what is going on in your musical life

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.

haha

playing in Europe thruout beginning next week thru end of April. Very excited. First time (solo).

fantasy send links
I was just told my voice had a newfound maturity and it was a bittersweet thing to hear

Yes! I’m not a pass agg person or communicator and I’m still in shock tbh. I can’t believe I spent 3 years playing w these people who have so little respect for me.

https://faithvoid.bandcamp.com/album/weird-chills

Congrats again ivy, I didn't know you were the Neil Peart of the band (drummer/lyricist). And sorry LL, that's really annoying, good riddance. More and more I'm amazed that any band with more than two people is actually functional.

lol no shit, i had a meltdown in the studio once where the guitarist and drummer clearly weren't digging our singer anymore and kept trying to "jason newstead" her my mixing down the vocals in the studio

by mixing

I finished mixing my drum duo album and had sort of internally decided against trying to pull anything off live. Buuut there just might be a chance that we could do it at an artsy festival in Europe next year, which is something I've always dreamed about.

So now I'm furiously googling gear and trying to think of how we might pull it off, without spending much money. Probably a topic for another thread but the one thing I want to avoid is playing drums to a backing track or loop with a strict tempo -- it's always too hard to get the monitoring and balance right, especially for multiple people, and it kinda sucks anyway. So instead I want to be able to do some live dubbing of the other drummer (like one mic going into my mixer & fx unit), and a way to trigger samples, preferably via drum pad (pads, one-shots, and some loops that I can re-trigger every few bars). Hopefully without spending $$$ on the industry standard Roland pad that everyone uses. I'm really kicking myself for selling my SP404, that could have worked fine, but looking into the tablet sampler app + midi controller pad option (even though I love a simple self-contained tactile piece of gear that doesn't involve a computer or smart device). Blah blah blah.

omg i hope you get to realize that dream jordan!!!

lmao @ being called "the neil peart of the band"

faith/void song is sick. jordan that sounds way too complicated for my brain but i hope you can figure it out.

my band/recording project is still slowly chugging away at recording. we've gotten into a semiroutine of getting together every couple of months to record the drums and bass for four songs, then later i go to a rehearsal space to record guitars, then finally we add vocals and other stuff at home. for the first time we're aiming at recording more songs than we need (the target is 16) and then cutting down to a cohesive 10-12 track album, and maybe saving some of the others for an EP down the road.

it's going pretty well but the mixing is getting to me, i don't have great ears and am not confident/experienced with doing that stuff on the computer. part of the point of doing this as a recording project (other than that we don't have the time or energy to play live any more) is that we can make each song sound however we like with multiple guitar parts or keyboards or extra backup vocals and not have to worry about replicating it live. but yesterday i was listening to an album our old band made where it was songs we had played out a bunch of times and it was recorded mostly live to 8-track with just vocals and some lead guitar overdubbed, and it sounds so good. i miss being able to record things like that. plus tape (even cassette tape) sounds so much better than digital, maybe it's because i'm old but also it's true.

I had my last home project mixed by my friend who is a personal and it was so worth it

but yeah I miss analog recording, there's something about it

Maybe a lot of it is natural compression that's occuring? I definitely think you need to work extra hard to get the vibe going with digital recording & mixing, although luckily there are so many amazing analog-style plugins today available for free or nearly free. The thing I like about digital is that there can be so many creative workarounds, I've done things that felt like cheating (like creating multiple copies of a track that are processed and EQ'd differently) and only learned later that it's considered a standard technique. I love mixing now as a set of puzzles to solve, but it still takes soooo much time, so much listening on multiple systems and tweaking and listening and tweaking.

Love the Faith/Void track Ivy - love the drum breakdown around 2.30.
I hear some Quicksand in there!

omg chinaski thank you, hearing any quicksand at all in our music is huge for us

and thanks everyone here for saying such nice things about it <3

I just put out a new single for Bandcamp Friday.

https://chrisirregardless.bandcamp.com/album/daisy-clocks-and-time

going on tour???? if you're in any of these places, come say hi.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/f42d05b451106547731929b0c43ff073/718e4c566df6d8f2-34/s2048x3072/c2c79df51274db9ea7cf974097213d4ad3e53ed3.jpg

Awesome flyer.

that's so rad

Those Omni magazine covers are fantastic - great flyer

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/A1Yh5422kvL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

super cool flyer!!

Turned it around tonight — sat in on gongs/small percussion w some friends at a venue I love/have played at multiple times and they had never been to. And we had such a good time. I love the last minute invite bc I don’t have time to get nervous or overthink anything. We rehearsed once earlier today and performed 5 hours later. What a week.

Also love the flyer Tyler and have fun on your tour!!!