Setting sail on a musical adventure

SINGLE Elena Duff releases love song

A love song by a local artist has proven that creativity can more than compensate for lack of budget. Elena Duff’s debut single ‘Sailing on the Sea of Love’ was pieced together like a sonic jigsaw for less than €100, a minuscule sum that belies its professional sound quality.

The song sees Elena cast off on her musical adventure, admittedly relatively late in life. Visual art has been foremost in her working life. Only in the last five years has she embraced music by picking up a ukulele as a hobby.

“I was finally like: I can play an instrument!’ It was so much easier than guitar and I started playing some cover songs, and teaching myself off videos on YouTube,” recalls the Bailieborough based artist.

“I very quickly got bored playing covers and started writing my own music. So I’ve been writing for a few years on and off.”

In the mean time she joined and left ‘Ukulele Underground’ a large, gigging ensemble, and suitably impressed a Korean ukulele manufacturer Namuai to give her a free instrument to endorse!

“He’s really into shredding rock guitar stuff so the head stock looks a bit like an electric Fender on the ukulele,” Elena says with a laugh.

In February of last year she penned ‘Sailing on the Sea of Love’ to mark Valentine’s Day, recorded herself playing it accompanied only by her baritone ukulele and set the simple ditty adrift on her YouTube channel.

“Everybody just really loved it. Random people who I just vaguely knew when I bumped into them were saying, ‘I heard that song on YouTube’, and I thought, maybe that’s one to record since I’ve already done my market research on it,” she jokes.

It’s a celebration of the feeling of being in love rather than an ode to a loved one. The gentleness of tempo brings to mind Richard Hawley and suggests that the sea has never been too treacherous and any perilous rocks have been safely negotiated. She accurately describes it as a “lullaby for adults”. In other hands it could easily have been sickeningly sweet. It’s possibly the melancholic undercurrent in Elena’s voice, reminiscent of Tracy Thorn, that helps her avoid that saccharine pitfall.

“It’s the voice that seems to get everybody,” she says. “I get terribly bad stagefright because I took this up late in life. It’s getting better with the experience of doing loads of open mics locally, but the odd time it’s crippling for no reason - I get up and I just completely fall apart.

“The worry for me is I’m going to forget the chords, it’s going to sound terrible. But nobody really cares - it’s all about the vocals with me I’ve noticed afterwards. I’m so concerned about the instrument and everyone else is concerned about the singing voice, so in a way that’s good. It gets me off the hook a little bit if I make a few mistakes here and there.”

She describes her voice as “a bit bluesy and jazzy in tone” and notes that gives the song “that jazzy vibe”. That vibe is also achieved by the double bass and whispering percussion with brush drumsticks. She recruited a session musician from Spain to play the double bass part.

“I found him on an online website that offers session musicians for a reasonable amount of money. So I just listened to his clips and sent him the song, and he sent some sound files back and I was happy - that was that.”

When it came to the drums, Elena was even more resourceful.

“I made some brush drumsticks with some fishing cable and chopsticks,” she says, explaining that she played them on a bodhran.

TheCeltis surprised she played the drums on it.

“The whole thing apart from the bass was played by me and mixed by me on [free computer programme] ‘Garage Band’ because I just don’t have the finances to go into a studio.”

Even if she had the finances, its likely she wouldn’t opt for the studio at this stage anyway. She tried it before, having won a free session through a songwriting competition in Belfast. In the studio she struggled to play in time with an automated beat.

“I couldn’t stick with the beat - I was just like freaking out, so I made a complete hames of the studio recording.”

When it came to recording ‘Sailing on the Sea of Love’ undeterred she bought “a few cheap gizmos” and got on with it herself.

“I’m not making some complicated song with millions of tracks on it - it’s just going to be vocals and a few other bits, so surely I can do that at home to a professional standard? I think it sounds pretty good - no one has said, God that sounds like you recorded it at home in your bedroom - it’s really amatuerish’. So I’m really happy about that.”

The final step was to get it mastered, “so it sounds good on radio or a computer”.

She found the answer through an online service again.

“Upload the file. They show you what it’s going to sound like, and if you like it you download it and use it. Obviously it’s better to get a proper studio engineer to do these things,” she concedes.

Having discussed paying for mastering, and hiring a bassist, theCeltexpected the costs to be significant. Far from it. At €25 the Spanish bassist cost less than a round of cervezas, she coughed up a further €20 for mastering and €30 for a USB interface to connect the microphone to her computer. All in for €75. She concedes you could get a couple of hours in a cheap studio for the same price but her investment meant she had more control and the freedom to make as many mistakes as needed to get it right.

“I could listen to myself immediately - it wasn’t someone else in a booth elsewhere listening to me and deciding if it’s good or bad. I could listen back and go, ‘God that’s terrible’. Do it again, and again, and again - and I could do it as many times as I like and not be thinking - Oh My God how much is this going to cost me in the studio. Ideally you would get professionals on board but we all have to start somewhere.”

She’s clearly proud of Sailing on the Sea of Love, and having heard it, rightly so.

“The fact that it did come out well, it shows you if you have a bit of creativity what you can do with your average computer and microphone for half nothing - I think creativity can bring a lot to the table with any artform, you don’t necessarily have to have a load of money to make something decent.”

Accepting she could be revealing her age she finds the slickness of current pop songs off putting, deeming them “over-produced”. If there are any “slight imperfections” in ‘Sailing on the Sea of Love’, to Elena’s mind that enhances the authenticity of the work.

“That’s what people respond to - they respond to authenticity that runs through any artwork - a poem, a drawing , a song to the emotion to it.

“How can you get emotion across about being in love in a pop song - or not being in love, or being happy or sad if everything’s so clinical?”

She hopes that this voyage will give her singer-songwriting credentials a boost and has sent the single out to all radio stations - some have already given it a whirl.

“The more actual radio play you can get [the better], and if people like it you will get played more and it just helps to get the name out there and you slowly build up so that when the next song comes out people will be more interested in hearing it and hopefully start building a bit of a following I suppose - slowly but surely.”