Technology is changing the way that music is made, played and shared in the world today and no one really knows how things are going to end up in the next four or five years - and beyond that point things are even more uncertain.

These days more people than ever before have access to music making tools and to the means of making their music available to others. Digital music making and the internet are bringing much more openness and democracy to creativity.

This section of the site talks about some of the tools and techniques that the musicians whose work is represented are using to produce their music. Click on the links below to find out more:

The Casio DH500 Digital Horn is an electronic wind instrument. Iain Cameron - one of the Kwase-Kwaza site developers - uses the Casio Dhorn in many of the CDs he produces and he gives a description of the Dhorn together with how he uses it.

Songwriter Resources

In the last fifty years there has been an explosion in songwriting. Most of the great popular music innovators have written their own material - Dylan, Hendrix, Lennon and MacCartney etc. The impact of folk and blues styles on popular music has brought this channel of self expression within the reach of millions of people. The popularity of the guitar and the falling price of electronic keyboards has put the key tools within everyone's grasp.

Robin Frederick who is a former Director of A&R for Rhino Records, composer and producer of over 500 songs for record albums and television series has written some unique self-help material which will help anyone get started.

Notes on Songwriting

On http://www.robinfrederick.com/write.html Robin starts the learner off at the key point - finding a good title for the song. She coaches the song-writer through all the subsequent steps to making a demo tape or CD.

Songwriter Resources

A second page http://www.robinfrederick.com/resources.html signposts you to a really useful set of supporting resources for songwriters - books, websites, software, contacts - to help you turn inspiration into reality without too much perspiration.

The story of Spaceward Studios.

Iain Cameron interviews Paul Wheeler and his producer Chris Matthews about the making of Paul's 2004 CD: "Redblues" 

Many of the leading figures who have changed popular music have been closely associated with the visual arts. Miles Davis spent more and more time painting as he got older. John Lennon, Keith Richards and Brian Eno are amongst the legion of rock stars who went to Art School. Basquiat is often compared to Jimi Hendrix. The Velvet Underground were taken up by Andy Warhol in his Factory project. John Cale's break through album as a solo artist was "Paris 1919".

"Pop Art" began in the late 1950s partly as a reaction to the rather obscure elitist strands in abstract art. It brought accessibility back into painting by making use of imagery drawn from popular music - see for example David Hockney's "Living Doll".

Pop Art paved the way for a close mutual interaction between the visual arts and music making for the rest of the century - not just through a emphasis on style (eg psychedelia) - but also as a means of expressing the creative personality or vision of the musician. Dada and Surrealism were frequently used as resources in this way, especially in the 1970s.

Derek Ridgers first attracted attention when he documented the punk revolution in London in the mid 1970s in black white photographs often taken with available light - part of a strong British documentary tradition. Subsequently he has developed an approach to portraiture which uses imagistic resources to intensify his insight into the creative personality of famous musicians.

We are very fortunate on this site that Derek has provided us with some images otherwise unavailable on the web."

This coincided with a revolution in English poetry itself. See www.pinko.org. Nick Totton is a poet who has been involved in radical poetry since that time. One of his poems inspired the version of Careless Love which opens the Serious Music for the Highveld CD.

Nick Totton's "Press When Illuminated - New and Selected Poems 1968 - 2003" (ISBN 1-844710-39-4) has just been published by Salt Publishing.

Nick has co-written many songs with Paul Wheeler over the years.

Click here to read "Biologic Song" - which inspired the Careless Love instrumental.

Meta criticism.