BEAT CONCRETE » one quarter full

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.

One Quarter Full

worldblee — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:58:45 +0000

I wrote this song before the economic downturn was fully in effect, but somehow it seems right for the times. This is our first good runthrough of the song, captured at rehearsal on 15 March.

We’ve started bringing a little portastudio to wherever we play so we can record the performance using its el cheapo built-in mics. Have a listen; hope to be playing it live for you soon.

Live the vocals would be mixed louder, but otherwise this is what we sound like live:

>> One Quarter Full (live rehearsal)

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.

Fun Fact: Originally, I called this song ‘75% Melancholy’ since that lyric is repeated a lot in the song. But ‘One Quarter Full’ captures the “optimism” of the song. I figure if you’re having one good day out of every four you’re actually doing pretty good.

Fun Fact II: I forgot a line during the runthrough. Here are the last four lines of the second verse so you can spot the flubbed line:

Less every year
The harder I try the deeper I delve
No one owns me
I can’t even afford myself