Rockin' up a storm with "Teddy Boys' Picnic" - The Fulminators triumphantly rework an early classic

The following will only be of interest to music obsessives. You have been warned!

We originally recorded "Teddy Boy" three and a half years' ago. I'd only just started using Apple's Garageband sequencing software, and I encountered two main problems (apart from my own musical ineptitude). First, when I used similar instrumentation to that employed between 1955 and, say, 1965, the results tended to sound sterile and there was a lot of empty space - the backings seemed hollow. 

Second, I couldn't figure out why songs that sounded loud and beefy during the recording process went all limp and weedy when turned into MP3 files. What I was hearing on Garageband was nothing like the same song when it was uploaded to iTunes. When I transferred those tracks to YouTube 18 moths ago (the only way of getting an audio recording onto Google's Blogger system), they sounded like they were played on a tinny transistor radio by a builder three doors down.

Well, I figured out what I was doing wrong a while back. Partly it was because I hadn't checked a particular tick-box on Garageband, and partly because I wasn't using Garageband's Master Track settings to change the sound of the recording at a stroke. I also needed to compensate for the slightly artificial quality of software instruments by coming up with my own settings for them (the hard, honking saxophone sound on "Teddy Boys' Picnic" had to be tortured out of the digital instrument - and I still can't figure out a way of sliding between notes). Finally, I'm dirtying up those empty background spaces with a ride cymbal (after all, it was good enough for Ringo on every track on With the Beatles.)

My aim with most of the stuff I produce is to make it sound as if it's a recording done in one take by a live band in a primitive recording studio circa 1962. I think I'm almost there with the percussion (I've finally found the loose snare drum sound I want - shown to best effect on "Twangtastic") and the bass (thanks to advice from a music-mad friend); guitars are easy, because, after all, they're real instruments - they just have an annoying tendency to distort when turned into MP3 files; as for the rest, it's trial and error - and an awful lot of fun!