Instrumental Failure

All of our EPs so far follow a kind of pattern.   This one and EP5 are missing collaborations with others.  But all our EPs finish with an instrumental.

Here are a couple of snippets from the instrumental for EP6.

At the moment it is called The Fail Song.

This song has a long history.  It started as an arpeggio on acoustic.  Many years ago.  


This tune was originally scheduled for EP5 and had the intention of having lyrics.

I then showed it to E and taught him how to play it. 

He then promptly wrote the first section as a strummy section and the arpeggio was kind of lost as I liked how he started the tune. (see first video)

If I remember, it might have been called "Fear of New York" (not to do with the "Exploits of Elaine" song honest!) originally.   But we were never happy with the lyrics, so it was shelved and brought out again for EP6.

I had another go at lyrics but failed. Possibly due to the time signature being slightly odd rhythmically.  More likely the lack of inspiration.

So we decided to make it the instrumental.

The original argeggio, in a slighly altered and slower form now makes it way into the middle section of the song as a piano and at the end of the song on acoustic (see the 2nd video).


It thus became The fail song, since we failed to write lyrics for it.

This is currently being mixed.  Hopefully, we will put it up on Soundcloud soon!



 

"Can't seem to settle down no more."

Quick update on the progress of EP6.    Three of the four songs are now, we believe ready for mixing.

The lead track, is the only one left to finish recording.   Lyrics are 95% there.  Drums / percussion has been done.  Guide guitar tracks completed.  We still need to add bass and solos.

So we are very happy with the progress.

As the video shows, like all the previous EPs we have re-recorded an old song, from before E joined The Hair Thieves in 2006.

This is a reworking of the 2002 tune "Strange Familiar World".   It is a personal look of how I view going back to my hometown and the changes in the people and places I grew up in.

The original idea was just to replace the drum  and acoustic guitar sound from the original.  Leaving the solo, bass and  tremelo guitar from the original. 

So essentially, E wasn't planning on playing on this.   But the more I dissected the original audio, the more I realised how little I knew about recording at the time, with bad editing, causing pops at edit points, so I decided to re-record everything.

So I made E record a tremelo guitar part (his least favourite effect), as can be seen in the above Vine video.

Right, back to working on the final track left before we meet up tomorrow.

Later,

Rollasoc

Low Hanging Fruit

We seem to have discovered Vine.

Vine being the latest annoying social media craze, that lets you record 7 seconds of video and tweet it..

Now I thought it might be useful to show a few quick snippets, occasionally, of progress. 

Here is a video of E playing with some effects prior to recording.






So expect more videos from the recording of EP6.   Though Facebook have just done a new video thingy that lets you take 15 second clips

Masters of our own destiny!!!!

 

We believe we are now happy with the mixes.  To be honest, they didn't need much tweaking from what we had at the end of February, but some small things have been fixed.

The next step is to prepare the tracks for mastering.

This involved removing some effects off our mix master bus and then rendering the tracks out as wave files instead of our normal MP3s.

These wave files have now been  placed in a new project that we will use to master the EP.

I'm still waiting to photograph the artwork for the EP.

I did go and get my light box out of the loft, but found that it is very broken. So will need to go and find another back drop soon.

So given holidays coming up in the next few weeks. It is likely that we will master the EP next month, and release it to the world sometime in July.

In the meantime, we have been working on EP6.

We have started writing a punk like song.  That is mostly written, though no real recording has been done.   At the moment, this has a working title of  "Leaving".

We are going to record one very old Hair Thieves tune, called "Strange Familiar World", though we are hoping to keep some parts from the original and just tart up some other bits of it.

There will be another instrumental.  At the moment, this looks to be called "Reverie Part1".  Reverie Part 2 was on EP4.

And we have some snippets of lyrics and several bits of music to make up the final tune.

So it all is looking good in the land of the Hair Thieves at the moment.

Later

Rollasoc

First Pass

Initial mixes have been generated for EP5, I'm happy to say. 

A few Cubase issues aside, it has been a mostly painless process so far!  Fun with actual mixers and virtual mixers on Android have been a bit of a welcome distraction too.

We are going to live with these mixes for a week and pick up again next week with tweaking them into submission.

Hopefully, next week, we may release a un-mastered version to Soundcloud for a very limited period.

I don't think there will be a massive amount of changes needed to get these to an acceptable standard, ready for release.

So hopefully, by the end of the month, it should all be mixed and mastered and we can think about releasing it into the wild.

In the meantime, we have started collating a few new tunes and bits and bobs that we have left over from previous EPs, with the idea of getting EP6 out sometime this year, rather than in several years time.   We shall see how well that progresses! 

Mixing it up

Yesterday saw the start of mixing EP5.

It was pleasantly painless experience.  The plan was to do a rough mix of "Beijing Morning".

This was archived and mixing started on the instrumental "Bathmophobia".  So for once we appear to be getting ahead of ourselves.

So the plan is to live with this mix for a few days and then tweak again later.

More mixing sessions are scheduled for later in the week.

Below is a brief video E made, using his Android Tablet to control Cubase. Even though we normally use a hardware controller, it is interesting to see how modern technology can be used in the music process.

It also contains a sneak peak at the new song "Beijing Morning".

Happy New Year!!!!!

We believe we have finished the last recording session for EP5.

As it turned out, after comping an existing part, we decided not to rerecord the bass for the instumental, "Bathmophobia".

I had been struggling at home alone with re-recording the acoustic for "Invisible Wall", Not being happy with the current version nor the freebie acoustic version we did for the Bridgnorth music festival.

So we spent some time testing different mic setups, but especially distances between the mic and the guitar.

I then went home and re-recorded the acoustic part, which I a lot happier with.  So that is it, EP5 recorded.

Now comes the task of mixing.  This will begin next week in earnest.

My plan this week is to get all the project files into some kind of order, sorting out the grouping, topping /tailing the audio files, setting up some basic send effects and general organisation of the project. All necessary but tedious jobs.

So next week mixing begins.

The track listing for EP5 remains:-
1. Invisible Wall
2. Beijing Morning
3. Assimilation
4. Bathmophobia

We will be making a simple video for Beijing Morning.

This will also be the first EP where we have not collaborated with other muicians.

More news next week.

Rollasoc