what is going on in your musical life

this band with a weirdo that plays only covers of local, small time musicians

haha i love this

haha its exactly what it sounds like

the first person I contacted about guitar lessons is too busy to take me on as a student but promised to give me contact info for other ppl, which basically means I am back at square one re: finding a guitar teacher

I am currently in the process of tracking down sheet music for a recital of solo and ensemble spiritual arrangements I'm doing as part of a quartet made up of ppl from my church choir (inc. my wife as the soprano) for the Tuesday before Easter; we're also going to take parts of that recital to do as music for the Good Friday service later that week.

I'm also looking over the Dvorak Mass in D major, which I'm doing at an evening Good Friday service in Dorchester; my primary responsibility AFAIK is augmenting the bass section but I believe I'm also going to be doing the tiny solo parts as well. (The other ppl from that include my wife again plus other folks from the spiritual ensemble we sing in.)

Also have a concert with the church choir coming up where we're doing Stainer's Crucifixion; I am not the bass soloist for it (thank God).

i didnt realize you were a bass! it occurs to me that i have never actually heard you sing. i imagined you having a very high tenor voice. haw.

i started a band with 2 of my girlfriends

Me too! We are called Ta1nted Pussy and have played 2 shows so far. We were supposed to have a show next Saturday opening for this weird Dutch guy, but he got detained by the Dutch government and told he can't leave the country without a work permit, so that show was cancelled. I play bass. I have not played bass since I was a teenager. So now I get to have fun learning/re-learning an instrument, plus I get to have fun with pedals. We are all noise/new music ladies, thus lots of fun with pedals. I got a Dr. Sample 202 for christmas! More fun! I kept one of the built-in samples, which is a lady saying "Stand By" for when we have technical difficulties during our sets.

We are planning to tour at some point later this year. L.A., maybe the South?

next month we have a gig opening for Cock E.S.P.

Our singer said, "Why do we always end up on shows with other bands with dirty names?"

having trouble finding time/motivation/energy to do anything too focused or serious over the past couple of years. i was playing with my friend who's a full-time musician but he decided to just play shows solo instead of with a band because the economics/logistics are easier that way. i've been doing some sample-based stuff on reason recently, i like it because it takes me back to when i was learning guitar and didn't know what i was doing and would come up with cool stuff by accident. also occasionally jamming/recording with the drummer from my old band, doing shitty lofi four-track stuff.

i would really like to have a more regular band where someone else bore the heavy lifting of the songwriting and i could just come in and play guitar and play shows a few times a year. but i'm not really connected to any kind of music scene anymore so i don't know how to find that kind of situation.

Band practice tonight. Eagerly anticipating our two track demo bak from being mixed/mastered although worried it might sound bad as we only spent two days on it.
Working on writing and practising our next batch of songs after an initial 6. It's now a concern that we have a 'sound' and aesthetic developing, meaning that we have songs we wrote and quite like that for one reason or another don't work very well alongside the others. Anyone had this problem? It didn't really matter before because we were still forming an identity which eventually formed into 6 upbeat slightly unhinged post punk numbers, but now this next one is a big dramatic sweeping thing with a more serious tone and we're not sure what to do with it.
Also written a reggae song, which I'm please with but need a way to subvert because right now it's verging a little too close to sixth form peace and love bob Marley cliches and I want to put a twist on all that really.
Wrote a sort of fast kinda sung-rap song but my girlfriend said it sounded like flight of the conchords. Not that that's an insult, but I wanted it to aoud more like Haim or something.

i didnt realize you were a bass! it occurs to me that i have never actually heard you sing. i imagined you having a very high tenor voice. haw.

haha that would make my dad very, very happy (he's a failed tenor in a previous life, sang lead in a doo-wop group in college)

I am technically a "bass-baritone" which really means that because most of my singing experience comes from being in ensembles rather than private, focused vocal study, I have no idea how to use my head voice and sing practically everything in chest; I have a sneaking suspicion I would end up being a true baritone or even a low tenor after several years of focused, serious voice training based on how my low range actually sounds, but the flip side is that I can actually croak out low notes even if they're inaudible unless I've been binge-drinking the night before so I dunno. But yeah, I've always sung low.

(which is actually why, in my teens, I realized I was never going to be a pop or rock singer, and why I was so taken by the grunge explosion)

putting the last touches on my new record (doesn't feel new, been working on it for about 15 months now) to send to mastering next week, figuring out how to put it out.

then i want to take some time to switch up my process, shake things up a little. work on some new synth sounds without any goals, try to finally learn ableton, record a bunch of new percussion samples. i want to take some piano lessons too, since i do everything with midi + mouse. i can figure stuff out on piano very sloooowly, so i thought it would be fun to play through some tunes in real time and get some chords under my fingers.

honestly though i probably won't do most of these things and i'll go back to what feels easy & comfortable. :/

I just got our first track back from the studio. I love it and I also cringe a bit because I can hear bits where my voice goes a bit wrong or a beat doesn't quite land how it's meant, and I'm trying to work out if anyone in their right mind would really notice or care.

roxy high school is an amazing band name

this is a neat thread idea.

i've been playing with a couple guys for the last month or so but it's just working out that well. they seem like they really want to sound like real estate or something, which isn't terrible, but a bad real estate impersonation comes out sounding reaaaaally bad, and it's not much fun to play drums to, either!

i've been writing and recording some new tunes, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually been a big breakthrough for me after about a 10 year songwriting/music coma that i didn't realize was a coma.

i'm moving back to chicago in a few months and i'm determined to join up with a good band. i used to be good friends with the cave/bitchin bajas scene so i'm hoping i can be looped back into all that stuff and that someone needs a good drummer

and yeah, high school is good, although i have to say i liked it even more when i thought the name was high school??

haha

whoa z s do you want to be in a band with me?

this is going to be really awkward when you reject me

well, that was easy. sure, let's play!

it's gonna be more like september or so

i think we are gonna be called "high school"??
a
I started a band in college called junior high university. I recorded one song for it and we had two practices and then everyone split up in different directions. that was the last band I was ever in.

have not touched my recording computer since my son was born. I long for a classical acoustic guitar so i can play around the house but I have no money for that now. debating selling an amp or two. I think my creative well has run dry for the foreseeable future.

i'm really burnt out on school this semester & have been slacking off to spend more time doing music stuff. all three bands i'm in are pretty active rn which can be overwhelming at times but is really fun. most notably i went on tour in january and started a new band called l0ud s3x which i am just so, so stoked on. the other songwriter in the band is really prolific and i really want to keep our ratio of songs 1:1. it's been a really fun challenge trying to keep up, he also writes amazing songs so i've had to be really strict about scrapping my tunes if they're not up to par. we're playing our first show at the end of the month & i'm pretty nervous because not everyone shows up for practice consistently and i want it to be spectacular

sp3ctacular l0ud s3x

I am not going to go into any more detail than this but the biggest audition opportunity of my lap literally just fell into my lap; I fully expect it to go nowhere but still, you never know...

would watch n/a z s band

DJP on x factor, it's America has been waiting for
xp

l0ud high school s3x

the biggest audition opportunity of my lap

lol dan

oh no, I've said too much

I am in month 15 of releasing a home-made recording every month. A lot of times I put it off until the month is almost over and then go into crunch mode. But at this point, even though I approach each song as its own thing and wasn't trying to make an album or anything, I can listen to all the tracks straight through and it sounds really cohesive to me, which I think is really cool. I also feel like I get a little better/more efficient at production each time.

I haven't performed onstage in like a year though, which was a conscious decision and I don't miss all of the bullshit that made me sick of doing it, but I do miss being onstage. But I maybe just joined a band that I actually think is really good and is kind of successful locally, which is cool because I don't feel that way about hardly any local bands and also I've never really been in someone else's band. They have kind of a Modern Lovers/Beat Happening/Magnetic Fields/Morrissey vibe. It'll also be neat because I'll be playing synth and I'm not actually a keyboard player at all, I'm a guitarist and songwriter, but that's also why I'll be a good fit for this.

kicking off recording of a new album. finally a chance to properly use all this new synth gear

Hey all - could I get a little bit of constructive feedback on this please? We've had an initial "how's this?" from the studio engineer on one of our tracks. Overall, I think it's okay but it's very difficult to distance myself and listen to it with uninvolved ears.

I'd really like to hear your thoughts, particularly on the mixing/production (we can't really go back into the studio to do any overdubs or retakes so we're working with the raw material we have, for better or worse). Are there any glaring errors on this track or things I should mention before I get back to him? One thing I noticed is that he's been a bit heavy handed witht he gating and compression, particularly some of the vocal parts where the sibilants and plosives are almost non-existent.

I'm only gonna keep this track online for a short while, but if someone could give it a listen and let me know their thoughts, i'd be very much obliged: https://soundcloud.com/doglatin/honolulu-demo-050313

god this sounds like a super harsh thing but i dont mean it that way - do you want/intend the beginning to sound like a 80's nylons style acapella group thing? like exactly like one? because thats what i hear. also some pitchy weirdness in the "so afraid" "yesterday" multivoice responses. again, if these are intentional things, no prob.

Lol, I haven't hear the nylons but it is supposed to be a bit of a tongue in cheek doowop thing and if it comes across that way I guess that's intentional. The song is very much a comment on retro culture and so it's littered with 60s and 80s references. Cheers for checking it out jjjusten, I'll look into the autotune thing. Think the sound guy's gone a bit overboard with vocal manipulation, but then we're not at all trained singers so there's undoubtably gonna be a push/pull thing going on.

song sounds good to me, esp. for a demo. i like it.

Xpost If you're talkin about Housemartins/Flying Pickets, I def see what you mean and kind of don't mind. I (was made to) grow up with that shit, haha.

Cheers n/a

I am making a lil album of songs that are about a min long each, I have about 10 so far where the music is done but I have finished singing over one of them, I've come up w/ vocal melodies for about 3

I am seriously using the dumbest most unwieldy out of date programs to put the songs together because for whatever reason I like how it all sounds more than if I do it in ableton?

what are you using?

I (lol) am using cues in virtual dj to play my laptop like an mpc or w/e (I could slice to a drumkit in ableton and do the same thing I guess, but idk, when I use ableton I spend 3 extra hours on shit) and then editing shit further and recording vocals in audacity, its a forehead in my hands deal, but still

i love stuff like that.

well I hope it lives up to its rudimentary description, I'm starting to embrace it, at least this way I don't end up fucking around with corpus for a week with no results

Good sounding demo, dog latin. I'd get some friends in a room for the backing vocals. And as for your solo performance it's a little too measured, just make sure you're saying "gate" instead of "gay" and make it fast and effortless

I was just in Prague recording with a budget-priced orchestra, stuff for five different clients and some stuff for my own use. There were 30 "pieces" ranging from 45-second long bits of orchestral incidental music to 20-minute marathon workouts. A total of 2.5 hours of music and 24 hours to record the whole thing. I def. got paranoid and overworked but I didn't break. I drove that bus.

It went very well but I instinctively prioritized the work of my clients, taking the time to really get something beautiful out of that shaky orchestra. I left not enough time for my own material. Now I'm futzing.

cheers FGTI - I did the lead vox, the others did backing. I think the engineer's but too strong a release on my vox because yeah, "gaze" sounds like "gay" etc...

i'm listening to spotify

gotta get these tapes out soon (for this band i recorded) but have no idea what im doing! i need to buy a tape duplicator! i need to buy...tapes! i need to figure out how to get this shit onto a master tape! what am i doing with my life! HELP!

i told my mom i was in a new band called high school and she recommended that we call it COOL GIRLS instead. additionally, "i like just a girl's name, like maureen, or mabel, for a girl band"

lmao at cool girls altho tbh i would like it as a name for a coed or all dude band

I was briefly in a(n all-male) duo called "Sarah"!

Ableton Live if you are going to be doing electronic stuff.

I hear you but six years of fiddling with Reason Compact and making loops has me hooked on their interface, and my prior experience with Ableton was that while it was *fun*, it didn’t get me where I wanted to go. I want to try writing “songs” and not just “building up tracks from stems,” if that makes a lick of sense.

(I am sure people can do everything with Ableton. But I couldn’t figure it out, perhaps too easily distracted by all the different doodads)
(Reason probably won’t fix this, huh)

the key for me has been spending more time in Arrangement view, where you have a regular DAW timeline, and not getting too stuck in Session (loop) view

The benefit concert I did on Mother’s Day is finally online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fblv-YIvPVM

The HC band I've been in for the last few years, Franky and the Slight Incline, is doing a record release tour of...one show! In New Paltz, NY this Friday night

https://dcxpclive.com/dcxpc-live-shows/hardcore-and-punk-show-snugs-in-new-paltz
https://www.instagram.com/p/DYIIc1OEUUs/
https://dcxpclive.com/store/p/dcxpc-live-vol-46-franky-and-the-slight-incline-live-12

...we were too disorganized to get any other gigs landed on our way up. Thank goodness Scott who's putting out this record has more of his shit together than we do. Hometown record release show June 5th at the Cave in Chapel Hill, NC

Cool!

i'm really excited about a project i'm in called Makes a Difference. it's a duo with me and Jessee (the funs, glow in the dark flowers; chicago people and others may be familiar) and our debut release is out today!

https://makesadifference.bandcamp.com/album/makes-a-difference

it's 6 songs, 33 minutes, 36 seconds.

i play in a few different projects around town, but this one is really special. Jessee really pushes me to make music in a way that i usually don't, and i think my playing and sensibilities lead them to new directions, too. the first song on here, 'angels without wings', is just...not at all what i would do if i were by myself. i love it. i love all these songs, to be honest. i'm really proud of it. we also have cds (they cost $3 + shipping).

the album cover is a drawing of a photo of a poster i made in kindergarten with ballet dancers - the drawing is on top, the photo is on the bottom it won a special "you're a little kid in southern missouri" award at an art competition. for some reason, though, i was heavily discouraged from my interesting in drawing little dancer men, in rural missouri, so the original photo stands out to me as a possible early artistic path i've found my way back to later in life.

wow i love that cover art z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzEEryvpIg

one of the members of my band (tim, the guitarist) is a part of a worker-owned bookstore initiative in my neighborhood, and they recently got to try out having a real store via a two-month residency in a nerdy knicknack store called side b. it's a small but really beautiful space, and we joked about playing a fake "tiny desk" concert there often enough that it became not a joke. we got lucky, a really talented cameraperson offered to film it, and as a result we look very cool, and i'm also proud of how well we played (though i'm the queen of forgetting lyrics during performances)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzEEryvpIg

one of the members of my band (tim, the guitarist) is a part of a worker-owned bookstore initiative in my neighborhood, and they recently got to try out having a real store via a two-month residency in a nerdy knicknack store called side b. it's a small but really beautiful space, and we joked about playing a fake "tiny desk" concert there often enough that it became not a joke. we got lucky, a really talented cameraperson offered to film it, and as a result we look very cool, and i'm also proud of how well we played (though i'm the queen of forgetting lyrics during performances)

ok that double-post is definitely not my fault, it was instantaneous, my god

yeah that album cover is sick z_tbd

cool video ivy. my band is also testing out a "live performance in an interesting location" video concept soon, it's gonna be interesting

https://shreddedsun.bandcamp.com/album/never-odd-or-even-2

new album and 7-inch out Aug 14, first single up now

Congrats, looking forward to hearing the final versions!

really like that!

we are also playing two shows this summer, which will increase our show total 100%

glad you got some booked, I remember you said it had been a little frustrating

finally got the mixes for the FAITH/VOID record and i hate them. i think it's mostly owed to the amount of time that's passed since recording (like... this is what we did? lmao) and my general frustration with the producer. also the drums sound weird like they've been passed through a phaser. anyway we sent notes back and hopefully we get updated mixes in fewer than six months

one thing that's made me feel better is that we agreed to get our previous producer to master it, which will most likely make me more satisfied with the sound. (we would've recorded this material with her but she moved across the country after recording weird chills. oh well!!!!)

Send them to me via ilx mail if you like-- happy to listen and comment

we've got a gig tomorrow! first Prairiewolf show since last October somehow. should be pretty mellow though, it's just at the record store in town here.

hope it goes well!

My trio The Chartreuse has a new two-song single. No drums, just guitar, bass, and Farfisa. I wrote the music and our singer wrote the words.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mfSSRf-F1DLVrIlqPISCigRIpR6Q0Hbxw

I released two big spacey drones off of the album that I'm putting out next month in an effort to feel a little less useless. It didn't work, but I'm proud of them anyway. (They'll be on streaming tomorrow or the next day.)

https://chrisirregardless.bandcamp.com/album/in-flower-jail

my band is also testing out a "live performance in an interesting location" video concept soon, it's gonna be interesting

― na (NA), Wednesday, June 3, 2026 2:42 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

http://www.youtube.com/@AtriumSessionsChicago

there's one more tune coming to that channel in the next day or two, waiting on a minor fix by the video editor guy

This is awesome

thanks!

yeah soundin’ great ya’ll!

love those harmony vox on just the first parts of the choruses in blank tape, it’s an ear worm for sure

cool song and i love the concept of the videos

second round of mixes for the F/V EP finally came through and they sound just right :) all of my anxiety and embarrassment about this project has dissolved

well other than the fact that i sing extremely off-key in one of the songs, but nothing can be done

http://www.youtube.com/@AtriumSessionsChicago

there's one more tune coming to that channel in the next day or two, waiting on a minor fix by the video editor guy

― na (NA), Friday, July 17, 2026 3:17 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg y'all sound fantastic

thanks all! i'm happy with how the videos turned out. i make a guitar flub of some kind in each song but that's the live experience i suppose. the videos were spearheaded by our drummer ben and he's hoping to make it a series, bringing in other bands to do similar sessions.
we played a show last night, only our third, unsurprisingly not a ton of people there on a tuesday night but we had fun and made some connections with other people in the scene.
got word today our 7-inch probably won't be ready for the album release show which is a bummer but whatcha gonna do.

I now have Logan Posthumous's cover artwork in hand and a release date: 7/31/2026. It's also now 10 tracks long, not 7.

And it's out.

https://chrisirregardless.bandcamp.com/album/worn-down-to-the-rope

chris, i've said this before but i really enjoy your work. it is especially lovely to write to

meanwhile. the masters and art proofs for the new faith/void EP have been sent off. release date 10/2, in time for our guitarist's birthday weekend

Congrats! After 2+ years of gestation, I got the masters back for two albums in the same week. One's an ambient record made from stems from the other one (and tracks that got cut), which will be out in 3 weeks amazingly enough.

congrats to all three of you on the new releases!

also who do people like for mastering?

These days I only get something mastered through a label where the label head is also a mastering engineer (which seems to be almost necessary to keep costs down in a tiny indie label scenario), or already has some sort of an ongoing arrangement with a particular engineer. A great mastering engineer is really something though. I've been extremely happy with Stephan Math1eu and Sean McC@nn. Also https://www.quietdetails.com/mastering. And Sarah Register.

speaking of new releases, our new album is out today finally: https://shreddedsun.bandcamp.com/album/never-odd-or-even-2
check it out if you feel like it

we always use carl saff for mastering, he's very popular with indie artists for a reason - his rates are reasonable, he does good work, and he's very communicative
i also see a lot of people using greg obis from chicago mastering service, he's in the awesome band stuck

Congrats Nick, sounds great. I assume track #8 is a reference to the band?

nope! didn't know there was a band with that name. we were just playing around with palindromes.

Oh wow, crazy. They were a Milwaukee band that I used to see on bills all the time back in the day.

I also had a weird situation where I was supposed to play a week of gigs backing up a singer and was replaced after the rehearsal, which was a first. There were a lot of factors and I don't want to get into detail, but I'm trying not to take it too hard. I almost never do for-hire stuff anyway these days, and this just makes me want to double down on sticking to my own projects and bands. I'm no stranger to getting my ass kicked musically and I know it's always an opportunity to improve, but this was a weird one where I thought it was going ok, but apparently it didn't quite gel and there wasn't time to work on it.

ugh sorry

Carl Saff did something of mine as well -- great work, great communication, fairly priced.

Saff does seem like a good option, he mastered the Styrofoam Winos record too which is one of my favorites of the year

listening to Shredded Sun on Qobuz RN sounds great, very infectious