what is going on in your musical life

just bought a fuzz pedal

what kind?

are you going to use it?

electro harmonix "Sastisfaction" fuzz. it was 50$

yea im gonna use it for solos in the band i play guitar in, also might put some vocals through it for my solo/recording project

Spent all last night with the house to myself standing and practicing singing the band's songs (memorising all the words, phrasing etc). It occurred to me I dont actually "practice" singing all that often. Its an instrument like any other and I really should. Wondering if I should get some lessons to refresh my technique and not kill my throat too.

If you feel like you might not have good vocal technique (in terms of keeping your voice healthy) -- then working with someone would be a good idea if you are going to sing regularly and potentially do damage to your voice. It's like other physical exercise: sports, weightlifting -- you don't want to fuck yourself up so you have to quit.

Yeah for sure. I dont feel strained at all, but I am finding transitioning from - whats the proper term for it? Belly singing v throat singing? - anyway that, I tend to wobble on a bit.

And, smoking doesnt help with the sustaining of notes and whatnot ugh. haha.

chest voice vs. head voice?

no, smoking definitely doesn't help :/ - learning/knowing ways to catch breaths during long phrases helps though

unless you are singing tuvan style

head voice, thats the phrase i couldnt remember :)

Well, the album I played on last year just came out..
http://www.reverbnation.com/virtualtrio/album/43256

Took a tour of Tiny Telephone studios yesterday. I am such a DAW-bro, I feel like it's hard for me to wrap my head around making a totally analog record. I want to follow up with him, but unless I misunderstood it seemed like JV said he's never heard a record there that had compression and EQ engaged during mixdown that sounded good, like that stuff should be used for tracking. That seems wild to me, but maybe I didn't get what he meant. Tiny Telephone seems like an awesome place to work though.

is there a statue of stephan jenkins on his motorcycle outside of the studio?

got together with two other drummers (who both do arranging or multi-instrumental solo projects) yesterday to plan a new thing, the idea is to make dance music composed entirely of weird percussion parts that we'll record over a weekend. i'm guessing most of the editing will fall to me afterward but i'm hoping this will be a fun + relatively quick thing to make.

That sounds super cool! Can't wait to hear it!!

Really crap jam tonight,first time we've ever not gelled playing, it was mega weird. I think our drummer sucks,is one reason why - we'd played without him for 3 sessions and he threw everyone off with his ridiculous speeding up bashy shit. Pity, cos we had some new songs I really wanted to work on but it wasnt that easy. I'm tired and irritated now.

released an album on saturday w/ a show, it was really great. famed ilxor crut1s was there. nothing else to report.

finished a bunch of songs that i dont hate now i have to figure out what to do with them

https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1/1478932_569945176428337_348850186_n.jpg

Made a demo video for a synth I'm selling right now only to find out that I have no good video codec so I can export it to a good video file. Fuck me, day wasted and ruined. Back to writing lyrics.

can NOT, that is

quit 1 band due to being too busy, then joined another.

electro funk morphed into minimal synth so subtly i almost didn't notice

Would it be band mutiny if I got R to have a crack at drumming in my band because the other guy is kind of sh1t?

TBF he's not dreadful, but he wouldnt know subtle if it hit him in the groin and we need someone who can drum Talk Talk styles.

It kind of depends on what your band dynamic is - if the drummer came with the band then you might be causing ructions, if he's just been playing along with you guys for a couple of times then it'd almost certainly be fine.

Yeah hes a later addition, and the other 3 of us are really the core of things, and we've all ummed and erred over his over-enhtusiastic style of playing. But he's a mate of the bass player's as well so, I don't know. Personally I'd be just as happy with a drum machine but I'm the singer, what do I know ;)

Nearly every drummer I've ever worked with does not know the meaning of subtle.

does he know that you'd like him to play more subtly

do you want him to play like a drum machine

This might be unfair but I think there's such a thing as 'drummer complex for some players where because they're generally stuck at the back and given a functional, anchoring role in the band with maybe a few backing vocals, they sometimes feel the need to overcompensate by showboating and smacking the shit out their drumset.

keithmoon.jpg

drummers are musicians too y/n?

dl, that's something bad musicians do tbh!

Buncha Neil Youngs in this thread

u goddamn right

may u find your crazy horse

That's my dream!

Oh man, I've got two or three new songs/productions I'm working on that are about to be finished and honestly they count as by far my best work to date. It's weird though because while they're all largely based on jams we came up with as a band, they've been largely produced at home on Reason (so electronic drums), and many of the elements I've come up with away from the rest of the band.
I don't want to exclude the others from the creative process at all, but I feel like I've also got a lot of drive and vision with these tunes and I'm largely capable of working on them without the (often meddlesome) input of other people. It's a bit of a conflict really - are these the band's songs or are they my own productions with a couple of elements from other people?
Also, as we're a three-piece and these new tracks are quite a different realm from the post-punk stuff we've been playing live, I'm wondering how we can recreate them happily if we take them to the stage.
Either we'd need to get a laptop playing bits automatically, which I'm really not keen on since it makes live playing very rigid and formulaic and we'd have to work out a way for everyone to stick to time. Also laptops on stage really aren't very interesting or appealing. So the other option is to get other musicians involved and at the moment I can't even find one person to help out on guitar, let alone a keyboardist or other player.

opening up for someone whose name rhymes with bran beacon this weekend, hope it goes well (mostly in terms of the show being well-attended, since i've been trying to get this promoter to consider me for things like this for a couple years now).

Nice one. Good luck Jordan

thanks! btw i think you should go solo.

Ooh, nice one Jordan, I love Fran Freakon live.

DL, I kind of think the questions you're asking are things that only you guys can know. Obviously the act of phrasing the question is in itself a way of hashing this stuff out, so don't think I'm saying "don't ask us", but... it all depends. It depends on how you talk about this stuff to each other, it depends on what your relationships are. It depends on your confidence levels, it depends on your shared and individual goals.

are these the band's songs or are they my own productions with a couple of elements from other people?

It depends. Who wrote them? You? The band? Are they your songs but with band arrangements? Your songs with band arrangements with your own production? Or did you do everything and they just played what you told them to? One thing I will say is if the others are involved in the writing process and you decide to just take those songs for yourself because "well, I wrote them", people will be pissed off.

I'm wondering how we can recreate them happily if we take them to the stage.

Sometimes you just can't - either keep them as studio tracks or rework them so the live show is a different thing. Or consider a cheap sampler if you've got snippets coming in and out... there are a few songs by my band where I've made long-ish multi-sample tracks and just play the mp3s through my ipod when needed. Both of those things are a little more tactile than just playing a track through a laptop, but honestly I don't think having a laptop onstage is that bad a thing.

I don't necessarily agree with Jordan, but you do seem to be pretty negative about your band experiences here. I don't know if that's just because this is a place to vent without having to deal with the kickback from your friends, or if it's because you are actually not having the best time... but maybe that's another thing for you to think about.

also i'll say that if you do want to add pre-recorded electronic parts to your live band, it can be better to split them up into sections (nothing longer than four bars) and have someone manually trigger them on a sampler or drum pads. basically what emily says. that way you don't have to worry about the whole band staying in time with sequences, because even if things get off they'll get reset on the next phrase.

Crediting your band on songwriting is very important if you want to keep the band together, ime. Typically it's good to identify which songs were a collaborative process and give the guy/girl who wrote the melody+chords 51% of the songwriting credit and split the remainder between other band members-- this is re: registering the song with your publisher. Even if the profits are slim, and it is thus a symbolic gesture, having the band feel as if they are personally and creatively invested in the project leads to strong ties of commitment in the long run.

Also I've seen bands break up at this stage because the drummer is like "but I wrote that drum beat, why is my beat less important than your chords, melody and lyrics?" and the drummer is kind of otm. Technically he didn't write the song but the conditions for determining those designations are pretty arbitrary

Yeah I always credit all my collaborators even on the stuff I just stick on soundcloud as my solo work. Without them a lot of my stuff would be rubbish.

These wouldn't exist without my bandmates, really on the whole, as they're based on riffs and ideas we had whilst jamming. So they do deserve lots of credit, there's no doubt in that. It's not really a question of who these are by - these will be released under the name of the band. But I'm a bit self-conscious of doing a Billy Corgan here. Our schedules aren't syncing up as much as they used to - we used to have our own garage to practice in (goddammit) and everything was very democratic, but now we're all working different shifts and can only meet up to practice every so often. So in the meantime I'm just taking brief ideas we came up with in the practice room and fleshing them out on the computer. Every once in a while a bandmate will call-in and contribute a bit of backing vox or a lick here or there which is great, but I'm worried the dynamic risks excluding them a bit and that this could create friction since everyone in the band is a creative person at heart.

also i'll say that if you do want to add pre-recorded electronic parts to your live band, it can be better to split them up into sections (nothing longer than four bars) and have someone manually trigger them on a sampler or drum pads. basically what emily says. that way you don't have to worry about the whole band staying in time with sequences, because even if things get off they'll get reset on the next phrase.

― festival culture (Jordan), Monday, March 3, 2014 11:26 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good idea, I'll look into the possibility of this.

I don't know if that's just because this is a place to vent without having to deal with the kickback from your friends, or if it's because you are actually not having the best time... but maybe that's another thing for you to think about.

I realise I come across like I'm moaning a lot ITT, but really it's because firstly I care a lot about the other dudes in my band - we've become very close since we started playing together a couple of years ago and I respect their ideas and ultimately their feelings. The band is something we all care about a lot but I'm very conscious of trampling or running wild around a project and getting too involved while blocking them out and making them feel frustrated. We've got very similar ideas but certain things (production choices for example, the drums never seem to be loud enough for my drummer evidently) we'll disagree with and then it can feel like a bit of an emotional battlefield. I guess this is regular band shit, and yeah I'm venting and thinking through out loud.