first song done

so the first song recorded and finished for the record is now up on the myspace. it's called Anal Fixation, it's the one corey inspired, haha. we recorded it on sunday and basically played it live and over dubbed the vocals. i think it took about four or five attempts before we got a clean one without any mistakes. we wanted it to sound live and full on energy, and i think that was definitely captured. so even though it's somewhat muddy sounding, it sounds real and fast!

we've done bass and drums now for two other songs, and are well on our way to making a record. the god damned jazz club is closing in a week, so me and jerry are gonna hit up the piano at the club before it's completely shut down early next week and record as much as we can with what has already been demoed and requires piano, cuz fake piano sux.

currently mixing nick's palace of worms black metal record and started recording some songs for two star spark. buy mainly focused on making our record and getting a bakers dozen of songs done by my birthday at the end of october.

started recording

so yesterday was the first day of recording some of the new tunes. started with tommi doing drums for two of the tunes, don't you wanna play with me, and you don't love me anymore. of course my damn computer software was still refusing to work properly, at one point the entire OS X operating system failed and the computer insisted that it had to be restarted. it was pretty fucking retarded. and all my plugins for mixing weren't working, but i got that fixed finally this morning by pulling off all the various version of digital performer on my computer and doing a clean reinstall of the software. so unless it starts crashing again once i start piling the effects on, we should be good to go.

as for the recording of the drums, for once, (once!) we got the mic placement just right in all the sweet spots. of course after we had broken down all of the mics and run through one of the songs we did with the band, tommi was like, oh i played that chorus part wrong, i actually do it like this! so now we gotta redux it. anyway, hopefully i can get it all to match up soncially! damnit! anyways, the drums were sounding really good, jimo was with us for most of it and said that they sounded really professional. they definitely sound better than the stuff i did with nick's black metal project (!) i think i've just finally really found the proper spots for the overheads and the bass drum. it's like the overheads need to be about 2.5 feet above the top of the cymbals (about half way between the drums and the ceiling (which is only 8ft high). and then the main bass drum mic just right at the edge of the tip of the hole, with a 2nd mic on the back end by the beater (to get more of a popping sound, or nail in the hammer). suppose we should get some grease for the beater at some point still, since it does have a tendency to squeek a bit.

anyways, once the rest of the guys showed up for practice, we did a few live takes of anal fixation, and overdubbed the vocals on top, with everyone doing the chorus part. it sounds pretty raw, but is full of energy. gonna have jimo help mix it, i think his ears are maybe less damaged than mine, and he's got a good sense of tone and how things should sound and fit in a the mix. we also attempted to record our band version of fem politique, but i don't think any of us were too happy with what we got. it wasn't bad, but there were some minor mistakes. it might still be usable though. recording five people at once live in a small room was definitely a first, and it's really not a technique that i see us doing too terribly often. really only for the songs that seem well suited for more of a live type feel. anyways, hopefully we'll get that song mixed and posted up on the myspace within a week or so. it's ridiculously short, at under 1:15. i suppose we should do more minute long songs! maybe that'll be my new thing, ha!

the retox show

well, we'll probably never play there again. four bands, no turnout. it was pretty ridiculous and pathetic. at least we brought our own booze to drink in the van this time, rather than give the damned bar all our money. they made us go last, so that all the people wouldn't theoretically leave for the out of town bands, ha! i was like, ok, but we'll be drunk, ha!

mountain animal hospital from santa cruz played first. they were really cool, like a mix of mew, sigor ros, and a little bit of the mars volta (but in a good way). they all had a mountain of pedals and the singer sang really high with lots of reverb all castrato like. plus they're drummer was really fucking good.

martyrs of the apollo guild from seattle played second. they were about what i expected. everyone liked the cute girl on keyboards. i think they'd have a lot of potential if their songs were half as long and consisted of more than one riff or groove. i left to go drink after two tunes.

light leaks actually did get people to come, about 5 or 6, ha! that's 4 or 5 better than us. they were really good, a couple of our guys had a little crush on their drummer. anyways, i'm biased, i think they're a really good band and i like their angry style of guitar rock.

so we played last, and we weren't too hammered. some of the other bands had already taken off, so whatever. we played decently for the most part. we did fem politique, inspire, busriding, popstar (jimo ran to the bathroom), birthday suit, anal fixation. and then we were gonna stop, but the four people in the audience were like, play some more, so we let corey go get a drink and played the gwen stefani cover and charisma. and they were like play one more, so we attempted to do i don't love you anymore, and it totally fell apart after the first verse. it was pretty annoying, so i was like, that's it, fuck this shit, let's get the fuck out of this dingy ass basement bullshit. the joke was that we were having band practice at the retox, ironically enough, last night at band practice, about the same amount of people stopped by to hang out as those who sat through our performance on monday night. anyway, regardless, no one in the group seemed too bummed out about the show. we just came to the conclusion that we probably shouldm't play on monday nights where we are expected to do all the promotion for two out of town bands, and where we didn't do shit to promote, cuz we were too elated over having actually played in front of people the week before, so like fuck it. it's not like the bar didn't make money off of the 15 people in the bands that played, so like whatever.

anyway, got one more day of black metal record, then we start recording stuff on sunday. gonna try to do a couple of tunes mostly live in the studio. and now my buddy charlie of two star spark has asked that i record his band a demo with their new bass player, so i'll probably start on that next week and hopefully hammer that out over 2 or 3 days.

repot on the transam show

it went really really well. we played: fem politique, birthday suit, inspire, charisma, busriding, what you waiting for (the gwen stefani cover, ha!), and anal fixation. we were pretty damn solid for the first five tunes, a little shaky on the cover, and finished loud and quickly on the last tune. billy and george, the guys running the party were really cool, and the drag performance by kegel kater (i think that's how it's spelled...) was really amazing and disturbing performance of terminal hiv set to a horrible killer song. it was pretty fucking hilarious, though i think jerry was a little spooked with his recent drama at home. anyway, we all pretty much proceeded to blow the $200 we earned at the damn bar after our drink tickets ran out, but hey whatever. it was a rather light turnout for the party, i guess they were competing with another event, but a lot of our friends came out (although about a dozen of them were on the list, ha!), and i left out a big stack of cds that mostly disappeared. at the end of the show i was like, hey if you took a cd, cool, if you got ten bucks to spare, even better. i think around $40 was collected, so that all went in the bank for the next cd. anyway, it was all a good time, i don't think anyone got laid, haha, but aside from a little crying and hugging at like six in the morning (not me, my bitter heart don't make no tears anymore), it was probably our best sounding and most consistent show so far. and jimo was definetly the missing piece in our gang. we got our next show a week from right now - next monday - over at the retox lounge. i doubt anyone will show up, but it should be alright. we'll be playing with three other bands, so we just gotta get a couple more songs together and just bash through our set again.

i got about maybe 4 or 5 days left of recording on nick's black metal record, so i'm gonna try and just bang that out as quickly as possible over the next week and a half, cuz i'm ready to start recording our new record. gonna try and drag tommi down to the studio friday during the day and hopefully band out the drums for one or two of the new tunes and pretty much take it from there.