New Recording Set Up
Well, on Tuesday, Neil set up the new digital recording gear that he purchased. The new gear looks pretty nice and it will make it easier to mix down each instrument individually again, rather than use the single microphone that we’ve used for the last couple of recordings.Â
Personally, I like the idea of making at least slight changes to our recording set up or gear with each new set of recordings. It’s fun to experiment with the different sounds that can come from recording or playing the music in different ways and it makes each set of recordings unique in their own ways. It doesn’t have to be something so significant as all new equipment with each recording, but just making slight changes to the sounds can really add a lot when you listen to the sound over time.
I was pretty surprised at how good the Lonely Microphone sessions sounded and they’re actually some of my favorite recordings now. At first, I was just thinking that they’d be decent enough for us to just listen to for personal purposes but, after listening to them quite a few times, I really like the thick muddy sound that came out of those recordings. The music sounds alive in a way that can’t be found in multitrack production recordings.Â
However, I’m really excited to see how the new recording equipment sounds and explore the different possibilities it offers. We’ll likely post up the sounds once we get a couple other kinks worked out with sound levels and record this weekend.
Emailed Music
I just loaded up a collaborated project between me and a couple of friends I went to college with. We tried for the longest time to figure out how we could make music while living so far apart. After we figured it out, we put these tracks together in about 4 or 5 months through email wave files back and forth, and these tracks are what we came up with.
It started with an electronic drum beat from Warren Carroll in Richmond. Then I layered all kinds of tracks with piano, bass, strings, horns, synths, and bells. Beavis in DC would then put the final guitar touches on them.
Enjoy the emailed music.
04.18.08The Haywire Transmission
I loaded up some of the solo stuff I was working on when I initially joined Neil and Jeremy some time back. This is really just a mix of various electronic pieces that I was working on after my last band, Stars Burn Out, broke apart.
It seems that each time that I leave a band, I still feel a need to write some kind of music and it’s often easiest working with computers in those situations. They’re a great way of putting together polyphonic material even if you’re not in a position where you can play all of the instruments.
The real limitation with writing music strictly on computers is the lack of feedback from other musicians. You really get to miss bouncing ideas off of other people. After writing a good bit of this material, I started to get tired of my own ideas.
So it was great when I first joined Neil and Jeremy that I got to use some of this material in a live situation. I’d basically play my laptop as an instrument alongside what Neil and Jeremy were playing.
It was pretty limited as a live instrument, however, so I’ve since dropped using it on a regular basis. It also gets a bit tedious writing on a laptop and requires a lot of time, which I don’t have much of these days.
By the way, I don’t really have real cover art for this stuff yet. I’ll probably draw something up on Monday.
Hope everyone enjoys it.
New Links
I added a couple of links to the Links page. Â It looked pretty empty and I wanted a place where we could share any of the music we’re interested in at the moment. Â
To me, listening to other bands has always been a kind of fuel to add to the fire. Â Often, I’ll hear little things in other people’s music that I’ll note and want to use whenever I play. Â Sometimes it even happens subconsciously. Â I’ll play something and, in listening to it later, I realize that it’s been influenced from someone else’s work. Â
Anyways, most people that know me would probably note that I change my musical interests on almost a weekly basis. Â One week, I’ll be listening to a style of music that’s totally chill and relaxing, the next I’m solely listening the loudest, most abrasive stuff I can find. Â It all depends on my mood and how I feel like influencing it. Â
Recently, I’ve been train commuting into DC which can be a harrowing experience at times. Â People are rushing back and forth everywhere and in every direction. Â Everyone’s got somewhere to be and they’re all trying to get there as fast as they can, myself often included. Â However, in this commotion, there’s an excitement that’s hard to explain. Â It just feels so “metropolitan”. Â
In an attempt to try to keep myself calm amidst this mass confusion I’ve been listening to some more relaxing stuff, or at least stuff that seems to flow with the movement of the crowd.
Anyways, check it out and feel free to post your thoughts. Â Thanks.
04.16.08We’re set up!
Well, in an effort to avoid the boredom of not really having anything to do at work and due to some problems easily sharing songs with others, I thought it was about time that The Chill needed a web site. I went ahead and set up the basics and we’ll probably add some more as needed. The primary thing that I think everyone will be here for is the music so I went ahead and set that up as the landing page for now.Â
Just about everything that I’m aware of is here from music that Neil and Jeremy were playing before I arrived through last weekend. There are a couple of things left on our old MySpace page that I’ll need to figure out how to get to. Unfortunately, I don’t have a the information to get into that page right now so I can move it over here. Perhaps we’ll do that later.
In any case, I hope everyone enjoys the new stuff as well as the old. Please feel free to comment as you like.