For folks in the North Valley, we’re playing the Thursday Night Market in Chico this coming Thursday, June 10, from 6 to 9 PM. Come by and groove with us for a while if you’re around. Keep it peaceful and easy, OK?

Second, we have two upcoming gigs: April 1 at Chico’s Thursday Night Market at 6 PM, 3rd and Main Street. We’ll play until 9 or so and would love to hang out with you in between sets, so come on by.

On April 17, we’re playing a benefit at the Chico Grange’s annual Open House. They have a great stage and the hall will be set up for dancing–plus, the Grange is a great community organization and you can learn about their mission. And it’s FREE, although donations to the Grange (as well as memberships) are invited. You can get more info here. The event is at the Grange Hall at 2775 Old Nord Avenue (one block east of Nord) and we hope to see you there.

Lastly, we bought a little HD video camera and are starting to shoot some videos. We’ll let you know when we have something ready to show.

Enjoy your Spring!

The Girl In Number Six is a song we know the recording arrangement for pretty well, having recorded a demo for it previously. While there are several guitar parts we can’t cover live, it was just a question of syncing the drums and the bass together more tightly and knocking out our parts. There are still a few tweaks to make, but the version you can hear on the player is pretty much complete.

Desiree, on the other hand, required a complete re-think. The entire song really only has four chords and there are lots of ways to approach it. Finding the right way has been quite a journey, and we’re not quite there yet. We need to add one more drum part to the choruses and tighten up a couple of other things to make sure the chorus drives, but the vocal harmonies we’ve added and the guitar parts are working pretty well together. The important thing is getting the raw emotion of the song across without making life seem hopeless.

If you’d like to download the current versions of these two songs, you can go to our band page on SoundCloud to get 256 kbps MP3s. Get ‘em while they’re hot! They’ll be coming to thesixtyone.com soon.

Kudos to Beki for playing upright bass at 160 bpm and making it sound so easy. We added a little drive to the bass, so it doesn’t really sound like an upright (maybe a fretless electric), but it is. She also did a great job singing harmonies and we had fun working out new harmonies on the fly—each verse has a different feel even though the main vocal melody is the same.

For such a gloomy song in terms of lyrics, it sounds very happy. The backing vocals are just one track of Beki and I singing together on one mic, Beatles-style, but they came out pretty lush. Ken’s going to have a hard time learning his background parts while keeping up his drumming!

If you want to download the track, you can get it on SoundCloud right now for free–click here.

Hope you enjoy the song, and as always, we value your comments.

Peace.

Not the George Clinton song, but man is P-Funk awesome

The whole goal of demos is to record something simply and easily but it wasn’t the case this time. But technology aside it was pretty easy to come up with the parts to go with the main guitar and vocal lines and Beki and I had some fun Sunday night singing background vocals. The song and mix aren’t very tight but it got a draft down on tape (so to speak) so that we can start playing it as a band in rehearsal. Which won’t be until next month when Ken gets back from his Euro vacation.

For once I wrote a 3-minute song. It’s a simple little ditty with some covert messages about peace and social justice. But mostly just a little ditty…

You can stream it from the player below (you can also download it from there, actually) or right-click and save from the link below.

>> We R Doctor Funkenstein

Peace, y’all!

The only thing you need to remember is that if you navigate away from the page the music will stop playing…

Well, the end may be coming, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about The End of the World, a song I wrote last week. I recorded a demo yesterday using my laptop and my lil’ $99 Line 6 Gear Box. Plus my Seagull acoustic, Gretsch guitar, Beki’s upright bass, and a microphone. But everything that I played went through the little Line 6 box.

I wish I looked cool when I was recording, but I don't

My goal when making a demo is to work as fast as possible. I had the main guitar part and vocal all worked out, but I made up everything else as I went along. I want to improve my little setup so that I can record higher quality stuff but I don’t want to sacrifice speed. The purpose of a demo is to get an idea for how the whole thing sounds when put together, not to record a gold record anyway.

I went for a trio format, with some MIDI drum loops that I edited subbing for Ken alongside the guitar and bass. Originally I just had acoustic guitar, but then I went and got the Gretsch to get some twang on the chorus (that’s what I wrote that lick on) and add a few parts here and there. I did the vocals all myself, going with first takes as soon as I had a level.

Anywhere, here’s an MP3 of the song. Post feedback if ya got any. Peace.

>> The End of the World (demo)

Right-click and Save-As to save to your hard drive to listen properly. Listen, share, and promote the track as you will for your own non-commercial use.

The best way to stream Beat Concrete tracks is at our MySpace page (www.myspace.com/beatconcreteband) where we have a selection of tracks including this one, or our ReverbNation page at www.reverbnation.com/beatconcrete, which also has this track.

The Harmonic Capo

It was a little hard to position properly on my old Seagull Artist acoustic (the neck heel gets in the way) but once I had it on there the musical possibilities quickly became obvious. I quickly came up with a little ditty that I recorded (below) and may work into a full song at some point.

I’m totally in favor of anything that makes my playing sound more impressive. In this case, I’m using the capo to give me an octave touch harmonic on the D, G, B, and high E strings, with the low E string tuned to dropped-D. When I fret a note it plays at the normal pitch, so playing open and fretted notes creates a nice contrast.

If you’re a guitarist and are interested, you can find out more at Bob Kilgore’s website. It’s $34.95, making it the most expensive capo I’ve ever purchased, but it gives you effects you can’t get any other way. Cool.

If you’ve never listened to Fela, here’s a good place to start.

If I had 17 musicians that I could jam with (and afford to pay) that is exactly how we would roll.

Anyway, we just re-worked the bass line to be more soul-oriented so that we could groove more smoothly in our trio format live and this is what it sounds like.

>> Spiritual Underground (live)

Normal caveats apply; Firefox users need to right-click and Save-As to save to their hard drive to listen properly. Listen, share, and promote the track as you will for your own non-commercial use.

The best way to stream Beat Concrete tracks is at our MySpace page (www.myspace.com/beatconcreteband) where we have a selection of tracks including Spiritual Underground.

Peace out.