June Happenings
I’ve been writing some new songs and exploring my singer-songwriter side a little bit lately. Most recently, I’ve been working with English folk artist Richard John on a new track. He came up with some chord ideas, then I worked out a verse riff based on them and put a new chorus on it. It’s fun to swap ideas back and forth across the Atlantic and I’m pleased with the results so far. You can hear the track I recorded using contributions from Richard on guitar and banjo here. It’s a sad song called “The Years”—not sure if we’ll play it with Beat Concrete or not; we’ll see.
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?
Back in the Garage
Since late December, we’ve been taking some time to work on recording. We’ve been working on our live performances, and recording is very different, so we’ve had to take a look at songs we’ve been performing and approach them differently. For the two tracks we’re working on now, we have taken two diverging paths.
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.
One Quarter Full
We did some recording over the holiday break, and One Quarter Full is the first song to come out of that. Starting with a stereo track of drums of rhythm guitar recorded at rehearsal (no click track, so the tempo is um, natural), we layered 3 guitar tracks, 2 vocal tracks, and 1 bass track to make what is (surprisingly) probably our best-sounding recorded track to date.
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.
New Demo: We R Doctor Funkenstein
Spent Sunday recording this and then made some tweaks and got a mix together today. Pretty much the same process as for ‘The End of the World’: cranked it out using Project5 and the little Line6 GearBox. Had to dig out my M-Audio Firewire 410 interface to record vocals as I didn’t want to go through the hassle of getting a microphone into the 1/4″ input of the GearBox. That turned out to be a mistake as the 410 is really a POS that always has driver problems. It almost destroyed my laptop (had to do a serious CHKDSK) but finally got it working although it wouldn’t work side-by-side with the Line6 box.
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.
Peace, y’all!
It’s The End of the World
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.
