Last week, I made the journey down to Easingwold, North Yorkshire to record the soundtrack to The Last Miner. It comes as the culmination of two months work composing the music and soundscape alongside the devising process.

 After composing the music and roughly orchestrating the various sounds of the mine, I recorded rough demos on my somewhat basic laptop with a more basic version of Cubase. During this stage, I’m never precious about the sound quality, I’m more eager to get the feel of each piece right.

I suppose it would make more sense to you to explain what I’ve actually written! The Last Miner, as you probably know if you’ve read our other blogs, is the story of an old man living in a mine, reliving important moments from his life and reappraising the decision to shut himself out of our world. There is very little dialogue, if any, and so there isn’t a single moment of silence in the whole 45 minute show. The soundscape serves to set the mood, tone and atmosphere, and goes some way to tell the story.

And so, armed with the demos I had roughly put together, I went to the town where I grew up, in the sleepy Vale of York to work with a friend I met at school, who just so happens to now be a rather prodigious professional producer – David Lawrie. David completed a masters in Music Production a couple of years ago and has impressed some very impressive people, such as world-class producer Michael Stavrou. I first worked with David in 2007-8 on my album ‘On Borrowed Time’, was blown away by his interpretation of my music, his skills at arrangement and innovative methods of sound capture and manipulation. Given that we had room in our budget for professional production on our soundtrack, I instantly thought of David and he was very excited to be involved. And so the process began.

The element of the soundscape that constantly runs is what I call the Sounds of the Mine – an effects-based score made up of wind sounds, distant machinery and surreal, uneasy throbbing, harmonic sounds. This sound is meant to be fairly uncomfortable to the audience, but as much a part of the Miner’s home as his chair, his routine and his canary – it is the comforting sound that is always in the background of his life. It is perhaps the single most important element of the soundscape. My demo version was constructed with wind noises made by yours truly blowing past a microphone, a coffee machine whirring away in the background, a very deep synthesised sine wave throbbing intermittently, all steeped in a huge plate reverb. The finished version still has my mouth sounds, but is cut through with cymbal harmonics (a very eerie, and very cool sound, made by scraping a stick gently across the face of a cymbal), some sine harmonics, a smattering of sub-bass frequencies that are felt rather than heard and the occasional machine whirring on. In terms of space, it is huge, and sets the tone rather well. There are numerous smaller sound effects, including whistles and lifts and various devices, but some of the most powerful sounds in the show are ruptures that happen at key moments in the story. Making these sounds really stretched our imaginations. Rather than going down the literal route of recording rock falls, we decided to fabricate them instead. Everything about the sound is stylised, it would be very jarring to suddenly hear a BBC sound effect in crisp, realistic detail. So instead, we ripped bits of cardboard, emptied a box of pennies on a floor tom, dropped velvet jackets, and I even scratched my head towards a very powerful condenser microphone. The combined effect is a startlingly accurate, evocative series of collapses. We also had a fun evening in David’s garage, recording all sorts of percussive noises: hammering on garage doors, drumming on ladders, paint tins and roof racks.

And then there is the music. All the music is folk inspired, reflecting the world the Miner comes from. The predominant instruments used are guitar, accordion, percussion, tin whistle and piano. The motifs are very simple, as overcomplicating things can spoil the atmosphere, and so the challenge was to be interesting, memorable and perfectly suited while being sparse and appropriate. There is one piece of music in particular that comes near the end of the show using a piano and an accordion that was a great challenge, despite it sounding very, very simple. It was a privilege to use some very fine equipment to record this show – top end microphones, fantastic instruments (one of the guitars used was an Ibanez electric classical guitar – one of only thirty ever made), a beautiful grand piano and some brilliant software, expertly used. After 5 days of recording (often finishing in the early hours), David and I felt we had done enough. It was an intense period of creativity, and though it was tiring, it is one of the most exciting parts of the whole process. I returned to Edinburgh with a pristine version of my work, ready to cue up and do its bit for the show.

The greatest compliment I received for the music so far was from my mentor, David Paul Jones, who said that he didn’t have much advice to give me as it was good enough as it is. Paul Fitzpatrick from Catherine Wheels remarked that the music clearly developed with the rest of the production and that it fits perfectly – which is the best praise I could hope for.

 The only thing left to do is to take my place in the LX box at Hill Street theatre and play these sounds over what the other members have made a brilliantly crafted show.