When It Rains It Pours

I guess I've got the bug again, because there I was recording last night for the second day in a row.

I've been thinking about doing a Breeders tribute album for a long time now. I can't even remember how long...since 2011? 2012? Not sure. What stopped me was shitty recording equipment, fear of the vocals, and a lack of understanding of and skill for the guitar parts, especially the rhythm guitar parts.

Buoyed by too many listenings to Last Splash last weekend and watching other people's musical dreams come true for 3 straight days, in the last couple of days I've laid down drum tracks for the following:
Cannonball
Divine Hammer (plus bass, vox, lead guitar)
Do You Love Me Now
Flipside
Full on Idle
Hag
Huffer
I Just Wanna Get Along (plus vox)
Invisible Man
New Year
No Aloha
Roi
Saints
Son of Three (plus bass and vox)

Also did guitar/vox/bass for Off You.

It is sort of insane.

It feels like this could actually happen, and pretty quickly. The rhythm guitar parts will, of course, be the made limiting factor. But I think I'm gonna push through everything else and see how far I get. Thought about shooting to get it all done in a couple of weeks and calling it "15 in 15, It's Better Than Jail"...but we'll see.

Think I'm gonna try to store all projects on an external drive to avoid the lack of space problem. Was able to make room for several projects last night, but external storage is probably a necessity in general.

Recording Again

FW has an interest in recording and I have no interest in paying for such things, and so I've started futzing with my equipment again to see what is possible.

Last night I recorded several drum tracks for Breeders songs. I did a dynamic mic inside the bass drum and two dynamic mics overhead. Ran those three through a mixer and then stereo out to my usb interface and into Audacity. Turned out real nice.

My laptop then promptly freaked out. The old gal is in her final days and is totally full. It is an XP (no longer supported) machine with a relatively small hard drive by today's standards. I probably need to strip all but the essentials off the thing and then store any large files on an external drive. The Audacity project files are pretty huge.

If I ever have a few thousand extra dollars I'd like to get a dedicated recording laptop and a multi-track usb interface with 8 or so inputs. But this is unlikely to ever happen. Really for what I need, what I have is fine. I just need to clean up the laptop.

As for recording FW, the challenges are less about my equipment than about my expertise in using it ...and about the level of experience with recording in general of the performers. And I'm not sure I'm up to negotiating the ups and downs of the process. But in the meantime I've got a nice start on the Breeders tribute recording that I've been meaning to do for a few years now.

CJ 3/24/2014 Frequency

Only 3 people in the audience. Opening act was...there. Closing act, Sphynx from Austin, was outstanding.

I had a cold, but played well. Drank hot water with honey in a thermos. We biffed start of Dead but got it together quickly.

Setlist:
Debaser
Wave
Down to Well
Rock a My Soul
Isla
Velouria
River
Bird
Dead
Monkey
Manta Ray
Gigantic
Hey
Lovely Day
Nimrod's Son
Where is my Mind
Gouge

TD, Mickey's, 3/22/2014

Played with Stereo Side Effects and Old Buffalo Money. Everyone shared my drum kit (there was a bit of unnecessary fretting about this, it seemed, but it all worked out okay in the end). We played well. I played well. Dropped a stick on "Hold You Under" that caused me to miss the transition to the "hard part" but oh well. Something weird happened during "At the Door" where AS skipped a beat and then that made JP skip a measure...but we all came back together...only to somehow diverge again. But we kept playing and all ended together. Not sure how we managed that. I felt good that I stayed with JP and that we didn't stop. We are well rehearsed and that feels really, really good.

Crowd was medium sized and enthusiastic. They danced. They asked for an encore and we played "Faghatland." We brought down $85 for our band...a decent haul at Mickey's. I had one of those "it's so cool that you're a girl drummer" gals come up to me after the show but I had to run and get something out of my car before she could drool too much on me.I think I handled it better than I have in the past (i.e. I was nicer to her).

Setlist:
1 is for Man
Some Delirium
Going Down the Drain
Hold U Under
Better N Better
Gotta Tell U
Bodies a Burnin
Whole Damn World
At the Door
KUKU
Gun in Your Grave
HSUL

Barney Miller...yes

Someday I oughtta learn dis

TD, 3/6/2014, Mr R

We picked up a somewhat last minute show with Red Tape Diaries and Tween Wolf at Mr Roberts. DISTORTION THURSDAYS! Against my better judgement I asked to share drum kit and bass rig. Though it arrived 20 minutes later than I would have liked, the kit was decent and felt pretty good to play. The hi hat stand really had a nice feel. I've been thinking lately about lowering/flattening my setup and raising my throne. There was a little of that going on here. I had earplugs in and couldn't really hear the bass drum (which was really muffled heavily with a tight batter head that sort of hurt my knee) but the boys said they could hear it great. It did have a really focuses sound. AS played through a little 240W G-K combo that sounded a little pathetic but worked. There was the usual bs about mics/cables/stands and us trying to get out of there with all of our equipment. Since RS stopped having Fridays off and AS got a real job...we all seem to have a license to act like old-old men and go home super early. We're dicks.

We actually played pretty outstandingly. I had a sort of "I really don't give a shit about this gig" attitude going on, and as a result I was more relaxed than normal. I'm settling more and more into playing drums sober and am SO grateful for it.

A drunk guy who's birthday it was shook my hand and asked me if we'd play an Alan Jackson song. I said that we only played originals. He was very insistent that he didn't know anything about what kind of music we played, but could we please play an Alan Jackson song. I smiled and slid away as soon as possible. When we took the stage AS gave the dude a shout out, so I think he was talking to everyone.

Setlist:
1 is for man
KUKU
Hold U
Easy Life
Some Delirium
At the Door
Gotta Tell
Bodies
Sent It
Better
Gun
HSUL

SVFD, 3/1/2014, HNS

SVFD played a benefit for GRC. I played okay...notably biffing the intro to Lost Again and the outro to Somewhere in the Between.

I really don't know why these things happen...messing up shit that I think that I know. Then again...I really should just practice those things into the ground. They are short segments that stick out...I should just bucket the fuck down and get them in the muscles. I'd never mess up a Pixies song I'd practiced into the ground. I have the technology.

I don't accept the argument recently posited that playing songs from memory makes the performance inherently sloppier. It just isn't true. What IS true is that playing things from memory that you don't truly have memorized yet will always be sloppy.

I just don't like having to have a music stand on stage. Others can do what they want, but it makes me feel shitty to have it up there for myself. And it makes me nervous to not know something well enough (then I can't focus on getting my shifts right and interacting with the audience and such). Some of those tunes are gonna be really tough to memorize, but I really have to try. Or at least get the notes down to a manageable size (my notes for Superman are lengthy, but acceptable if I must have notes, for instance). Two page notes written in pencil really doesn't cut it on stage. Notes should be compact and readable from the floor.

Side note: I am disappointed that my most prominent feature in gig photos is becoming my double chin. Sure would be nice to be able to grow a legitimate beard. Le sigh.

Setlist:
Red Rubber
Rudy
Mr Smiley
Spiderwebs
Superman
About a Girl
Rascal King
Somewhere
Lemuel
Thigh High
Lost Again
Came Out
I Will Survive
Wallet (forced encore)