parae - the blog thing: August 2007

our next show

is september 21st @ the lipo lounge in chinatown in sf. we're playing with 3 industrial noise goth bands or some shit. tommi and i were discussing what our set should be, i feel that we ought to play all of our most pop of pop stuff, just to be annoying fuckers. but then we were talking about putting together some new material, and that it should be more experimental or whatever. tommi was like, let's do some easy punk songs, and i was like, well we could do some grindcore, that's really hot right now. every sunday, the band across from us is this grindcore metal band, and we always lament the fact that we're not more metal, cuz it seems that metal has such a built in audience. we have no audience. just barely tolerated by our friends, haha. whatever. anyways, i was like, maybe we should try to tour. but then, like, what's the point, not like anyone would come out to a show, cuz it's not like we've networked with other bands all over the place, so barring any spike in publicity, what's the point. anyways, i just ordered some book off of fucking amazon on mixing and mastering, cuz i ought to be more learned, and not so fucking blind in the dark as to what the fuck i'm doing. maybe eventually i might one day be able to consistently capture a decent drum sound. anyways, all the beats are recorded for all the songs now, we have like 30, which is way too many. i just have to add and fix some parts and properly mix everything until my head explodes. still haven't really someone to master the fucker. kinda procrastinating on that one. october is the goal...

on mixing

ok, so like we recorded drums for three of the songs yesterday, so that leaves just one tune that needs beats, and for now, the plan is to put all electronic drums on it, just cuz. so hopefully we'll do that tomorrow night.

i've been reading up on mastering, and what i have learned is that i've been mixing hella ass backwards since like forever, trying to bring up the loudness of tracks by squashing shit with a limiter. apparently this is like not the way to do shit, so now i gotta go back and remix like 30 fucking songs, it's awesome. actually, it ain't that bad, i did a few yesterday, and really all i had to do was turn everything down so that there's enough headroom. the other dumb thing i was doing was mixing down to 16 bits instead of 24 bits. like as soon as i clicked 24, a whole world sound fuckin' opened up, and everything sounded like less thin, especially the low end. from what i've read, in order to have shit mixed all proper, mixes gotta have a good amount of headroom and ought to be mixed down in the highest resolution possible. i'm probably gonna by this big ol' book on mastering written by this guy bob katz which supposedly breaks down a lot of the voodoo and art and technique of it. but, i've given up on the idea mastering the damn cd myself, most likely it would be too crackheaded and i'd probably fuck it up, or it would just take way too long for me, cuz i would obsess over it, especially since i'd have i can barely work a god damn compressor as it is. so i've resigned myself to spending up $1200 to have the damn thing properly mastered. the only problem, finding someone to do it who isn't full shit and actually knows what the fuck they're doing and aren't gonna rip us off. and we're potentially talking about 30 songs here, should the evaluation committee approve them all for public consumption.

anyways, the drums we recored yesterday sound hot, so yeah. we went to a show last night at this place called 21 grand in oakland which was hella cool. can't believe i'd never been there before. JC, who just moved here LA dragged us out. we saw three bands, missed the first one, they were mikaela's fiend (who bought the cd of after only hearing one song - which was a mistake, cuz it's just standard guitar and drums noise that really isn't that interesting - not the boredoms drived trance they were doing on the piece we actually saw), twin featuring a former member of the need, and mika miko, who i thought were pretty unoriginal. but it was fun! i would totally go back there again, lots of hot little ambiguous indie rocker boys.