This past Friday I pulled out Blonski’s purple bass and his fat Peavey amp and rocked and rolled at Rockville High School’s Band Aid concert. I’ve played with a few other teachers in my middle school at our talent shows for the past five or so years, but when Jen’s son suggested we take our show on the road to the high school, we though, “Why not?”
Thanks to Jen Roggi on vocals, Judy Thompson on drums, and Ryan Kupferschmid on acoustic guitar. We had a blast and hopefully we’ll do it again next year.
Two quick updates… First, General Pancakes debuted at The Cue in Danbury last month. Steve, Jim, and I hung out with family and friends, played songs by Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, and Lionel Ritchie, and dined on exquisitely smoked pig and cow parts. The delicious footage can be found below.
Will there be a second show for the General? We’ll have to wait and see!
On the recording front, Steve Blonski and our Forefathers has been making progress in spurts when we have time. We’re nearly finished recording a complete demo of the album, but there’s more work to do. Once we finish that, our plan is to take our time getting the recording sounding right so that it all gels together well. More info when it comes…
Until next time, keep partying, karamuing, and liming.
I didn’t grab a pic, so this is a depiction of what Predator would see when looking at a band of clay models. Relevant!
My bass hands, they are rusty. These past couple months have been the longest stretch in a while that I haven’t been in at least one group, holding down the low hertz waves.
Slow Blues:
My co-worker Fred and I have jammed occasionally over the years, with a rotating cast of his friends. Fred sings and plays a mean guitar, and even though his musical tastes diverge somewhat from mine, I love getting to learn and play some more old school stuff.
Born On The Bayou:
This time we got together at my place and rocked it with Brian (Guitar and some sick CCR-charged vocals) and Billy (Drums and all around great guy) to see if we could maybe get a thing going, and possibly play out some time. While the results were a little rough, there was a lot of cool stuff in the recordings, and it was really only a first shot together, with no plan or songlist really. Very cool to see everyone kinda lock in a figure out a song on the fly.
Spooky:
Mike had generously let me borrow his 8 track recorder, which worked great! Unfortunately, I took the effect out from the PA for vocals, so the tracks have an ethereal quality sometimes. Balance was an issue too; I had set up 1 room mic, 2 drum mics (overhead and bass), direct in on bass, and the aforementioned vocals from PA. I had hoped to get the guitars pretty good from the room, but it was loud and the mic picked up one guit more than the other. Definitely would direct out or close mic the guitars next time, and if that happens I’ll be sure to share the end product too!
During a visit to Narragansett in preparation for the Newport Jazz Festival a week or so ago, the opportunity finally arose to put my new M-Audio M-Track II to use.
My three year old son was looking forward to seeing Robert Searight of Snarky Puppy. He’s already declared that he wants to be as good of a drummer as him, and I applaud his (extreme) ambition. The Puppies tightly funk-jazzed their way through a handful of instrumentals in front of Fort Adams as the sun threatened to set. We capitalized on the energy the bands brought by playing some music of our own.
What better way to celebrate modern jazz than to learn a Led Zeppelin cover and adapt it for two acoustics and a mandolin?
I plugged the M-Track II into my Surface Pro (1st gen) and ran everything off of battery power. We gave Jim one mic and positioned it so that it picked up more of his vocals than his guitar. The second condenser sat between Steve and I, slightly favoring Steve’s mandolin.
So far, I have two concerns with the M-Track II. First, it doesn’t have any MIDI inputs, which the competing PreSonus Audiobox USB includes. Second, the Zeppelin recording came out nicely, but the other two jams we recorded had a hiss on the mic pointed and me and Steve. This could be due to a number of factors not directly attributable to the interface (too hot with direct sunlight? bad cable? bad microphone?), but either way I’m leery.
Hopefully I’ll know more when I get to record something else. Until then, though, Steve has a few originals he’s been working on that might get some drum tracks later this week. In addition, I’m still telling myself I’ll rerecord some Rama Ram Jat. We’ll see!
In the vein of content creation for this site and as a consequence of a passing remark from Mikey (thanks for the idea beuuedday!), I present to the SGP community a little taste of a side project I’ve been in for the past (almost) 2 years.
We rocked and we rolled…
Disturbing The Pie is a band I’m in with 2 of the former members of a Jethro Tull / eclectic rock band I used to be in called TaleSpin, plus a guy we all know who has rocked with co-headliners from past shows. Our music selection is pretty eclectic as well, spanning the 50s to the 90s, with perhaps a few outliers. Its good stuff… check out our Facebook page for updates on shows and also to find out if we have any other websites (I think we do!) with further media to peruse.
OK, so at this show we did last weekend I recorded the majority of it for posterity, and I think it came out pretty good! Not to downplay us, but we hadn’t had many practices beforehand so there are a few weird moments, but overall it was pretty good and the crowd sure loved us! Our drummer even did one of those ALS ice bucket thingys in a thong, so there was something for the ladies too!
Here are some samples of our show:
An aside to the aside: Mikey has been cooking up some musical analysis/commentary posts, and I mean to follow suit. Stay tuned for what may occur!
Updates on two bands and miscellaneous other details! Hooray!
First, The Name would like to thank Shake it Twice for letting us rock out at Musky’s with them earlier in the month. Despite technical difficulties and human error, we managed to pull off (if we’re being generous) four songs. Two The Name originals and covers of “Summertime” by The Fresh Prince/DJ Jazzy Jeff and “The Way of the World” by Earth Wind and Fire. Luckily there is no audio from the show. The next step is recording the originals and hitting the open mics.
In addition to a pending The Name release, Meat Without Feet are inching closer to their second release. Another four track EP, WPOP will likely drop within the next month or so. Recording in nearly complete, with only minor touch-ups and mixing left to do.
Friend of the label, Jefim Piekarz, is also hard at work on The Wayward Solider’s debut, which will feature some drum, bass, and keyboard from SGP members.
Black Velvet’s second disc, Reserved, is also perpetually in progress. Someday!
This is our first blog post for SGP! Figured a place to keep everyone up to date on the latest SGP projects was in order.
A few things happening…
First, the second SB & the Victor Frankensteins disc is more or less finished. We’ve decided to delay the release in order to fool around with mixing/master tricks and some new plugins. All recording is done and at some point we’ll just be satisfied and release it.
Second, the SGP 10th Anniversary album is in the works. We’re recording one new track, one old unfinished track, and then tacking on some unreleased works from the past. This will be the first chance to hear some stuff from the abandoned Andre EP, and the rarely talked about Space album. Thinking about including two “discs” with one greatest hits and one rarities. The goal is to finish it before the end of 2010 so that it’s still the 10th anniversary…
And finally, The Name is making its debut Wednesday the 25th at an open mic at the Main Pub in Manchester, CT. Hoping to release a single before or shortly after the performance.
