what is going on in your musical life

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!

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

whoa that is a fun cover! your band sounds great ivy. i have never played with a rock band that loud and it sounds like fun :)

There are a few things going on in my musical life, none of them esp exciting but definitely more hopeful than the last few years in there is something going on at all:

* my gongs being featured on my coworker's EP, we took promotional photos and video and it was fun

* band i've been jamming with for ***3 years*** finally has date to record in july -- finally!!

* I put together a playlist of my most recent solo recordings. They def could use a mastering (recorded in my basement) but if you like the Dusseldorf school of German rock music from the 70s, the album Moebius/Plank/Neumeier album Zero Set, weird solo synth music by women like Dorothea Raukes/Deutsche Wertarbeit DO I HAVE THE PLAYLIST FOR YOU. My faves are BB Music, Good One, and Explosive Sampler https://on.soundcloud.com/iX6z8KCsHDL7CJDn6

sorry the official title is Exploding Sampler

I have a new single up for Bandcamp Friday.

https://chrisirregardless.bandcamp.com/album/i-have-a-snake-thank-you-very-much

love to hear a la lechera update, especially when it involves gongs

meanwhile, our bassist finished the album art today and it's so good. (front and back cover are here.) we're doing a very very small run of vinyl, realizing a dream of mine even though it's so expensive and we'll prob never do it again

that's hot

By chance I came across instructions on Reddit earlier this week about how to recover data from broken HDD’s via HDDSuperClone. I had a go last night on my main production HDD that broke catastrophically (or so I thought) right in the middle of a few key projects in 2008, which I refused to bin just in case.

12 hours later and I’ve managed to rescue almost all of it. It’s like a time capsule, all my dubstep masters I thought were lost together, hundreds of ‘320 dubs’ I never burnt, flyers for all my gigs, clips of my tracks on Rinse / the Breezeblock etc.

Tbh it feels like a dream, I genuinely thought all this stuff was gone forever and now I have all the stems and Ableton projects etc to actually remaster and commission some modern remixes etc. Happy af right now :)

Amazing!

that rules so much willl!!!!

That is wonderful!!

Yeah, that's great!

excellent news!

Lol Ivy 5318008

my new band finally has a name and thus an Instagram page (I guess this is pretty much required now)

anyway, Field Hospitals with a brief snippet of a song

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5hHBAXvlda/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

that sounds freakin great!!!

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