Three Gigs, 6/25 & 6/26

I played three gigs in two days.

TD, High Noon Saloon with Damsel Trash and Venus in Furs, 6/25/2014
The other bands killed it. John the sound guy was really nice to us. We brought in $53 on a Wednesday night. People danced. JP broke two strings and RS broke one string. I played okay but not great. We have played better shows, but we survived and dealt with disruptions better than normal, so I was proud of us. I may or may not have gotten my butt signed by Damsel Trash.

Setlist to come

CJ, at GRC, 6/26/2014 noon-time
We turned CJ into a KiD fronted group for the purposes of performing for little girls. It went really well. I didn't sing as well as I would have liked, but well enough. AVzang told me it was a good set, which meant a ton to me, and that she liked that we covered "Winterlong," which was nice because it means she was actually paying attention. A kid requested "Where is my mind?". The boys were swell about the whole thing. I la la luvs them.

Setlist:
Debaser
Build High
Bam Thwok (first time we ever performed in public)
I Bleed
Monkey Gone to Heaven
Gigantic
Where is My Mind (added by request)
Winterlong
Manta Ray (skipped cause we were short on time)
Into the White

SVFD, National Women's Music Festival, 6/26/2014
This was the first time I ever played a national festival and I was both excited to do so...and uneasy because all performers at the festival are supposed to be women and I don't identify as a woman. So playing the festival basically meant being in the closet about being trans and lying, which I felt shitty about.

The sound check and the change-over was a little chaotic and confusing, but things mostly worked out okay. Stage sound was really poor but I'm told the sound in the house was good. I played through a borrowed sweet SWR rig with a 4x10 cab...but it might as well been a piece of shit because I could barely hear it standing right in front of it. Anyway, it was DI'ed to the house.

All that said, we played pretty well and had fun on stage. I managed to make eye contact and have a fun exchange with most of my band mates. Our sign language interpreter was really nice and fun and BL goofed with her throughout the show.

I was mostly off book except for Lemuel. Though I glanced at my notes for "Sergio" and "I Will Survive" because I was tired. I think looking at the notes might have hurt more than it helped.

Setlist:
Rascal King
About a Girl
Came Out of A Lady
Sergio
Lost Again
Spiderwebs
Rudy
Lemuel
Red Rubber Ball
I Don't Love You Anymore
Dandelions
Thigh High
Mr. Smiley (cut for time)
Wallet (cut for time)

I will survive

Breeders Tribute Part One Update

19 songs

6 weeks

boom...done

Cannonball

Flipside

Hag

Full on Idle

Roi

Huffer

Divine Hammer

Saints

Invisible Man

I Just Wanna Get Along

Do You Love Me Now

No Aloha

Son of Three

New Year

Drivin' on 9

Roi Reprise

Mad Lucas

Off You

SOS

I'm calling this first 19 songs "Part One" now. I fully intend to do more, but I need to work on other things for awhile. This project was becoming a reason to avoid other obligations, so I gotta stop for awhile.  

"Part One" was done over a period of 6 weeks, but I was trying to figure out how much time EXACTLY was spent. I didn't work on it at all for 10 days of that time because I was out of town. And somewhere about two weeks into the project I nearly gave up on it entirely because "the guitar parts were too hard." So I'm sure there were some fallow days around that time. I figure about 4 hours a day for 5 weekends and an average of an hour a day on weekdays. So that's about 60 total hours of work or so. That's to arrange all the parts from scratch or internet tab (such as it was), learn the parts, record the parts, mix the songs.  The only cheat on that is that I'd been working on learning some of the drum parts for about a year and I knew parts here or there for a few of the other songs. But 90%+ of the parts I learned in those 6 wks, sometimes moments before recording. The songs include rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, keyboard, violin, cello, drums and vocals. There are only two sampled parts...on "Mad Lucas" and on "Off You"...the weird Moog noises. All the rest is me playing.

Update on Breeders recordings

Steady progress. Was thinking Friday morning that it would be cool to have all of Last Splash done and be able to create an album order playlist. Was shocked this had not occurred to me before. So I started and finished Mad Lucas, Roi Reprise, and Driving on 9 all over the weekend. Also re-recorded drums for New Year (better but still not great) and posted all four. This leaves only "Off You" of the original 15 tunes I started undone...and only SOS undone off Last Splash. I recorded most of SOS this weekend too, including the bass line that's been giving me fits for months (it is pretty close, but still not convinced it is "right"). Mostly I just have to get down the vocals and the KeD morse code thing, which is less straight forward rhythmically than I'd thought (sometimes it follows the morse code pattern and sometimes not-so-much).

Highlights of the weekend were whipping out ye olde violin, nary touched for almost ten years and barely touched even back in the day, and producing not entirely offensive sounds with it. Also set the Vox amp to tremelo reverb and got a decent approximation of the Mad Lucas vocal effect.

The songs are coming more easily now, which I supposed shouldn't surprise me as all things come more easily the more that you do them. It DOES feel a bit like I've unlocked some mystery key that was blocking me even just a few weeks ago. I'm beginning to understand their language.

TD, Wurst Times, 5/24, 2014

We played in the last slot at HNS for Wurst Times alt-brat fest. I was shocked to find it relatively well organized for a festival...backline available, drink/brat tickets organized, show ran on time, attendance decent. The kit I used was out of tune and the snare sucked (luckily brought my own) but was actually pretty decent (even had good cymbals). I played pretty well once I figured out not to play the horribly out of tune floor tom and use the 2nd rack instead. A couple of years ago I would not have even noticed this so I guess I'm getting "better".

A decent gig.

It is almost as if we practice every week and are playing gigs once a month now and have our shit together.

Setlist to follow.

Breeders Project Update

Up to 8 tunes posted now. Seven more are in process and close to done. Picked out 10 more to work on next cause I decided that I totally love doing this even if it IS kind of embarrassing.

It's the little things...

Case in point. When I recorded "Huffer" I played the guitar "solo" straight through. In real life Kim and Kelley exchange parts on this as call and response. It bothered me that it didn't sound like two people playing on my recording. But I didn't want to re-record it as two separate lines cause...well that would be hard. So instead I took the line of myself playing it all and copied it and pasted it into two new tracks. One track I panned right and deleted every other part. The other I panned left and deleted the opposite parts. The result sounds like two people playing like on the original. I'm very please with myself about this.

I know that this is just the kind of digital tom-foolery that Kim hates...but it is fun to learn how to use the software and to make it sound kinda like the original. I'm "fixing" very little. It's all me on there...even the mistakes for the most part.

See 1:14 through 1:24 on the recording below.