the melody which ultimately turns into the lead guitar track.
RECORDING
I prefer to record the tracks live, raw and real, rather than overdubbing them to perfection. I've come to appreciate the emotion and character of live performance and I'm willing to include a bad-note or two in a 10 minute song because I want to preserve every drop of feeling and emotion.
MARSHALL, MESA BOOGIE AND.....
I love distortion. It comes in a lot of different flavors and I'm constantly experimenting with different amplifiers and stomp boxes. Lately the Mesa Mini Rect has been my favorite real tube amp. The little 1-watt tube Marshall head and it's bigger brother, the Origin 20 watt have been great utility amps for parallel distortion effects, harmonizer leads or just adding a second different sounding amp head.
The Bogner Ubershall pedal combined with a fake-IR has been killing it for recording direct. The Bogner has a magical response to playing dynamics, it does NOT just swamp your sound with buzz, you can back your guitar volume down and it cleans up nicely but still adds a delicious thickness to the sound.
My 4x12 vintage Marshall cabinet finally arrived (only six months late). This is an exquisite execution (still handmade in England) of the classic cabinet and it's filled with four very bright sounding Celestion G12 Greenback speakers. It's awesome to have this to put up against my other Marshall cabs.
RECORDING WITH APPLE LOGIC PRO DAW SOFTWARE
I love MIDI so Logic is the best choice for me and my music. It was not an easy journey. I jettisoned Digidesign Protools many years ago and started using Logic at version 6, never looked back and now it's been a 14 year relationship. Logic is so deep and has so much capability, it has transcended from software to truly become my recording partner. This is what I always wanted sound-wise, back when we were stuck using tape.
The Mark King Orchestra is produced using Logic, it's multiple (a whole bunch of) EXS24 samplers providing the strings along with English Horn, Oboe, Flute and Timpani among others. Fast SSD drives have made loading samplers insignificant in terms of system resources and having the sampler integrated right inside the DAW is fantastically empowering.
RECORDING WITH THE MELBOURNE NEVE
In 1970 my fascination with everything "Recording" was just taking off and the big Neve consoles were the flagships of the industry. Today, my goal is using modern day Neve products to achieve those vintage era sonics.
I've got a lot of preamplifiers to choose from but my little fleet of Neve 1073 modules feeding an 8816 mixer is the source for my DAW inputs. I plug the acoustic guitars directly into the instrument input on these preamps because I love the authoritative strength they add to the tone.
I call it the Melbourne Neve because I'm in Melbourne and it's all Neve hardware.
MIXING AND CREATING OUTSIDE THE BOX
I'm a big advocate for creating and mixing outside the computer. It's not about the summing debate or any of that silly rhetoric, it IS about having a LOT of DSP horsepower. I know there are lots of recall features I might be missing out on but I'm ok with that. I like classic Lexicon effects and reverbs, lots of them. PCM81, PCM91, PCM92 along with the Bricasti M7 and Eventide Eclipse; these and many others deliver the other-worldly soundscapes my ears crave, in realtime, with absolutely zero hit to my DAW processor usage, it's pure creative freedom to go in any direction without technical interruptions.
Activating just a single instance of Lexicon Native brings my quad processor DAW to its knees so I've built a recording and mixing system that allows me to utilize multiple hardware effects simultaneously at mix-down time. These effect processors are a natural extension of my creative process and since I'm creating my own music, these DSP gadgets are the adjuncts that my creative process requires.
My 40-channel Soundcraft console has eight aux sends driving all the DSP. The console feeds a second Neve 8816 mixer which feeds the Tascam DA-3000 stereo master recorder running at 24bit/192k. An API 2500 stereo bus compressor lives on the Neve 8816 inserts providing huge sonic-horsepower, fatness and glue to the mixes. The Neve and API products fit each other like fine gloves, the Neve has the punch and clarity and the API brings the opamp/transformer horsepower to provide endless, effortless headroom and dynamics.
FEATURED GUITAR AMPS (these are the ones I'm using day to day right now)
Boogie Mini Rect, Marshall Origin 20 head, Marshall DSL-1
FEATURED GUITARS (these are each chosen for their tone in the current compositions)
Yamaha nylon string, wide-neck version, silent guitar (affectionately known as "NYLON")
Yamaha steel string acoustic (affectionately known as "STAR")
Martin D-35E Retro
Gibson Lucille
Gibson Les Paul Special
Fender Stratocaster(s)
Jackson Soloist (affectionately known as "Jackson Blue"), it's got a great Floyd Rose
Line6 Variax with Floyd Rose
HARDWARE SYNTHESIZERS
Sequential Prophet 6
Kurzweil keyboards and modules (too many of them)
Hammond XK3 organ with 1970's vacuum tube-powered Leslie 147
Yamaha DX7 (original 80's keyboard) one of my favorite electric piano sounds
SOFTWARE SYNTHESIZERS
Logic Native synths like the EXS24 Sampler, Clav, Rhodes-style, Wurlitzer-style electric piano
G-Force Mellotron sample player and Oddity synth
Arturia V Collection 9 Software Synthesizers (these are the synth models I use regularly)
DX7V, OB SEM, Jupitor 8V, Juno 106, Moog Modular, ARP 2600, Mini Moog, and others
CHICKENS
Mary and I have adopted 34 wonderful fluffy feathered friends, it's the chickens. Mostly bantams because they're so cute (and they make a lot less poo). While we share a special love for white silkie chickens, we love and deeply care for every one of our little chicken friends.
CREATING MUSIC IS MY HAPPY PLACE
I am thankful for every day that I get to enjoy with my favorite human, in this wonderful creative place we're living in :-)
My wish for everyone, Good Music To You!