Post by ashcatlt on Apr 29, 2015 18:34:19 GMT -5
Every year for the last like 15 or so, my home town has thrown a big week long party where we treat all of our local musicians like real rock stars. I missed quite a few of them because I was in New Orleans, but since Katrina I've played in five of them with three different bands. I also work sound for 3 or 4 days of it, and this year I had the forethought to schedule paid vacation, so I'm basically getting paid twice to go out and party all week. Kinda doesn't suck.
This year, the LT set was on the Monday night, and the whole show was deliberately arranged to be some of the furthest out, nerdiest experimentalists in town.
The first act, Tim Kaiser was in a punk band when I was in grade school, but now he builds all his own electrified and electronic instruments, effects, and noise makers. And he really does beautiful work, and then makes really whacked out soundscapes with them.
The second act, Dirty Knobs is ostensibly a drone project, but he just kind of does all kinds of incredible electronic and sonic experiments. What they played that night was a lot different from the link...
Then came Superfly McFlash who somehow runs a microphone and his guitar through a looper and a bunch of crazy effects, beat-boxes to create leads, I think he uses a pitch shifter to set up basslines sometimes. It comes out as a kind of metal/hip-hop hybrid that almost sounds absurd on paper, but he really means it, and really does it, and it's really awesome.
After us was I Am The Slow Dancing Umbrella who just reformed this year. Apparently they were active making all kinds of random experiments and noisescapes around town for much of the time that I was down south, and quit when they heard I was coming back.
And then there's Lorenzo's Tractor. A month and a half ago, we released an album that by all accounts is our most accessible in like 20 years. Course, I'm sick of playing those songs, so we just threw them out and started fresh. I insisted on coming up with a full set of new lyrics. I also decided that we'd play the entire set in the whole-tone scale that starts on E. Somehow I got Luke and Harrison to put up with all of that for five rehearsals, and while I missed a couple lyrics, overall it was exactly what I wanted. Like, definitive versions.
If you're wondering about the banjo, there's more than anybody wants to know about it in this thread.
The first piece is kind of based on an old song called "the Way" from our album the Moment, the Words, the Last One, but I stole some words from my friend Vinnie. That song is, I think, in A major or F# minor or something, but it's really only three notes - B, C#, F#. We slid the A string notes down a fret for this, which accomplishes something.
The second piece is actually 12 bar blues if you count the beat as 40bpm. Of course, there's really no IV or V available in the whole tone scale, so we slid those up a fret. I play mostly wrong chords over the top of the walking bass thing, but it's all the standard Dominant 7 triad thing on the A string - 7 6 7, 5 4 5, 3 2 3
The third piece is "When Things Go Black", which was on the Sunless Port album without any words. It was already in the whole tone scale. In fact, it was originally titled very descriptively as "Whole Tone Grunge Blues". I took the W T G B and found a suitably dark phrase that fit.
Edit - there was a fourth piece, but you'll have to wait to read about it.
The fifth piece started with the main bass riff that Luke wrote. It was in E minor, and we usually play it as such, but I end up really only playing notes from the whole tone scale anyway, so he slid his E string notes down a fret (I think, maybe up, I didn't ask) and it was done.
We all played into the computer and used nothing but my own plugins for "amp sims". I had the GK3 driving the "hand drums" and through a strange kind of harmonizer I built to an electric piano VSTi. The other drums follow the dynamics of our playing. There is an underlying stream of midi beating away, and then I modulate the velocity of those hits on the way to SuperiorDrummer based on the volume of our guitars. I control the ride cymbal while Luke controls the entire rest of the kit. I kind of transposed two of the cables coming from Luke, though, such that his synthesizer line - which has been distorted, then resynthesized, then Whammy pedaled, and is pretty much always as loud as possible, was driving the drums. I'm pretty disappointed about that partly because it also means that the crowd didn't actually hear his synth line. It makes very little difference, but there's less dynamic to the drums that I might have preferred. I did mix the synth in where it should have been for the video, but I did not fix the drum thing.
Anywho, I gotta go dive back in. Shows that I want to see are starting in an hour, and I'm a half hour away.
This year, the LT set was on the Monday night, and the whole show was deliberately arranged to be some of the furthest out, nerdiest experimentalists in town.
The first act, Tim Kaiser was in a punk band when I was in grade school, but now he builds all his own electrified and electronic instruments, effects, and noise makers. And he really does beautiful work, and then makes really whacked out soundscapes with them.
The second act, Dirty Knobs is ostensibly a drone project, but he just kind of does all kinds of incredible electronic and sonic experiments. What they played that night was a lot different from the link...
Then came Superfly McFlash who somehow runs a microphone and his guitar through a looper and a bunch of crazy effects, beat-boxes to create leads, I think he uses a pitch shifter to set up basslines sometimes. It comes out as a kind of metal/hip-hop hybrid that almost sounds absurd on paper, but he really means it, and really does it, and it's really awesome.
After us was I Am The Slow Dancing Umbrella who just reformed this year. Apparently they were active making all kinds of random experiments and noisescapes around town for much of the time that I was down south, and quit when they heard I was coming back.
And then there's Lorenzo's Tractor. A month and a half ago, we released an album that by all accounts is our most accessible in like 20 years. Course, I'm sick of playing those songs, so we just threw them out and started fresh. I insisted on coming up with a full set of new lyrics. I also decided that we'd play the entire set in the whole-tone scale that starts on E. Somehow I got Luke and Harrison to put up with all of that for five rehearsals, and while I missed a couple lyrics, overall it was exactly what I wanted. Like, definitive versions.
If you're wondering about the banjo, there's more than anybody wants to know about it in this thread.
The first piece is kind of based on an old song called "the Way" from our album the Moment, the Words, the Last One, but I stole some words from my friend Vinnie. That song is, I think, in A major or F# minor or something, but it's really only three notes - B, C#, F#. We slid the A string notes down a fret for this, which accomplishes something.
The second piece is actually 12 bar blues if you count the beat as 40bpm. Of course, there's really no IV or V available in the whole tone scale, so we slid those up a fret. I play mostly wrong chords over the top of the walking bass thing, but it's all the standard Dominant 7 triad thing on the A string - 7 6 7, 5 4 5, 3 2 3
The third piece is "When Things Go Black", which was on the Sunless Port album without any words. It was already in the whole tone scale. In fact, it was originally titled very descriptively as "Whole Tone Grunge Blues". I took the W T G B and found a suitably dark phrase that fit.
Edit - there was a fourth piece, but you'll have to wait to read about it.
The fifth piece started with the main bass riff that Luke wrote. It was in E minor, and we usually play it as such, but I end up really only playing notes from the whole tone scale anyway, so he slid his E string notes down a fret (I think, maybe up, I didn't ask) and it was done.
We all played into the computer and used nothing but my own plugins for "amp sims". I had the GK3 driving the "hand drums" and through a strange kind of harmonizer I built to an electric piano VSTi. The other drums follow the dynamics of our playing. There is an underlying stream of midi beating away, and then I modulate the velocity of those hits on the way to SuperiorDrummer based on the volume of our guitars. I control the ride cymbal while Luke controls the entire rest of the kit. I kind of transposed two of the cables coming from Luke, though, such that his synthesizer line - which has been distorted, then resynthesized, then Whammy pedaled, and is pretty much always as loud as possible, was driving the drums. I'm pretty disappointed about that partly because it also means that the crowd didn't actually hear his synth line. It makes very little difference, but there's less dynamic to the drums that I might have preferred. I did mix the synth in where it should have been for the video, but I did not fix the drum thing.
Anywho, I gotta go dive back in. Shows that I want to see are starting in an hour, and I'm a half hour away.