We know things have been quiet around here for the past few weeks, and we feel like we owe an explanation. Here’s what’s been happening:
Right after the Gotham Rocks showcase Brian got a new computer for the studio for a few reasons, most importantly to be able to run the newest version of the recording program Pro Tools. It has been a very rocky transition, to say the least. He’s been spending all his time trying to get the kinks worked out, which is the primary reason things have been so dead over here.
The first nightmare happened with the live recordings we did at the Gotham Rocks show. We tried to do a multi-track recording of our whole set, but the hard drive couldn’t keep up with how much information was being sent to it, so we only got the middle three songs. Those three songs sounded great though, so we thought we could still use them somehow. While Brian was setting up the new computer he was mixing the live songs straight from the external hard drive that we used to record the show, so there wasn’t another copy of it saved anywhere.
Once Brian finished getting the new computer ready, he went to save a backup copy of the live recordings over to it, but he copied the wrong folder, which wound up erasing the live recordings from the show instead of saving a second copy. He tried for days to recover the deleted files, and found everything except Shane’s guitar, but unfortunately that file seems to be lost forever. Luckily he burned rough mixes of two songs onto a CD to show the rest of the band before the files got deleted, and we still have the CD, so we can release those mixes if we want. They won’t be as good as the final mixes Brian had before the files disappeared, but they still sound pretty damn good for live recordings.
After sorting through the live recording disaster, Brian went to get the video from the show edited and posted to YouTube. Then he found out the new version of iMovie, which came with the new computer, is completely different than the version he used to have. Besides having a completely different workflow, which took a few days to learn and get used to, it also processes files a lot differently.
We use your run-of-the-mill miniDV camera to record our shows, like most people use for making home videos, but the new iMovie changed how it processes DV footage and the results look much worse than they used to. It took a while to figure out how to navigate around this issue and arrive at a final video that doesn’t look terrible. There are still a few things we’re going to try to improve the quality of the videos, but at least we now have something that’s good enough to post.
In the middle of the new computer disaster, Brian was interviewed by Dr. T from iLike2Rock.net. We were offered a featured spot on their site because of our performance at the Gotham Rocks show, and we were asked to do an interview so that they could put together a podcast featuring the band. We are this week’s "Band Of The Week," and a podcast including two songs from Standing Over Shadows and the full interview with Brian is up on their site. You can also use the direct link to download the mp3 for the podcast.
Now that all of this stuff has been sorted out we’re going to go back to posting regular updates again. Sorry for the down time!
Monday, August 31, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
August '09 Metal iMix
The Metal iMix for August '09 is here! This month features songs by most of the bands that are playing our Gotham Rocks Showcase on August 8th.
We figured this was the perfect way for you to get to know some of the other bands that we're going to be sharing the stage with at Crash Mansion in a week. We also threw The Dirty Pearls in there because they got us our last show at Crash, and also because without Tommy's help we never would have gotten this one. We put their song "Icarus (Hollywood la la la)" on there as a token of our appreciation for all the help we've gotten from the Pearls. Thanks guys!
Here are the songs for August!
We figured this was the perfect way for you to get to know some of the other bands that we're going to be sharing the stage with at Crash Mansion in a week. We also threw The Dirty Pearls in there because they got us our last show at Crash, and also because without Tommy's help we never would have gotten this one. We put their song "Icarus (Hollywood la la la)" on there as a token of our appreciation for all the help we've gotten from the Pearls. Thanks guys!
Here are the songs for August!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Recording New Songs
This post has a long and a short version.
Short Version: The basic information, who, what, where, etc.
Long version: Details of our approach to these recordings
Average Read Time (Short Version): 2 Min
Average Read Time (Long Version): 8 Min
Sorry it's been so dead around here lately, we've put up some updates on our Twitter account over the past few weeks, but haven't had anything major to write about, until now!
We're headed into the amazing Dennis Riese Family Recording Studio at New York University today to record for a class run by a production legend, Rod Hui. Rod was Brian's professor for a mixing lab when he was in college, so when he heard Rod was looking for bands to record this summer, we jumped at the chance to get into a studio with a large format console, a solid compliment of outboard gear, and a highly decorated producer.
We're going to be recording two new songs, "Bulletproof" and "Break The Mold". We've played "Bulletproof" live a few times, so some of you may know that one, but "Break The Mold" has never left our rehearsal room, so we're excited to be able to lay it down before Mike leaves for college. We haven't decided exactly how we plan to release these songs yet, a large part of the decision may depend on how the recordings turn out.
Our plan is to focus on nailing the drum sounds and performances while we're there, and do the rest of the parts back at Brian's studio like we did for the last record. There are a few reasons we're going this route. The first is the simple factor of time, we only have 4 hours to set up, record two songs, break down, and get copies of the session files made. The second is space and transportation: it would be impossible for us to fit a full drum set, a 4x12 half stack and head, a bass amp, guitars, and a bass into one car and still have room to carry the band members.
If we had more time we probably would have found a way to get all of our gear in, but because we only have four hours, it isn't worth it. Even if we came in with our amp settings dialed in exactly how we want them, trying to nail the perfect guitar sound, bass sound, and drum sounds would probably require at least 3 hours of set up alone. By focusing on the drums, we can utilize the most important aspects of the studio without over-extending ourselves and trying to do too much.
--Stop here for short version--
Drums, more than any other instrument, require the kinds of tools you can only get at a big studio. The first, and possibly most over-looked, is the live room. For you non-studio people, this is the room where the drums, amps, and anything that's being recorded goes. It's separate from the control room, which is where all the recording equipment, like the mixing console, is. There are two reasons the live room in a full-size studio is important for drums, more so than any other instrument.
The sound of recorded drums on almost, if not every, album ever made uses microphones placed out away from the drum kit, so that it picks up all of the drums. These mics are called "room mics", since they're placed out in the room away from the drums. If you think about it, this makes sense, when you listen to a drum set, do you put your ear right next to the snare drum to hear it? No, you stand back and listen to the kit being played as a whole. These room mics give perspective and depth to drum recordings.
The problem with room mics is that how good they sound depends on the acoustics of the room they are in. If you have a shitty sounding room, your room mics will sound like shit. Fortunately a full size studio should have at least a decent sounding room, which is one reason why it can help a lot to record drums there.
The other big advantage of using the live room in a full-size studio to record is the actual space, and how it's designed for isolation. Without this it's impossible to effectively pull off "live" recording. Live is in quotes because live studio recording is different than live recording from a show. Live recording is when all the instruments are being recorded at the same time, rather than doing the drums first, then the bass, guitars, etc. In order to record live you need to a) have the space to put all the people performing in the same room, and b) have a way to keep their instruments from being picked up in the wrong mics.
The big bonus of live recording is that the musicians all get to play together, feed off each other's energy, and perform the song as if they were on stage. If you just have one person sitting alone in a room playing to a metronome, it winds up sounding pretty sterile and robotic. However, if you can get the band together to play in the same room, using the metronome as a guide to keep them from straying way off tempo, all of a sudden they can push and pull the beat together and really add some energy and life to the recordings. If you get the drums recorded with this energy, it's permanently captured in the timing of the drum parts. If you then want to go back and re-record instruments, like we are planning to do, that feeling and groove will still be there so the other instruments will be able to recreate it during the re-recording.
Another problem with live recording is that you also need a way to keep the instruments separated from each other. If you've got a room mic up on the drums, but the guitar player's amp is in the room with it, you're going to get some guitar in the drum's mic. This unwanted sound from another instrument is called "bleed," and you want to have as little of this as possible. Preferably none at all. It's for this reason that big studios build "iso booths" (short for isolation booths) where you can put a guitar amp and close it off from the rest of the studio. With the guitar amp off in the iso booth, you won't be able to hear any guitar in the live room, this ensures that you don't get any bleed on the drum mics. You may ask, how does one hear the guitar then? Since the guitar is being recorded, too, it has mics on it, so you just take the signal coming from the guitar mics and send it to the headphones everyone is wearing while they record.
Besides the live room, the reason a full-size studio is more important for drums than anything else is the equipment. It's not that it necessarily has better equipment, although some of it may be, it's that it has a lot more of the better equipment.
Remember the example of sticking your head next to the snare drum that came up a few paragraphs back? Even though this isn't natural, if you can imagine doing it you'd probably come to the conclusion that, besides possibly going deaf, you'd hear a very strong impact. By placing mics close up on the drums like this, you achieve a sound with a lot of attack and presence. The mics that go right next to the drums are called "close mics", and you blend them with the room mics to balance the sharp attack with the perspective of the room to get a rich, full drum sound. In order to get a modern drum sound, most people will close mic all of the drums (toms, kick, snare) and even some of the percussion (china crash, ride cymbal). This can lead to sessions with a huge number of microphones set up.
The thing is that there's a bunch more equipment needed, like a preamp and converter, to get the sound from a microphone recorded into the computer. Now, it's relatively cheap to buy enough equipment to process one or two mics at a level that can compete with a professional studio. It becomes problematic when you want to use a top and bottom mic on the snare, an inside and outside mic on the kick, four tom mics, two room mics, some overheads, some close cymbal mics, and a mono room mic. Having enough gear to handle all that on a pro level is why you need to go to a full-size studio to record drums if you want to get the kind of drum sound we're after.
If we get the drums done as close to perfect as we can, using the tools of the big studio to their full advantage, we will be in good shape when we come back to Brian's. He has enough gear to handle at least two mics at a level competitive with the studio we will be in today, and since guitars, bass, and vocals can all be done well with one mic, two or three at the most, we should be fine recording them once we get back here.
We're going to use these songs as a test to see how we should approach recording for the next album. We've been talking about going to a big-name professional studio, like Avatar or Germano, to do drums for the next album for a while. It would be pretty expensive, but still much cheaper than doing a whole album there. Since we're getting these songs done for free, depending on the results, we'll be able to tell if it's worth the money to consider doing it again in the future.
Short Version: The basic information, who, what, where, etc.
Long version: Details of our approach to these recordings
Average Read Time (Short Version): 2 Min
Average Read Time (Long Version): 8 Min
Sorry it's been so dead around here lately, we've put up some updates on our Twitter account over the past few weeks, but haven't had anything major to write about, until now!
We're headed into the amazing Dennis Riese Family Recording Studio at New York University today to record for a class run by a production legend, Rod Hui. Rod was Brian's professor for a mixing lab when he was in college, so when he heard Rod was looking for bands to record this summer, we jumped at the chance to get into a studio with a large format console, a solid compliment of outboard gear, and a highly decorated producer.
We're going to be recording two new songs, "Bulletproof" and "Break The Mold". We've played "Bulletproof" live a few times, so some of you may know that one, but "Break The Mold" has never left our rehearsal room, so we're excited to be able to lay it down before Mike leaves for college. We haven't decided exactly how we plan to release these songs yet, a large part of the decision may depend on how the recordings turn out.
Our plan is to focus on nailing the drum sounds and performances while we're there, and do the rest of the parts back at Brian's studio like we did for the last record. There are a few reasons we're going this route. The first is the simple factor of time, we only have 4 hours to set up, record two songs, break down, and get copies of the session files made. The second is space and transportation: it would be impossible for us to fit a full drum set, a 4x12 half stack and head, a bass amp, guitars, and a bass into one car and still have room to carry the band members.
If we had more time we probably would have found a way to get all of our gear in, but because we only have four hours, it isn't worth it. Even if we came in with our amp settings dialed in exactly how we want them, trying to nail the perfect guitar sound, bass sound, and drum sounds would probably require at least 3 hours of set up alone. By focusing on the drums, we can utilize the most important aspects of the studio without over-extending ourselves and trying to do too much.
--Stop here for short version--
Drums, more than any other instrument, require the kinds of tools you can only get at a big studio. The first, and possibly most over-looked, is the live room. For you non-studio people, this is the room where the drums, amps, and anything that's being recorded goes. It's separate from the control room, which is where all the recording equipment, like the mixing console, is. There are two reasons the live room in a full-size studio is important for drums, more so than any other instrument.
The sound of recorded drums on almost, if not every, album ever made uses microphones placed out away from the drum kit, so that it picks up all of the drums. These mics are called "room mics", since they're placed out in the room away from the drums. If you think about it, this makes sense, when you listen to a drum set, do you put your ear right next to the snare drum to hear it? No, you stand back and listen to the kit being played as a whole. These room mics give perspective and depth to drum recordings.
The problem with room mics is that how good they sound depends on the acoustics of the room they are in. If you have a shitty sounding room, your room mics will sound like shit. Fortunately a full size studio should have at least a decent sounding room, which is one reason why it can help a lot to record drums there.
The other big advantage of using the live room in a full-size studio to record is the actual space, and how it's designed for isolation. Without this it's impossible to effectively pull off "live" recording. Live is in quotes because live studio recording is different than live recording from a show. Live recording is when all the instruments are being recorded at the same time, rather than doing the drums first, then the bass, guitars, etc. In order to record live you need to a) have the space to put all the people performing in the same room, and b) have a way to keep their instruments from being picked up in the wrong mics.
The big bonus of live recording is that the musicians all get to play together, feed off each other's energy, and perform the song as if they were on stage. If you just have one person sitting alone in a room playing to a metronome, it winds up sounding pretty sterile and robotic. However, if you can get the band together to play in the same room, using the metronome as a guide to keep them from straying way off tempo, all of a sudden they can push and pull the beat together and really add some energy and life to the recordings. If you get the drums recorded with this energy, it's permanently captured in the timing of the drum parts. If you then want to go back and re-record instruments, like we are planning to do, that feeling and groove will still be there so the other instruments will be able to recreate it during the re-recording.
Another problem with live recording is that you also need a way to keep the instruments separated from each other. If you've got a room mic up on the drums, but the guitar player's amp is in the room with it, you're going to get some guitar in the drum's mic. This unwanted sound from another instrument is called "bleed," and you want to have as little of this as possible. Preferably none at all. It's for this reason that big studios build "iso booths" (short for isolation booths) where you can put a guitar amp and close it off from the rest of the studio. With the guitar amp off in the iso booth, you won't be able to hear any guitar in the live room, this ensures that you don't get any bleed on the drum mics. You may ask, how does one hear the guitar then? Since the guitar is being recorded, too, it has mics on it, so you just take the signal coming from the guitar mics and send it to the headphones everyone is wearing while they record.
Besides the live room, the reason a full-size studio is more important for drums than anything else is the equipment. It's not that it necessarily has better equipment, although some of it may be, it's that it has a lot more of the better equipment.
Remember the example of sticking your head next to the snare drum that came up a few paragraphs back? Even though this isn't natural, if you can imagine doing it you'd probably come to the conclusion that, besides possibly going deaf, you'd hear a very strong impact. By placing mics close up on the drums like this, you achieve a sound with a lot of attack and presence. The mics that go right next to the drums are called "close mics", and you blend them with the room mics to balance the sharp attack with the perspective of the room to get a rich, full drum sound. In order to get a modern drum sound, most people will close mic all of the drums (toms, kick, snare) and even some of the percussion (china crash, ride cymbal). This can lead to sessions with a huge number of microphones set up.
The thing is that there's a bunch more equipment needed, like a preamp and converter, to get the sound from a microphone recorded into the computer. Now, it's relatively cheap to buy enough equipment to process one or two mics at a level that can compete with a professional studio. It becomes problematic when you want to use a top and bottom mic on the snare, an inside and outside mic on the kick, four tom mics, two room mics, some overheads, some close cymbal mics, and a mono room mic. Having enough gear to handle all that on a pro level is why you need to go to a full-size studio to record drums if you want to get the kind of drum sound we're after.
If we get the drums done as close to perfect as we can, using the tools of the big studio to their full advantage, we will be in good shape when we come back to Brian's. He has enough gear to handle at least two mics at a level competitive with the studio we will be in today, and since guitars, bass, and vocals can all be done well with one mic, two or three at the most, we should be fine recording them once we get back here.
We're going to use these songs as a test to see how we should approach recording for the next album. We've been talking about going to a big-name professional studio, like Avatar or Germano, to do drums for the next album for a while. It would be pretty expensive, but still much cheaper than doing a whole album there. Since we're getting these songs done for free, depending on the results, we'll be able to tell if it's worth the money to consider doing it again in the future.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
July '09 Metal iMix
Here's our metal playlist for the month of July! Hopefully it will give you a taste of what bands we're into at the moment. Right now Brian's really enjoying Dream Theater's new release, Black Clouds & Silver Linings so there are two tracks on there from that album. As always, you've got two from your favorite unsigned metal band, DIVERGENCE.
We also put some on there from Alter Bridge and Shinedown, two bands with amazing lead singers that you should check out if you don't know them. Shinedown's third album (their latest, The Sound Of Madness) is starting to make a lot of noise on mainstream radio because of the song "Second Chance." Just because they're on mainstream radio doesn't mean they're soft though. We like them for the same reason we like Sevendust, who's song "Inside" is on this playlist. Both bands manage to achieve a sound that is both heavy as hell and still musically pleasing, which is something we aim for ourselves if you couldn't tell.
Here is the playlist for July, enjoy!
P.S. This is our 100th Post!!
We also put some on there from Alter Bridge and Shinedown, two bands with amazing lead singers that you should check out if you don't know them. Shinedown's third album (their latest, The Sound Of Madness) is starting to make a lot of noise on mainstream radio because of the song "Second Chance." Just because they're on mainstream radio doesn't mean they're soft though. We like them for the same reason we like Sevendust, who's song "Inside" is on this playlist. Both bands manage to achieve a sound that is both heavy as hell and still musically pleasing, which is something we aim for ourselves if you couldn't tell.
Here is the playlist for July, enjoy!
P.S. This is our 100th Post!!
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Gotham Rocks Showcase August 8th
We booked our next show! We're going to be playing the Gotham Rocks showcase on Saturday August 8th at Crash Mansion!
Saturday 8/8 @ 6:30 PM | $10 Tix
CRASH MANSION
199 Bowery St. (@ Spring St.)
New York, NY 10002
21+ w/ I.D. to Enter
This is going to be a great show for a lot of reasons. First, Crash Mansion is an amazing venue. When we got the last-minute call to open for The Dirty Pearls there everyone was in agreement that we've never sounded better, and that had a lot to do with the amazing PA system the venue has in place. Another reason is that, because it's a Gotham Rocks show, we'll be playing alongside plenty of other really talented modern rock/metal bands, including Diablo Royale and Shadows Lie!
Gotham Rocks puts these showcases together for the bands to get sponsorships with musical equipment manufacturers, music magazines, and radio stations. We're hoping to make a strong impression with not only the Gotham Rocks people, so that we can get more shows, but also with the people from the various companies, which in past shows have included Marshall Amps, Sirius/XM Radio, and LiveNation!
We're really pumped to have this opportunity, so you know we'll be there ready to rock extra hard, hopefully you'll be there to rock with us!
Saturday 8/8 @ 6:30 PM | $10 Tix
CRASH MANSION
199 Bowery St. (@ Spring St.)
New York, NY 10002
21+ w/ I.D. to Enter
This is going to be a great show for a lot of reasons. First, Crash Mansion is an amazing venue. When we got the last-minute call to open for The Dirty Pearls there everyone was in agreement that we've never sounded better, and that had a lot to do with the amazing PA system the venue has in place. Another reason is that, because it's a Gotham Rocks show, we'll be playing alongside plenty of other really talented modern rock/metal bands, including Diablo Royale and Shadows Lie!
Gotham Rocks puts these showcases together for the bands to get sponsorships with musical equipment manufacturers, music magazines, and radio stations. We're hoping to make a strong impression with not only the Gotham Rocks people, so that we can get more shows, but also with the people from the various companies, which in past shows have included Marshall Amps, Sirius/XM Radio, and LiveNation!
We're really pumped to have this opportunity, so you know we'll be there ready to rock extra hard, hopefully you'll be there to rock with us!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Thanks For Coming To Crash Mansion Last Night
We just wanted to write a big THANK YOU here to everyone that came to see us play at Crash Mansion with The Dirty Pearls in NYC last night. Yes, we had a show last night, it was totally last minute and we didn't get around to posting a message about it here. We did send an e-mail to our mailing list about it though, so if you're not subscribed yet you should sign up.
Tommy from the Dirty Pearls was originally trying to get us on this show, but the owner of Crash Mansion booked his own bands instead. The day before the show one of those bands dropped out and Tommy gave us a call asking us if we would fill in last minute. We jumped at the chance to open up for such a prominent band in the New York underground music scene.
Mike was in Virginia the day before the show and hauled ass back to NJ the day of, the rest of us took half days at work so we could run through our set when Mike got back. We hadn't played together since our show at the Ivy over two weeks earlier, so we rehearsed quickly and then jumped on a train with our guitars and headed into the city for the gig.
Crash Mansion had easily the nicest sound system of any venue we played at, and the crowd was in agreement that we've never sounded better. We also got a chance to make a good impression with some prominent people in the New York music scene, so we're hoping that will help us land even better shows in the future.
Unfortunately we didn't have enough hands to bring a video camera with us to the show, so we won't be able to put anything up on YouTube this time around. We did have our buddy Artem take more photos though, so we'll at least have some pictures to put up.
Rather than write a one sentence blog post about little things like putting up new pictures, we're going to save short messages like that for our Twitter/Facebook/MySpace status updates. If you want to stay in the loop about that kind of stuff make sure you follow us on one of those networks!
Tommy from the Dirty Pearls was originally trying to get us on this show, but the owner of Crash Mansion booked his own bands instead. The day before the show one of those bands dropped out and Tommy gave us a call asking us if we would fill in last minute. We jumped at the chance to open up for such a prominent band in the New York underground music scene.
Mike was in Virginia the day before the show and hauled ass back to NJ the day of, the rest of us took half days at work so we could run through our set when Mike got back. We hadn't played together since our show at the Ivy over two weeks earlier, so we rehearsed quickly and then jumped on a train with our guitars and headed into the city for the gig.
Crash Mansion had easily the nicest sound system of any venue we played at, and the crowd was in agreement that we've never sounded better. We also got a chance to make a good impression with some prominent people in the New York music scene, so we're hoping that will help us land even better shows in the future.
Unfortunately we didn't have enough hands to bring a video camera with us to the show, so we won't be able to put anything up on YouTube this time around. We did have our buddy Artem take more photos though, so we'll at least have some pictures to put up.
Rather than write a one sentence blog post about little things like putting up new pictures, we're going to save short messages like that for our Twitter/Facebook/MySpace status updates. If you want to stay in the loop about that kind of stuff make sure you follow us on one of those networks!
Thursday, June 11, 2009
June '09 Metal iMix
We're trying a new way of promoting the band - a monthly hard rock/heavy metal iTunes iMix! Each month we'll put up a playlist of 10 songs, including a few of ours, so that we can share the songs we're into at the moment with you. Hopefully it will be successful, and something we will keep up with!
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Killing In The Name Video Posted
The last video from our gig at the Ivy Inn, a cover of Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name," is up! In case you missed them, here are all the videos from the show!
Killing In The Name LIVE @ The Ivy Inn 5/30/09
Killing In The Name LIVE @ The Ivy Inn 5/30/09
Monday, June 8, 2009
Standing Over Shadows Video Posted
The video for "Standing Over Shadows" from our gig two Saturdays ago at The Ivy Inn in Princeton, NJ is up!
Standing Over Shadows LIVE @ The Ivy Inn 5/30/09
Standing Over Shadows LIVE @ The Ivy Inn 5/30/09
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Bulletproof Video From The Ivy Posted
The video for "Bulletproof" from our gig two Saturdays ago at The Ivy Inn in Princeton, NJ is up!
Bulletproof LIVE @ The Ivy Inn 5/30/09
Bulletproof LIVE @ The Ivy Inn 5/30/09
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