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I've played in bands for 20 years, and while they have all sounded different, I think they would all be classified with the word "punk" somewhere in the genre description. My current band is a four piece where I play lead guitar and also have lead vocals on half the set. I think we're kind of "pop"-ish with focus on choruses, but songs are often influenced by whatever we're listening to at the moment, which can be anything from black metal to melodic pop rock. This fall we finally got into a studio to record the first songs of what we hope will be our debut album. We also caught the attention of a local film and television college, that had their students make us a video as an assignment. So we decided to release the video song as our first single. Sorry about the lyrics being in moon language (the superior Norwegian dialect known as "Trøndersk"). Basically it's an anthem about overcoming challenges and hoping for better times ahead. I wrote this after suffering a head trauma and broken cranium last fall, which was only the top of the iceberg, as the stars seemed to be aligned against me and the people I love the following months. This injury also put the brakes on the band and was the main reason we only played two gigs this year. The chorus translates to something like: "Rise up! When life puts you down, get back on your feet, one day it'll be your turn!" (I'm feeling a lot better now, by the way) Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms3-JGmIqdA The studio recording was done "live" without clicks, with vocals and extra guitar tracks post-recorded. The song is also the only song we recorded that has an element we don't do live, the e-bow padding on the final chorus. The video was also shot without playback, we were just playing the song in front of the camera team and a small audience, trying to capture our normal stage energy, as we're lovely actors who wouldn't be able to mime it. The fake blood was the film crew's idea, adding some light symbolism into an otherwise storyless video. Comments? Please be gentle, we're amateurs.
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Dec 20, 2016 10:31
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| # ? May 5, 2024 06:45 |
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The verse riffs are more thrashy than I generally like my punk (A+ on the drums though) but the choruses were good, kept the energy going all through the track and it all sounds tight and well recorded. The blood was a bit weird, on the fingers I can sort of see because you're playing yourself to the bone but the slight nosebleed and dripping mouthful didn't tell any stories to me. I'm not a very visual artist though, there's a very good chance the symbolism skipped straight past me.
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Dec 20, 2016 11:47
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Gym Leader Barack posted:The verse riffs are more thrashy than I generally like my punk (A+ on the drums though) but the choruses were good, kept the energy going all through the track and it all sounds tight and well recorded. The blood was a bit weird, on the fingers I can sort of see because you're playing yourself to the bone but the slight nosebleed and dripping mouthful didn't tell any stories to me. I'm not a very visual artist though, there's a very good chance the symbolism skipped straight past me. Thanks! Yeah, they were going for a general feeling of falling apart and playing to the bone. The original script had more scenes in it besides the concert setting, but we settled for this version because they had a lot of great raw material filmed and we didn't think intersecting a film novella in there would make anything better. I was kind of sceptical about the blood myself when we were filming, but I like how they used the clips. Our dialogue with the film team has from the start been concerned with that the visuals match the dynamics of the song, and I think they understood us. Like, the intro riff that has only one guitar audible is in B/W with cuts that are long and out of focus until the band comes in, and the first solo hint that also has just one guitar is also long, calm cuts. On the guitar solo with the pounding "reversed" drum beat there is fast cuts, dutch angles and some other weird stuff. Other than "follow the structure of the song" the film team has had freedom to do whatever they wanted.
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Dec 20, 2016 12:24
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Overall it's a good package, there was nothing at any point that didn't seem professional, and the track will easily stand among it's contemporaries. Do you have any more music I can hear? Also any more stories or details about the recording process would be sweet, I love talking shop about music production, especially punk.
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Dec 20, 2016 12:47
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Of course: https://soundcloud.com/user-606478767/sets/promo/s-UUdLj That's a soundcloud containing the 6 songs we managed to finish in two days. We used that link to shop around to friends and people whose opinions we respect, asking for comments and which song they thought would make the best first single. If you think the verse riff to Reis Dæ Opp! was to thrashy you'll probably like some of the other songs better. The studio we used was a local shop situated in the same building as our rehearsal space, managed by some friends of ours. We paid for a package deal of two days recording and two days mixing, and our main goal was to record as many songs as possible in our two days. We set our session to a weekend, and used saturday to record the band and sunday for vocals and guitar dubs. Originally we planned that I'd play the guitar exactly like the rhythm guitarist and everything even remotely lead-guitar-ish would be dubbed in afterwards. Very soon we realized that many of the lead parts were essential to the structure of the song, and played them normally, overdubbing extra rhythm guitar afterwards instead. The solos on "Reis Dæ Opp!" and "Tits Machine" (it's not in english, the title is a stupid pun) are the only lead stuff that wasn't played live. The guitar amps had their separate rooms. Mine was in the hallway, the other guitarist's in the bathroom. He used his own 120W Peavey XXX. Since my amp is pretty much the same as his (I think it's actually modeled after his) I borrowed the studio tech's Orange amp to get a more crunchy rock sound. Our studio technician is a fan of gang shout vocals (think NY hardcore bands like sick of it all/agnostic front), and we did the backing vocals or several of the songs together with all four in the booth.
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Dec 20, 2016 13:43
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Tits Machine is everything I want in a punk song, just the right amount of Snares Per Second to get me moving. Schtøggen reminds me a lot of the Fat Wreck stuff I listened to as a teenager, like a mix of Flogging Molly and Wizo. I've never done much recording of actual amps, all my stuff has been software modelling, mainly for convenience. I did build a huge soundproof booth and can easily record a loud amplifier within but I am also a lazy motherfucker and any obstacle in the way of recording is likely to make me lose interest quickly, also I can do a whole track from my chair with amp sims and that's a huge plus.
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Dec 20, 2016 14:03
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Cool. Have you tried reamping? As in, recording dry guitar and then later feeding it through whatever amps and boxes you prefer? I know it's kind of common nowadays, and you already have the booth. I've only used software amps (amplitube metal) for home recordings and song sketches. I wouldn't do that on a "real" recording, but I know it's also more common nowadays. By the way, most of our "focus group" was split between the single we ended up releasing and "Tits Machine". The title is, as I said, a stupid pun. It sounds exactly like the word "Tidsmaskin" in Norwegian, which means "Time machine". It's mostly about how fun the scene was when we were younger, and that a good band can take you back there and have you forget that you live in the age of smart phones and no dancing. kjetting fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Dec 20, 2016 |
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Dec 20, 2016 17:59
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I haven't reamped as yet but I'm all set up to if necessary, I always end up with clean tracks that I chop up and feed into the modellers so would be easy to incorporate a real amp. When I stop being lazy. Parenthood is tiring.
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Dec 21, 2016 04:22
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Love it, really like the raw energy wrapped up in a digestible song - You've captured the live feeling well too, nice one man!
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Dec 21, 2016 20:23
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peter gabriel posted:Love it, really like the raw energy wrapped up in a digestible song - You've captured the live feeling well too, nice one man! Thanks, and I also hope you don't mind that I imagine you are the real Peter Gabriel posting this. :-) Regarding Peter Gabriel... We wrote some notes for the mixing engineer for each song we recorded, with some references to bands and songs to listen to to help define the sound for it. We mentioned some other Norwegian bands combining punk and metal, like Kvelertak and Ondt Blod, and threw in Ignite's last album for a punk record that has the same theme of standing tall and pushing on in hard times. So, I was joking a little about that the song was most similar to Peter Gabriel's duet "Don't give up" with Kate Bush, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it was pretty much true. It has some similar themes, the same structure with the verse and chorus being sung by different people, the verse talking about negative stuff while the chorus is uplifting, etc. (Maybe not that funny, but you know how in-jokey band humor can be).
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Dec 21, 2016 22:23
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Dec 21, 2016 22:33
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