Thursday Night Market Video
Quick vid of us playing last week. Playing on the street; that’s our style! Playing for the people! Yeah!
Upcoming Things
We are emerging from our winter slumber (yaaawwwwn) on this site with a couple tidbits for our faithful listeners. First, we have a new recording of Desiree, which you can hear on the music player on the right. We put out a version in January, but decided it needed a radical overhaul. We think it turned out pretty good, but your opinion is the one that matters.
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!
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!
ReverbNation, Playa
Oh, sorry, we meant “ReverbNation PLAYER.” It’s that old punctuation problem again. Anyway, here’s a new way to stream music on our site from our ReverbNation profile. We’ll keep this perma-linked under MUSIC, and there’s a smaller version available on the right-hand sidebar below our MySpace status.
The only thing you need to remember is that if you navigate away from the page the music will stop playing…
