BEAT CONCRETE » Music

Thursday Night Market Video

worldblee — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:56:01 +0000

Quick vid of us playing last week. Playing on the street; that’s our style! Playing for the people! Yeah!

Upcoming Things

worldblee — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:42:18 +0000

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

worldblee — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:28:55 +0000

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

worldblee — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:43:42 +0000

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.

>> We R Doctor Funkenstein

Peace, y’all!

ReverbNation, Playa

worldblee — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:38:45 +0000

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…

It’s The End of the World

worldblee — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:18:50 +0000

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.

Spiritual Underground

worldblee — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:42:22 +0000

Except for the fact that my vocal chords were messed up we laid down some pretty good grooves last week. Here’s our song Spiritual Underground for your listening and downloading pleasure. SU was originally a more afro-beat track inspired by the late, great Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who’s always been a hero of mine.

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.

New Live Tracks Plus Links

worldblee — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:01:26 +0000

Putting up two live tracks recorded at rehearsal on Sunday: Stereo and Love Bomber. I sing the first one, Beki the second. Because we have songs scattered across the site, we thought it might be useful to put all the songs together to make it easier to grab the MP3s.

To save any of these files to your computer, right-click on the filename and choose Save Target As. Then save ‘em to your MP3 folders and play them and share them at will.

These have the same old lo-fi feel as our other tracks. Need to get back to the studio and record these for reals, but if a song is decent it should come through anyway.

PS: I update ‘Stereo’ with a new live version record 17 May because the original version sucked (I was slightly out of tune and I can’t frickin’ stand to be out of tune!).

The Girl in Number Six

worldblee — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:20:07 +0000

Today we’re heading into the Beat Concrete vaults thanks to a little computer serendipity. I was listening to some live tracks and when Windows Media Player was through with them it moved to the next track, which turned out to be a demo of The Girl in Number Six. I’d forgotten about it, but listening to it fresh I decided it wasn’t half bad. The guitar arrangement was definitely influenced by XTC and to reflect their Northern English roots I played the secondary guitar parts through an AC-30 emulation on my trusty little Pandora headphone amp.

If you google 'the girl in number six' you get this--awesome!

The demo started with a mono rough mix of rhythm tracks we recorded in a North Coast studio a few years ago, and then I threw that on my little portable 8-track recorder and dubbed a few guitar tracks using my Pandora to try out the guitar arrangement I’d planned in my head. The mono track had a scratch vocal I’d recorded in the studio live to guide the other band members, and I doubled it with Beki singing alongside me into my 8-track’s build in mic. Voila! Instant demo.

Good demo or POS? You be the judge.

>> The Girl in Number Six (demo)

Note: If you’re using FireFox, you may need to right-click on the file and choose ‘Save Link As…’ to save the file to your computer. Sorry to have to say that on every audio link but our ISP doesn’t seem to like FireFox. We do, though.

Dark Love

worldblee — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:01:24 +0000

Just realized it has been a while since we posted a new song. Went back to the well of rehearsal tracks and pulled up a bucket of Dark Love. This is a song I wrote a long time ago and we’ve been playing it for years. But we updated the middle section to add a slow blues groove in Cm and Ken recently started singing on the song. So this version is ‘new’.

>> Dark Love (live rehearsal)

This one clocks in at about five and a half minutes. Some nights it’s shorter, others it’s loooonger.

Note: If you’re using FireFox, you may need to right-click on the file and choose ‘Save Link As…’ to save the file to your computer. Clicking on the link may only play the beginning of the song.

Not what I envisioned when I wrote Dark Love, but who am I to argue with Google?