How's Your Sight Reading?

Dig Jonathan Newman's Blow it Up, Start Again.

(Click through to embiggen, make sure you watch clear through to the last frames).

The Accidental Album

So. I think City Samanas accidentally made an album. I really like it. Maybe there should be some interstitial, maybe some things could be edited down, maybe a bit of tasteful mastering, but it's a cool album.

Eric Clapton's guitar in While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Isolated.
I am unnecessarily amused by a television commercial.

I know, right?

What Wickedness This Way Comes

So, quite by accident, I think we recorded an entire album.

Note that what you hear above isn't mastered and could likely use some gentle caressing as far as the mix goes.
This entire record is Greg Bartus, Lily Kinner, Dave Wolfe, and me. 

Samanament

Rehearsal Wednesday night. Schecter bass going into the Aphex preamp (I'm sort of under the impression that only the right channel of that preamp works as it should, but it may be simply that it never warmed up properly.)
Lou likes his cymbals low. Normally that might be irksome for an engineer trying to record toms separately from the cymbals but since we go with a simple 3-microphone setup on the drums it actually makes life easier because the cymbals are about as far from the overhead mics as the toms are -- making the cymbals relatively less loud in the recording.
Other than being scolded for my general lack of musicianship the rehearsal went very well.
Of course, this helped:

My view of the rehearsal with Lou.

No, the Avalons are not ours. We don't use them. The bourbon, however, was Bulleit.

Above this text is (or should be) links to songs we recorded. That Bandcamp album will be getting updated with more materials over the next several days. 

Musical lubricant with Greg and Lily.

Juliette Valduriez

I offer this compelling and definitive evidence that the Fender Stratocaster is not required. Now a Gibson SG with P-90 pickups would in fact be cooler, but the SG is naturally groovier than a Stratocaster. Don't believe me? Re-watch video evidence.

Cat Empire

The Cat Empire. You know. On the Gogol Bordello tip.
And then there's this band what is called Leningrad. And the song below is called "Fish". And yeah, they're total crazy.

Sapphire Road Tractors

Last night Lou Clark played drums with City Samanas. Slowly but surely I'm getting all the members of Tyrannosaurus Mouse into the City Samanas. Ha!

Now. Here are some things. We played "Blue Shadow" for a good 35 minutes. Also, the experiment that is "Toxic Fruit" did, in my opinion, fail. I asked that we come up with a half-dozen motifs and then play them in a loop and then I edited them together. It seems more like a medly than as a prog-rock piece I thought it would be. Still, there are some nice motifs in there.

Lily rocks out on Ethan's fretless Jazz bass.

 We have like a gazillion (that's an accurate, scientific, number) of new themes we created in Blue Shadow.

Lou has the most conservative playing style where it looks like he's not moving even if he's rocking out.

 I tried to get a picture of Greg but he was looking down the whole time I had the camera out.

3 of the 4 of the gang.

Oh. In other big news we plugged the bass directly into an Aphex tube mic preamp. It's Greg's preamp. I don't really know what I think about it. Does the bass have more, er, "girth"? I just don't know.
There are so many questions I don't have the answer for.
Before we'd been using a Countryman 85 direct box feeding a Lindell preamp. I dunno. What do we think? I felt the bass guitar in last night's recordings was easier to mix. Maybe?
Still, I could totally imagine that much of what we recorded last night could end up on a record.

Measuring the Invisible

Last week's rehearsal's yield.

So. I did a thing. We're recording bass through a Countryman 85 DI and a Lindell preamp. In post I'm running the bass through an automatic level plugin but more importantly (and, er, starting on the second or third track here as of this writing) going through Samplitude's tube-warming plugin.
Yeah, I know. "Tube warming". It's the buzzword from about 5 years ago. But it does the extra thing I felt we want the bass to do. Makes me re-think the Aphex tube preamps that Greg has. Hmm... that might be worth trying actually...

Analogue

Things one needs to know in order to understand A/D and D/A conversion.
It's 25 minutes long but very well worth your time.

Walla

Here's my new walla. I recorded the audience after a RCCNY concert. I think that none of the voices are distinct. There's English and Russian being spoken.

Like a Dream

Jim at Little Dawg amps talks about his "less is more" philosophy regarding tone stacks. Honestly, I have no idea what he's talking about. I do know that if I don't have a good guitar sound within about 20 seconds I'm just not going to get a good guitar sound out of a guitar/amp combination.

Can I tell you what a dream it is to not have to put 2" tapes up on a machine, reset the mixer and re-patch all the outboard gear, hoping you wrote the settings down correctly, and make a pathetic attempt to get the same mix up from two weeks ago but this time with a little more bass guitar? Because it's true. Those days sucked.
And now, discussions regarding the relative volume level of said bass guitar become rather simple. The project is brought up. I make a change. Render out a new version of the song. Everyone listens. Makes new notes. It's like a dream.