For the “random” part of this blog, the garbage put out by the deli across the street from me caught on fire last night. Here’s the FDNY arriving to put it out.
The Sound of One Amp Exploding
Music, internet, random. A journal of a recording made at a great distance.
Writing...
I don’t seem to have any control over what comes out. Its just like, the window opens and things fly through it. If I’m ready I can catch some stuff that flies through the window. If I’m not ready, it gets away.
I can never open the window myself. If I force myself to write when the window is closed, all I get is junk.
I fleshed a musical idea into a new song a couple of days ago: “Mantis”. For some reason my mind has been on the homocidal sexual habits of that particular species of bug. Read whatever you want into that.
Our Method (so far)
One of the exciting parts of doing this recording is that this way of working is brand new for us. We’re literally making up how we work as we go along.
In a nutshell, we have a server to which we can each FTP files. We’re starting off with me making a reference cut, which consists of a rhythm guitar, a click track and a vocal.
From there Klinowski will start making drum tracks. We don’t need finished tracks, just a groove that’s close enough for us to start laying overdubs against it.
Everytime someone lays a track, they post the individual track up to the server, as well as a board mix so we can hear it sit in the mix. If possible we’ll also post a MIDI file.
We decided that as a convenience, all rendered tracks should butt up against 0. That means that if I recorded a vocal, say, that didn’t start until a minute into a song, then I would need to print a minute of silence at the head end of the track so it could just be dropped in at the beginning of the song and will automatically sync up.
We’re making this up as we go, so there’s a really good chance we’ll modify how we do things as the project progresses.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
This is Klinowski’s board mix of the drums he’s programming. This is a work in progress - the drums are going to mutate over time. In addition to drums, this track contains the scratch guitar and vocals, which is used as a reference for the real tracks. (There’s also a click, track, which isn’t in this board mix.) This song is called “Prisoner of Time”, by the way.
First Drum Tracks
Klinowski posted up his first drum tracks last night. Wicked.
The Blue Shift logo, attached to my leg.
The Line-Up
Once upon a time there was a band, based out of Toronto, called Blue Shift. Three of us have come together to do this project.
Mike Klinowski is on bass. He’s the co-founder, with me, and comes out of this punk/metal background (although apparently he’s mellowed into a lot of Ani Difranco in recent years…sheesh…). Mike is kind of a trickster, and often serves as my foil musically. He used to play in a band called the Dead Lemmings, some of whom went on to form the better known Do Make Say Think. Mike and I went to school in two different places: the University of Toronto, and a music industry school called Harris Institute for the Arts.
In addition to playing bass, Mike is going to be doing drum programming for the project.
Michael Milanetti is on guitar. He provides a textural rhythmic approach to playing that has gained a lot of subtlety over the years. At the same time he’s gotten more heavily into songwriting and has written some really compelling music (some of the tunes we’re going to do are his). Michael acts as the “luke warm water” between Klinowski and I. ;)
My name is Loren Davie. I sing, play guitar and keyboards, and in the past did the bulk of the songwriting for Blue Shift. My dreams of being a rock star didn’t work out, but I still feel that music is one of the most important things in my life, and Blue Shift music occupies a special niche in the universe for me.
There’s a tattoo on my right leg of a circular labyrinth, which I copied off the over of Carl Jung’s “Man and His Symbols”. This is the logo we used for Blue Shift.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
We started by sending song demo tracks to each other. Here’s an example of one. Note that its a SONG DEMO, not exactly a ready-for-prime-time recording.