what is going on in your musical life

i started a band with 2 of my girlfriends

Me too! We are called Ta1nted Pussy and have played 2 shows so far. We were supposed to have a show next Saturday opening for this weird Dutch guy, but he got detained by the Dutch government and told he can't leave the country without a work permit, so that show was cancelled. I play bass. I have not played bass since I was a teenager. So now I get to have fun learning/re-learning an instrument, plus I get to have fun with pedals. We are all noise/new music ladies, thus lots of fun with pedals. I got a Dr. Sample 202 for christmas! More fun! I kept one of the built-in samples, which is a lady saying "Stand By" for when we have technical difficulties during our sets.

We are planning to tour at some point later this year. L.A., maybe the South?

next month we have a gig opening for Cock E.S.P.

Our singer said, "Why do we always end up on shows with other bands with dirty names?"

having trouble finding time/motivation/energy to do anything too focused or serious over the past couple of years. i was playing with my friend who's a full-time musician but he decided to just play shows solo instead of with a band because the economics/logistics are easier that way. i've been doing some sample-based stuff on reason recently, i like it because it takes me back to when i was learning guitar and didn't know what i was doing and would come up with cool stuff by accident. also occasionally jamming/recording with the drummer from my old band, doing shitty lofi four-track stuff.

i would really like to have a more regular band where someone else bore the heavy lifting of the songwriting and i could just come in and play guitar and play shows a few times a year. but i'm not really connected to any kind of music scene anymore so i don't know how to find that kind of situation.

Band practice tonight. Eagerly anticipating our two track demo bak from being mixed/mastered although worried it might sound bad as we only spent two days on it.
Working on writing and practising our next batch of songs after an initial 6. It's now a concern that we have a 'sound' and aesthetic developing, meaning that we have songs we wrote and quite like that for one reason or another don't work very well alongside the others. Anyone had this problem? It didn't really matter before because we were still forming an identity which eventually formed into 6 upbeat slightly unhinged post punk numbers, but now this next one is a big dramatic sweeping thing with a more serious tone and we're not sure what to do with it.
Also written a reggae song, which I'm please with but need a way to subvert because right now it's verging a little too close to sixth form peace and love bob Marley cliches and I want to put a twist on all that really.
Wrote a sort of fast kinda sung-rap song but my girlfriend said it sounded like flight of the conchords. Not that that's an insult, but I wanted it to aoud more like Haim or something.

i didnt realize you were a bass! it occurs to me that i have never actually heard you sing. i imagined you having a very high tenor voice. haw.

haha that would make my dad very, very happy (he's a failed tenor in a previous life, sang lead in a doo-wop group in college)

I am technically a "bass-baritone" which really means that because most of my singing experience comes from being in ensembles rather than private, focused vocal study, I have no idea how to use my head voice and sing practically everything in chest; I have a sneaking suspicion I would end up being a true baritone or even a low tenor after several years of focused, serious voice training based on how my low range actually sounds, but the flip side is that I can actually croak out low notes even if they're inaudible unless I've been binge-drinking the night before so I dunno. But yeah, I've always sung low.

(which is actually why, in my teens, I realized I was never going to be a pop or rock singer, and why I was so taken by the grunge explosion)

putting the last touches on my new record (doesn't feel new, been working on it for about 15 months now) to send to mastering next week, figuring out how to put it out.

then i want to take some time to switch up my process, shake things up a little. work on some new synth sounds without any goals, try to finally learn ableton, record a bunch of new percussion samples. i want to take some piano lessons too, since i do everything with midi + mouse. i can figure stuff out on piano very sloooowly, so i thought it would be fun to play through some tunes in real time and get some chords under my fingers.

honestly though i probably won't do most of these things and i'll go back to what feels easy & comfortable. :/

I just got our first track back from the studio. I love it and I also cringe a bit because I can hear bits where my voice goes a bit wrong or a beat doesn't quite land how it's meant, and I'm trying to work out if anyone in their right mind would really notice or care.

roxy high school is an amazing band name

this is a neat thread idea.

i've been playing with a couple guys for the last month or so but it's just working out that well. they seem like they really want to sound like real estate or something, which isn't terrible, but a bad real estate impersonation comes out sounding reaaaaally bad, and it's not much fun to play drums to, either!

i've been writing and recording some new tunes, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually been a big breakthrough for me after about a 10 year songwriting/music coma that i didn't realize was a coma.

i'm moving back to chicago in a few months and i'm determined to join up with a good band. i used to be good friends with the cave/bitchin bajas scene so i'm hoping i can be looped back into all that stuff and that someone needs a good drummer

and yeah, high school is good, although i have to say i liked it even more when i thought the name was high school??

haha

whoa z s do you want to be in a band with me?

this is going to be really awkward when you reject me

well, that was easy. sure, let's play!

it's gonna be more like september or so

i think we are gonna be called "high school"??
a
I started a band in college called junior high university. I recorded one song for it and we had two practices and then everyone split up in different directions. that was the last band I was ever in.

have not touched my recording computer since my son was born. I long for a classical acoustic guitar so i can play around the house but I have no money for that now. debating selling an amp or two. I think my creative well has run dry for the foreseeable future.

i'm really burnt out on school this semester & have been slacking off to spend more time doing music stuff. all three bands i'm in are pretty active rn which can be overwhelming at times but is really fun. most notably i went on tour in january and started a new band called l0ud s3x which i am just so, so stoked on. the other songwriter in the band is really prolific and i really want to keep our ratio of songs 1:1. it's been a really fun challenge trying to keep up, he also writes amazing songs so i've had to be really strict about scrapping my tunes if they're not up to par. we're playing our first show at the end of the month & i'm pretty nervous because not everyone shows up for practice consistently and i want it to be spectacular

sp3ctacular l0ud s3x

I am not going to go into any more detail than this but the biggest audition opportunity of my lap literally just fell into my lap; I fully expect it to go nowhere but still, you never know...

would watch n/a z s band

DJP on x factor, it's America has been waiting for
xp

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!

Sweet! I've been shedding to record a tricky jazz version of the Zelda dungeon theme this weekend, with a band that does not have a good name.

thanks ivy and Jordan!

coming up with band names is the worst, we settled this by online poll with the 4 members, ranked choice balloting lol

I feel like it's maybe a decent name but at least not actively bad where it could hold you back

Omg — please don’t make me talk about the band name spreadsheet. We have a spreadsheet and we still can’t agree on something. I’d share my side of the story but it’s too long — the lack of decisiveness is making me lose faith :(

Nice UMS! That sounds great can’t wait to hear the whole thing

Its so hard to find a name that isn't taken these days unless it's something like Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her (which IIRC is taken).

I think if you can get just the name as an IG handle you're on the right track.

it really is the hardest thing, I do recommend setting up the poll thing where everyone picks their three favorites in order, it forces a decision

actually ivy, Faith/Void is such a great name I'm jealous

the path to a great band name is to steal it from a friend who is never going to form a band (his original idea was “faith void split” and i’m glad we ditched the “split”)

Yeah it’s a great band name

All I’m doing these days is “new set, new songs”. Was distracted for three weeks in rebuilding my rig to make it multi-channel. It was a productive dead end. Solved the problem and realized I didn’t like the results as much. Tore it up and went back to stereo

Interesting! I'm in the final stages of obsessive mixing for this drums-only record I'm working on (a collaboration with my main early drum teacher, which is a really nice thing). Getting to like "v14" for some tracks. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel though, just tweaking a few more tracks. I had a big breakthrough the other day when I remembered the existence of parallel compression/processing (exported five tracks of drum kit that I had processed to death down to one, brought it back in, took most of the processing off the original tracks, and blended the two).

Meanwhile I did this session, it was basically a sight-reading/first rehearsal/recording session deal. It had been a long time since I've been in an "everyone recording live" situation. I wish I had been able to play a little more freely, but after a couple takes you don't want to be the one who fucks it up when it's going ok. I only made one mistake that will haunt me the rest of my days on this one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFC3kAXjKg

I only made one mistake that will haunt me the rest of my days on this one

real!!!! you sound fantastic tho

meanwhile i'm going through a very intense unwound phase so i've decided to learn a bunch of unwound songs on drums. discovering that my drumming goal specifically in my band is "play more like sara lund"

great goal ivy. i did not realize that i followed one of your bandmates on letterboxd (and previously on twitter/bluesky when i was on there)

sounds hot jordan

Hornado!!

Great drumming jordan

Thanks guys <3

The other tune on that session was an intricate arrangement of the Zelda dungeon theme, curious/apprehensive to hear how that came out

i really want to hear that!!!!

album has been distributed to stores/streaming services. first single out 5/1. so nervous i feel like my body's gonna turn inside out and also so happy omg

Congrats!

Congratulations!

Zelda, lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCM-YRSZFlw

I keep thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_/_Void_Split

i have a solo show coming up, that's good. Looking forward to it etc.

at the same time, the band i was invited to join may 2021 and has taken up three years of my time/effort/money/creativity and has never formally recorded or played a show just dumped me via text. the pretense was that our schedules were incompatible and they couldn't make the progress they wanted to make (????) with my schedule. i just -- i am pissed they wasted my time, money, effort, and creativity. if i weasn't good enough you could have told me years ago, and if i was -- is this seriously how it ends?

WHATEVER i have other fish to fry

nooooo i'm so sorry ll. what dicks!

i only wish i had left of my own accord -- the truth is that my life has been pure chaos since i met them (employment tumult, abundant family issues including death of a parent, a pandemic, etc -- little of which I told them details about and rarely did it interfere with our rehearsals) and it was going nowhere. but i figured it would be better for me to continue playing regularly and i enjoyed it most of the time.

i just cannot believe i was blindsided like this. it's shocking. UGGGHHHHHH

Also thank you for responding and your accurate assessment of their behavior.

it’s a day of bad news bc i stubbed my toe on my drumkit right after practice and i think i broke it???

Booooo
Foot probs are the worst

but before i forget or pass out tonight, here's the new faith/void single, which will hopefully be on streaming services tomorrow, idk i find music distribution very confusing

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

Video is private, but excited to listen. I heard “End Of The World” (R.E.M. original) in a public place and thought “I would prefer the Faith/Void version thanks”

it is *not* on streaming bc i’m an idiot. the youtube embed should work now tho

Sounds great ivy

wow that sounds great ivy! excellent chorus, the whole thing is very hooky but slightly off kilter in a great way

LL - that sucks so much, I'm really sorry to hear about that, is that the same band that didn't have a name? sounds like they needed someone to blame for their own inaction. bands are such a hotbed of passive aggressive communication

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.