what is going on in your musical life

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"!

haw

possibly touring in the summer with the black/doom band, havent been out in a long time bc our guitarist lives a couple hours away, so we havent been as "active" in general. mostly an east coast thing, possibly all the way to canada, where i have never been

come to Atlanta!

I have been recording bits and pieces for an eventual cassette release. I've also been asked to do a split release with a local drone act. AND my band is recording stuff. So hopefully soon I'll have lots of physical stuff to give out at shows!

I've heard good things about getting cassettes made through National Audio?

Yeah National Audio is great, I've done a couple things through them.

guitarist in one band left us cuz he moved out of london :( which is a shame. was looking forward to recording those songs. we'd played 5 shows or so. it was going well. oh well. i have a decent recording of the last practice, guess i'll stick that on soundcloud if i can be bothered to mix it.

started a new thing with the same guys, got a new guitarist, and he rules! he's a bit older than us, used to run a drone and kosmiche club. had a practice on sunday and ended up with 16 little things to work on, 3 or 4 fully formed songs just happened, so looking forward to this band. krauty space rock with big OTT vocals and thinking i'm gonna bring an edp wasp and delay pedal into the equation. will prob play a show in the next month or two. my drumming is really rusty tho, need to get back on the practice pad before they kick me out!

tracks sitting in the computer way into the 100s by now, mostly experiments with the ridiculous synth collection that lives in the studio where i live. none of the synths are mine, but i'm free to use what i want and i've set up a synthesizer room and got everything patched up. pretty sweet. currently obsessed with the doepfer modular and making new presets for the matrix 1000- that's a seriously powerful bit of kit but the presets that come with it are crap.

playing classical guitar again, got my nails all purty, think i'm going to try and start performing too. maybe get some restaurants gigs.

have also been digging my uni pieces, trying to put together some sort of composer portfolio. surprised myself by how good some of those pieces are. the goldberg ensemble performed some of my string pices, which was very cool, had to ressurect an old hard drive, thought i'd lost those recordings for good!

Why is having good nails important for playing guitar? I don't play with my nails. I guess if I had long nails it would be difficult but...

if you play fingerstyle you get more control over your sound, you can also play louder and as everybody knows louder = better

It's a really fundamental part of classical guitar technique. Your nails are the tools you use to create and shape your sound.

Do restaurants in the UK hire classical guitarists??

What are you putting a composition portfolio together for, CB? Graduate schools? Grants/gigs?

*Show us your scoressss*

making new presets for the matrix 1000- that's a seriously powerful bit of kit but the presets that come with it are crap.

surprised to read this, mine is coming back from service today but from the little i got to play with it before it went in i thought some (though yes far from all, or even most) of the presets were absolutely lovely. insta-BoC!

i believe they ran a competition so the 1000 presets are all from users of the matrix 6 (which has identical innards) those patches are just a bit uninspired imo! but yeah totally get the BoC thing- if that's what you're after, they're perfect!

x-post, i'll up some stuff on my soundcloud and mayyybe post some stuff up here when i've got it all sorted, but i'm a bit shy about my own music, esp the stuff i've spent a lot of time on.

and just doing a portfolio for.. err.. i don't know really. i've seen a few bits of paid work recently, such as composing some piano pieces for an audio walk in london. i'd have probably had a chance of getting that if i had some music organised and online. unfortunately the only stuff i've written that's even half listenable i did at uni ages ago, since then i've just been obsessed with synths, microtonality, learning to play drum kit and never finishing things.

Do restaurants in the UK hire classical guitarists??

yeah, you can make pretty good money (read: actually make *some* money) doing functions/events/restaurants/weddings etc. i'm thinking some satie, beatles arr. for classical guitar, cheesy spanish stuff, play through a little amp. will be good practice anyway.

I played two harsh noise sets this week and someone who saw both of them posted that this city is "a patriarchal cesspool" on FB immediately after leaving the show tonight & now I'm irrationally worried that she's talking about me

don't worry about it

- offered up my sound work exp to a newly forming fairly hip arts council for my neighborhood in an advisory capacity. wondering how quickly that will turn into "hey i know it's 4 pm on sunday but the slam poetry competition needs you to come down and turn on their wireless mic."
- related to my endless pedal thread, but the fact that i am getting deluged with new pedal line offers is some strange mixture of feeling like the prettiest girl at the prom and huge stress wrt money allocation and decision making.

wow that is cool! the songs sound great!

I get a little Go-Betweens (Grant) vibe but can definitely see that south/rustbelt/midwest 80s jangle coming through, it was a great listen.

Thanks for posting <3

Have rly liked all the Field Hospitals M@tt has shown me, hard endorse. Also am drunk

thanks all :) really appreciate it. we are all huge go-betweens/NZ/flying nun fans as well.

LJ have fun :)

Just got a couple techno tracks back from mastering. I think these are the strongest recordings I've made so far, starting to nail down a real workflow between hardware and ableton. I just wish I worked a bit faster. I'm sending them off to some small labels, see if anyone bites.

fuckin rad

Pre-order for my band’s new album up. I’m pretty happy with it overall, altho as with everything all I can hear anymore are the things I’d have done differently … It’s indie rock somewhere in the universe of like the new pornographers or guided by voices. https://salthorse.bandcamp.com/album/lucky-teeth

the song "Hen" that's available is super infectious :)

it's got that energy of Mass Romantic-era New Pornographers

Thanks, UMS! That’s super nice to hear.

The rest of the album drops in a few days. (Can’t remember exactly when I set it to drop. Maybe Friday?)

we did a Halloween single - cover of "Pet Sematary" by the Ramones which I have always loved and thought we could take in a more jangle/indie type direction. very happy with the arrangement.

https://fieldhospitals.bandcamp.com/track/pet-sematary

oh man i love that song

yeah it's always been a huge fav of mine since i saw the video and movie when i was a kid

dee dee wrote the lyrics and "i don't want to live my life again" always struck me as this kind of throwaway but incredibly heavy lyric in the way that the ramones could only pull off

sounds great!

nice! very tubs-y

"i don't want to live my life again" always struck me as this kind of throwaway but incredibly heavy lyric
i remember feeling this strongly in high school and i had barely even started living my life when i decided i would prefer not to go through that again

I've emitted some new drones, clangs, and hums for (what is left of) Bandcamp Friday.

https://chrisirregardless.bandcamp.com/album/juggling-avocados-in-my-mind

my band of 10+ years has our second show ever next week (playing with ilxor Eazy!) and a third show lined up for the end of the year
we also have eight songs pretty much recorded (aside from some minor cleanups) and a ninth song ready to record. they are all hilariously compact, even for us - all right in the 3-minute range, barely any solos or instrumental bits, just get in and get out. i think they sound pretty good? i tried to get the ball rolling early on deciding on an album name and art bc those are the things that are hardest for all of us to agree on (especially art) but we haven't made much headway there

already sequenced the EP we’re recording in november

1. neverending uti
2. a cruel angel’s dissertation defense
3. sigourney wiener
4. beach chair community
5. two armed scissor
6. taylor swiftboat veterans for truth

neverending uti

lol A+

love to hear it ivy!

NA, please post the album when it's done

Christine, i'm a fan of your clangs. track 2 here in particular; reminds me a bit of Tropic of Cancer although quite a bit less dour

holy display name resource ivy, can we poll those? :)
i love records that are sequenced before they’re recorded, or even written! 6-7 song ep’s especially!

Christine, I reeeeaally liked what I heard of your music a while ago! Damn you’ve been busy :O

I've fallen into a period of "light work" with lots of time for R&D. Over the past two years I've been questing for a stable matrix mixer, something MIDI or OSC controllable, with a significant (more than 8) number of I/O, and a significant (more than 32) number of possible synapses/connects.

When I was hanging out with some Finnish friends, they suggested I try building such a setup in Reaktor. I'm loathe to go back into the "computer-processed audio" world, as the stability of that world is just too harrowing and inconsistent. But further research suggested that I could use a computer as a front-end for some manner of outboard digital mixer. I finally settled on an RME Fireface controlled by Max/MSP. It's been over a decade since I did any Max programming but I fell back into it smoothly, and four days later, built a patch that controls 12 analog ins and 12 analog outs. I can route any in to any out with a theoretical maximum of 80+ synapses (looping back digital audio through SPDIF, AES, ADAT and MADI)-- my build settled on 62 regularly used synapses. All connections can be controlled with LFO and/or envelopes, all are saved as presets, and now suddenly I am looking forward to a live set with unlimited number of presets (so I can program as many set list options as I want), and, most saliently, four channels of output audio (instead of the stereo output I've been using for the past eight years).

I did some demoing of this rig and built a few songs and it's working insanely well, being able to extend sound design to an entire 360-degrees (instead of just left and right) has been super inspiring. I sent the Max patch on to some super-user friends and they were impressed. Feeling like a proud programmer today

i do hope to one day understand every word of that post

fgti posts that make me want to learn more audio engineering skills

I'll explain it-- an RME Fireface is basically an audio interface with 12 I/O on the analog level. Connect it to your computer and record into your DAW, that's what it's for.

But it also has digital audio routings-- ADAT, AES, SPDIF and MADI-- four different formats.

So, what I'm doing is doing a "loop back" with the digital audio. For example, analog in 1 (guitar) will be routed to MADI channels 1 through 12. The incoming audio is converted to digital, and then looped back so that MADI 1-12 are identical, all just the guitar.

Then, I route MADI 1-12 to each of the analog outs. I can send my incoming guitar sound to any output I desire.

Added to this, each of those MADI channels has its own fader, so you can effectively direct the guitar to go to any output at any volume you desire.

Added to this, the front end for the RME Fireface is MIDI controllable. So, MADI channels 1-12 can be linked to MIDI CC 102-114 (MIDI channel 9).

Say I want on a preset to have my guitar running to Analog out 1 and 2 at 0 dB (the main outputs). I program Max to send the appropriate MIDI commands to raise the level of MADI 1-2 to 0 dB (and lower MADI 3-12 if necessary).

Next preset, I want to run the guitar through an outboard effect? Max raises MADI 3-4 up to 0 dB (and lowers 1-2 down to -oo dB).

I've programmed LFOs and envelopes, too, so the faders can 'dance'-- whether it's a violin drifting back and forth in the stereo field as I build up a loop (so it sounds lush and stereo), or a chaotic send-to-a-reverb to create instability, or a gradual fade so one loop fades from the front channels to the back channels, it's all programmable.

that's a really cool idea and huge props for understanding Totalmix to that degree. I use a Babyface and the quality is amazing but I find the software really very challenging, myself.

kind of excited, the old City Pages here (RIP) used to do an annual local industry best new bands poll called Picked to Click and it's been resurrected by some former City Pages people (including a former ilxor) and we finished in the top 10 and got a little write-up. back in the day, it was a huge deal kind of like pazz & jop but local

anyway the older I get the more I really appreciate these little moments of recognition and positivity, feels like it's harder to be a band every year especially as you get older, kids, etc etc so I'm honestly really touched by it

https://racketmn.com/picked-to-click-2025-no-10-field-hospitals

nicely done!

faith/void going back in the studio to record an EP this weekend! the whole "going into the studio" part of it has been a bit of a fiasco so far but i'm hopeful we will record our best-sounding record featuring our best songs yet

thanks budo!

excited to hear it ivy

Very awesome to you both!

Reason Compact remains the best app for the iPhone ever made