Saturday, April 24, 2010

Ruby lounge open mic

As it's been a couple of months since the Welsh dragon gig & no upcoming shows on the horizon, I went along to the Ruby lounge open mic night just to keep the rust away. It's only a three song set, an open mic standard, but it was still good to perform:

Trouble
Like a dog with a bone
Hear the train a'comin

I rushed through the songs abit, but overall it was good to play. Bonnie's talking about organising another acoustic pillage at the Tugboat, so it'll be interesting to see if that eventuates & if I can get Pisces together to perform. I know Mike's looking at slowing down his performing now that he's got a family so will have to see how that pans out.
Watched "It might get loud" last night. It was interesting to see the three guitarist's talk about their passion for playing and how their personalties affected their styles. I'd say Jack White left the biggest impression. He has an interesting attitude, "start a fight with your guitar & make sure you win" he told his 9yr old son, Jack jr. He spoke a lot about conflict & the need for dissruption in the creative process. I generally work in the opposite manner, I write easier when I'm stimulated & creatively inspired, not when I'm conflicted. I always thought that was a bit of a myth that creative types had fallen into believing, that you've got to be depressed in order to create. We need some new rolemodels. Incredible performer & player though, that man just oozes authenticity, it'll be interesting to see what type of legacy he has in 20, 30 years & how he's remembered.

I've decided that the answer to what to do with the first Pisces ep is Vinyl. I'm gonna print 20, it's only about $200, & create my own record cover. It's a good option I think, if people want to download it they can have it for free but the vinyl will be charged. I'll update more on that later.

I've updated all my tracks & live performances on my apra site, I'm not sure how it works but I think they pay you royakties for performing your tunes. It'll be interesting to see how that all works.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy Session 4

Caught up with Allan yesterday & did guitar, cabasa & vocal for "I'm your lover" & guitar & tamba for "City streets". Really liking the way the albums coming together, it was completely by chance that Lover ended up being the first song we recorded. It was always my intention to have "look at the sun (fall again)" as the opening track on L,L,L but due to time constraints on the first day of recording I cut both that track & "broken promises". We got straight into recording & did Lover cause it's so familiar. Mike did a nice little drum intro & G brought in his bass after 4 bars with the guitar following 8 later. It's a really nice introduction to the record & hopefully we can get it right with the recording cause it's a fantastic oppurtunity to have some real explosiveness at the beginning of the album. As an introduction to us to a lot of potential new listeners it's important we grab them straight away & this track will do this if done right. I recorded a second guitar track on the main riff to give it more emphasis, the drum, bass & cabasa do a nice job of bringing the listener in but it's the riff that'll really grab them so I want it emphasised. For that reason I'm panning the second guitar to the left channel to give it some seperation from the first guitar & putting the cabasa through the right. It'll hopefully allow the listener to be brought in slowly then held by the riff.
I did a couple of takes on the vocal for it, getting it pretty right the second time out with the only problem being that I was quite tentative with the first line. Seeing that it's going to be the first the listener hears vocals I didn't want it to be a tentative start so I re-recorded the first verse. Unfortunately because it's quite a gutsy song I wrecked my vocal on those two takes so when I tried again my voice started breaking. Shit. I left it & will do the first verse another day.
That's the difference between a trained & untrained singer.... : )
"City streets" sounds good, I did the guitar on Allan's Gretsch just to give it more spark. Something was missing though so I tried putting it through the left channel & the original guide guitar I did earlier through the right. It worked so I put a tamba on just to emphasise the rhthym of the song & I think it sounds great. I'll do a vocal next time up.. Things going well!