what is going on in your musical life

l0ud high school s3x

the biggest audition opportunity of my lap

lol dan

oh no, I've said too much

I am in month 15 of releasing a home-made recording every month. A lot of times I put it off until the month is almost over and then go into crunch mode. But at this point, even though I approach each song as its own thing and wasn't trying to make an album or anything, I can listen to all the tracks straight through and it sounds really cohesive to me, which I think is really cool. I also feel like I get a little better/more efficient at production each time.

I haven't performed onstage in like a year though, which was a conscious decision and I don't miss all of the bullshit that made me sick of doing it, but I do miss being onstage. But I maybe just joined a band that I actually think is really good and is kind of successful locally, which is cool because I don't feel that way about hardly any local bands and also I've never really been in someone else's band. They have kind of a Modern Lovers/Beat Happening/Magnetic Fields/Morrissey vibe. It'll also be neat because I'll be playing synth and I'm not actually a keyboard player at all, I'm a guitarist and songwriter, but that's also why I'll be a good fit for this.

kicking off recording of a new album. finally a chance to properly use all this new synth gear

Hey all - could I get a little bit of constructive feedback on this please? We've had an initial "how's this?" from the studio engineer on one of our tracks. Overall, I think it's okay but it's very difficult to distance myself and listen to it with uninvolved ears.

I'd really like to hear your thoughts, particularly on the mixing/production (we can't really go back into the studio to do any overdubs or retakes so we're working with the raw material we have, for better or worse). Are there any glaring errors on this track or things I should mention before I get back to him? One thing I noticed is that he's been a bit heavy handed witht he gating and compression, particularly some of the vocal parts where the sibilants and plosives are almost non-existent.

I'm only gonna keep this track online for a short while, but if someone could give it a listen and let me know their thoughts, i'd be very much obliged: https://soundcloud.com/doglatin/honolulu-demo-050313

god this sounds like a super harsh thing but i dont mean it that way - do you want/intend the beginning to sound like a 80's nylons style acapella group thing? like exactly like one? because thats what i hear. also some pitchy weirdness in the "so afraid" "yesterday" multivoice responses. again, if these are intentional things, no prob.

Lol, I haven't hear the nylons but it is supposed to be a bit of a tongue in cheek doowop thing and if it comes across that way I guess that's intentional. The song is very much a comment on retro culture and so it's littered with 60s and 80s references. Cheers for checking it out jjjusten, I'll look into the autotune thing. Think the sound guy's gone a bit overboard with vocal manipulation, but then we're not at all trained singers so there's undoubtably gonna be a push/pull thing going on.

song sounds good to me, esp. for a demo. i like it.

Xpost If you're talkin about Housemartins/Flying Pickets, I def see what you mean and kind of don't mind. I (was made to) grow up with that shit, haha.

Cheers n/a

I am making a lil album of songs that are about a min long each, I have about 10 so far where the music is done but I have finished singing over one of them, I've come up w/ vocal melodies for about 3

I am seriously using the dumbest most unwieldy out of date programs to put the songs together because for whatever reason I like how it all sounds more than if I do it in ableton?

what are you using?

I (lol) am using cues in virtual dj to play my laptop like an mpc or w/e (I could slice to a drumkit in ableton and do the same thing I guess, but idk, when I use ableton I spend 3 extra hours on shit) and then editing shit further and recording vocals in audacity, its a forehead in my hands deal, but still

i love stuff like that.

well I hope it lives up to its rudimentary description, I'm starting to embrace it, at least this way I don't end up fucking around with corpus for a week with no results

Good sounding demo, dog latin. I'd get some friends in a room for the backing vocals. And as for your solo performance it's a little too measured, just make sure you're saying "gate" instead of "gay" and make it fast and effortless

I was just in Prague recording with a budget-priced orchestra, stuff for five different clients and some stuff for my own use. There were 30 "pieces" ranging from 45-second long bits of orchestral incidental music to 20-minute marathon workouts. A total of 2.5 hours of music and 24 hours to record the whole thing. I def. got paranoid and overworked but I didn't break. I drove that bus.

It went very well but I instinctively prioritized the work of my clients, taking the time to really get something beautiful out of that shaky orchestra. I left not enough time for my own material. Now I'm futzing.

cheers FGTI - I did the lead vox, the others did backing. I think the engineer's but too strong a release on my vox because yeah, "gaze" sounds like "gay" etc...

i'm listening to spotify

gotta get these tapes out soon (for this band i recorded) but have no idea what im doing! i need to buy a tape duplicator! i need to buy...tapes! i need to figure out how to get this shit onto a master tape! what am i doing with my life! HELP!

i told my mom i was in a new band called high school and she recommended that we call it COOL GIRLS instead. additionally, "i like just a girl's name, like maureen, or mabel, for a girl band"

lmao at cool girls altho tbh i would like it as a name for a coed or all dude band

I was briefly in a(n all-male) duo called "Sarah"!

haw

possibly touring in the summer with the black/doom band, havent been out in a long time bc our guitarist lives a couple hours away, so we havent been as "active" in general. mostly an east coast thing, possibly all the way to canada, where i have never been

come to Atlanta!

I have been recording bits and pieces for an eventual cassette release. I've also been asked to do a split release with a local drone act. AND my band is recording stuff. So hopefully soon I'll have lots of physical stuff to give out at shows!

I've heard good things about getting cassettes made through National Audio?

Yeah National Audio is great, I've done a couple things through them.

guitarist in one band left us cuz he moved out of london :( which is a shame. was looking forward to recording those songs. we'd played 5 shows or so. it was going well. oh well. i have a decent recording of the last practice, guess i'll stick that on soundcloud if i can be bothered to mix it.

started a new thing with the same guys, got a new guitarist, and he rules! he's a bit older than us, used to run a drone and kosmiche club. had a practice on sunday and ended up with 16 little things to work on, 3 or 4 fully formed songs just happened, so looking forward to this band. krauty space rock with big OTT vocals and thinking i'm gonna bring an edp wasp and delay pedal into the equation. will prob play a show in the next month or two. my drumming is really rusty tho, need to get back on the practice pad before they kick me out!

tracks sitting in the computer way into the 100s by now, mostly experiments with the ridiculous synth collection that lives in the studio where i live. none of the synths are mine, but i'm free to use what i want and i've set up a synthesizer room and got everything patched up. pretty sweet. currently obsessed with the doepfer modular and making new presets for the matrix 1000- that's a seriously powerful bit of kit but the presets that come with it are crap.

playing classical guitar again, got my nails all purty, think i'm going to try and start performing too. maybe get some restaurants gigs.

have also been digging my uni pieces, trying to put together some sort of composer portfolio. surprised myself by how good some of those pieces are. the goldberg ensemble performed some of my string pices, which was very cool, had to ressurect an old hard drive, thought i'd lost those recordings for good!

Why is having good nails important for playing guitar? I don't play with my nails. I guess if I had long nails it would be difficult but...

if you play fingerstyle you get more control over your sound, you can also play louder and as everybody knows louder = better

It's a really fundamental part of classical guitar technique. Your nails are the tools you use to create and shape your sound.

Do restaurants in the UK hire classical guitarists??

What are you putting a composition portfolio together for, CB? Graduate schools? Grants/gigs?

*Show us your scoressss*

making new presets for the matrix 1000- that's a seriously powerful bit of kit but the presets that come with it are crap.

surprised to read this, mine is coming back from service today but from the little i got to play with it before it went in i thought some (though yes far from all, or even most) of the presets were absolutely lovely. insta-BoC!

i believe they ran a competition so the 1000 presets are all from users of the matrix 6 (which has identical innards) those patches are just a bit uninspired imo! but yeah totally get the BoC thing- if that's what you're after, they're perfect!

x-post, i'll up some stuff on my soundcloud and mayyybe post some stuff up here when i've got it all sorted, but i'm a bit shy about my own music, esp the stuff i've spent a lot of time on.

and just doing a portfolio for.. err.. i don't know really. i've seen a few bits of paid work recently, such as composing some piano pieces for an audio walk in london. i'd have probably had a chance of getting that if i had some music organised and online. unfortunately the only stuff i've written that's even half listenable i did at uni ages ago, since then i've just been obsessed with synths, microtonality, learning to play drum kit and never finishing things.

Do restaurants in the UK hire classical guitarists??

yeah, you can make pretty good money (read: actually make *some* money) doing functions/events/restaurants/weddings etc. i'm thinking some satie, beatles arr. for classical guitar, cheesy spanish stuff, play through a little amp. will be good practice anyway.

I played two harsh noise sets this week and someone who saw both of them posted that this city is "a patriarchal cesspool" on FB immediately after leaving the show tonight & now I'm irrationally worried that she's talking about me

don't worry about it

- offered up my sound work exp to a newly forming fairly hip arts council for my neighborhood in an advisory capacity. wondering how quickly that will turn into "hey i know it's 4 pm on sunday but the slam poetry competition needs you to come down and turn on their wireless mic."
- related to my endless pedal thread, but the fact that i am getting deluged with new pedal line offers is some strange mixture of feeling like the prettiest girl at the prom and huge stress wrt money allocation and decision making.

thanks to Rocksmith I can fake my way through the following songs on the guitar:

"Boys Don't Cry" - The Cure
"Islands" - The xx
"Go With The Flow" - QOTSA
"Black" - Pearl Jam
"Where Is My Mind?" - Pixies
"Angela" - Jarvis Cocker

I can't play triplets fast enough to really play the RHCP version of "Higher Ground" tho

also I have to learn some spirituals before a week from Tuesday, well really by Sunday because I think I'm supposed to rehearse them that afternoon oops

also singing Stainer's "Crucifixion" a week from Sunday; I don't have the big baritone solo but I do get one of the mini interjections in the bass section (it's not as big a deal as that may sound as the entire bass section is 4 ppl; one is doing the big solo and the three interjections are split up across the rest of us) this does mean though that this season I will have had a little solo interjection thing in every concert with our church choir, which yay

I played two harsh noise sets this week and someone who saw both of them posted that this city is "a patriarchal cesspool" on FB immediately after leaving the show tonight & now I'm irrationally worried that she's talking about me

― C: (crüt), Thursday, March 14, 2013 2:29 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i apologize crut but this is making me lol. you need to write a piece called partiarchal cesspool

that was a typo but tbh it works

cesspool party!

I am making a lil album of songs that are about a min long each, I have about 10 so far where the music is done but I have finished singing over one of them, I've come up w/ vocal melodies for about 3

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, 6 March 2013 17:47 (1 week ago) Permalink

someone help me, every song I make is extremely disorienting for other people

I had my first jam with some really nice neighbors I met -- they are both classical musicians (a Juliard-trained composer and a violinist) who have other careers now but the guy is learning banjo. I played through some basic folk tunes with them (with my sub-sub-sub-Doc Watson-style flatpicking) and it was really nice and unaffected and it felt good to just be playing some pretty songs without trying to have an edge or angle of any kind. First time in a couple years I've played with other people.

Also have been doing kids songs for my one-year-old, and played at her birthday party, which was the first time I've performed in at least a couple years.

hope you got free drinks at least

three cake tickets

My performance was very moving, a couple of audience members even cried.

Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors.

That's been my life lately, choosing to work with blessed & hard-working one person indie labels in the hopes that an album will get heard by a few people, even if it means waiting 1 - 2 years to put it out.

(although I have to say it's been kind of nice to listen to something 6 months later and still be able to make a couple of mix changes, if I had chosen to self-release it would have been too late.)

I'm playing in Milwaukee 5/30 as well, lol.

thanks ivy! i'm excited. NA - look forward to seeing you!

that's cool about the label and the 7 inch, I feel like any time you have a chance to put something out that you don't have to pay for that's a huge win

for father’s day I have decided to ask for a new laptop, because my el cheapo macbook air that I got for grad school almost ten years ago is ready for retirement. On this laptop I will run a DAW. I plan to get Reason as my main, but I have two questions for this gang:
1. Is that enough?
2. If not, what should be my second? Logic Pro?

logic proooooooo

its like $200 and comes with a shitload of plug-ins of decent to great quality

Logic Pro seconded

I love Logic Pro

Definitely Logic Pro

OK OK now you’re just making me want to deviate intentionally

Ableton Live if you are going to be doing electronic stuff.

I hear you but six years of fiddling with Reason Compact and making loops has me hooked on their interface, and my prior experience with Ableton was that while it was *fun*, it didn’t get me where I wanted to go. I want to try writing “songs” and not just “building up tracks from stems,” if that makes a lick of sense.

(I am sure people can do everything with Ableton. But I couldn’t figure it out, perhaps too easily distracted by all the different doodads)
(Reason probably won’t fix this, huh)

the key for me has been spending more time in Arrangement view, where you have a regular DAW timeline, and not getting too stuck in Session (loop) view

The benefit concert I did on Mother’s Day is finally online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fblv-YIvPVM

The HC band I've been in for the last few years, Franky and the Slight Incline, is doing a record release tour of...one show! In New Paltz, NY this Friday night

https://dcxpclive.com/dcxpc-live-shows/hardcore-and-punk-show-snugs-in-new-paltz
https://www.instagram.com/p/DYIIc1OEUUs/
https://dcxpclive.com/store/p/dcxpc-live-vol-46-franky-and-the-slight-incline-live-12

...we were too disorganized to get any other gigs landed on our way up. Thank goodness Scott who's putting out this record has more of his shit together than we do. Hometown record release show June 5th at the Cave in Chapel Hill, NC

Cool!

i'm really excited about a project i'm in called Makes a Difference. it's a duo with me and Jessee (the funs, glow in the dark flowers; chicago people and others may be familiar) and our debut release is out today!

https://makesadifference.bandcamp.com/album/makes-a-difference

it's 6 songs, 33 minutes, 36 seconds.

i play in a few different projects around town, but this one is really special. Jessee really pushes me to make music in a way that i usually don't, and i think my playing and sensibilities lead them to new directions, too. the first song on here, 'angels without wings', is just...not at all what i would do if i were by myself. i love it. i love all these songs, to be honest. i'm really proud of it. we also have cds (they cost $3 + shipping).

the album cover is a drawing of a photo of a poster i made in kindergarten with ballet dancers - the drawing is on top, the photo is on the bottom it won a special "you're a little kid in southern missouri" award at an art competition. for some reason, though, i was heavily discouraged from my interesting in drawing little dancer men, in rural missouri, so the original photo stands out to me as a possible early artistic path i've found my way back to later in life.

wow i love that cover art z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzEEryvpIg

one of the members of my band (tim, the guitarist) is a part of a worker-owned bookstore initiative in my neighborhood, and they recently got to try out having a real store via a two-month residency in a nerdy knicknack store called side b. it's a small but really beautiful space, and we joked about playing a fake "tiny desk" concert there often enough that it became not a joke. we got lucky, a really talented cameraperson offered to film it, and as a result we look very cool, and i'm also proud of how well we played (though i'm the queen of forgetting lyrics during performances)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzEEryvpIg

one of the members of my band (tim, the guitarist) is a part of a worker-owned bookstore initiative in my neighborhood, and they recently got to try out having a real store via a two-month residency in a nerdy knicknack store called side b. it's a small but really beautiful space, and we joked about playing a fake "tiny desk" concert there often enough that it became not a joke. we got lucky, a really talented cameraperson offered to film it, and as a result we look very cool, and i'm also proud of how well we played (though i'm the queen of forgetting lyrics during performances)

ok that double-post is definitely not my fault, it was instantaneous, my god

yeah that album cover is sick z_tbd

cool video ivy. my band is also testing out a "live performance in an interesting location" video concept soon, it's gonna be interesting