A tongue in cheek song railing against the fact I just turned sixty-five.  My State pension now kicks in and I can apply for a free bus pass, whoopy do…  (April 2018 edit: I remixed and mastered the song, and added a video).

I’ve been playing the guitar for almost half a century now and I have no idea where all those years went.  The main thing is that I’m still playing and still having fun with music, so I guess it’s a lifetime commitment now!

The lyrics came pretty quick, over a couple of days.  The format of a minor key blues shuffle seemed right so the rest fell into place fairly easily.

Technical notes:

I used PG Music’s Band In A Box RealTracks to provide the drums, bass, rhythm guitars (L and R), and piano backing, as well as a BIAB soloist track for the harmonica parts.  I imported these tracks into Cakewalk by BandLab (formerly Sonar Platinum) where I added a rhythm guitar track panned centre plus all the lead guitar and vocals. I did the vocal using my usual trusty RØDE NT2 mic and sweetened things with EQ and reverb in Sonar’s ProChannel tools.  For the lead guitar sounds I used Scuffham’s excellent S-Gear guitar processor software.

I used a couple of drum loops to embellish the ending and sampled a CD (can you spot which one from one of the voices?) for the ‘tape rolling’ banter at the start and end in order to make the track sound ‘live’.  The final mix was mastered in Sonar using iZotope’s Ozone 8 mastering suite.