Robots Will Be Our Superiors

Reaching Scarlet will be at Liquor Sweets this Friday with Ian & the Dream and John Frederick Band.  Doors are at 8:30, door is $7.

We’ve also been confirmed at Mikey’s (mi-keys?) for May 2nd.  More details as I get them.

Skappleton is also less then a month away!

For the third (fourth?) week in a row, “Fight” was played on FM 102.1′s local show.  Not only did we get our song played, but we got a shoutout from Kenny and Mike from Something To Do about our upcoming show with them and The Invaders.  Suzanne (the DJ) has said nice things about us a few times, which means all of that bribe money is finally paying off.

Which brings me to my next point: We’re playing Ska Fest this Saturday at The Modjeska.  We have an early slot, so plan on us hitting the stage near 5:00.  If I find out for sure I will update this post.  The Modjeska is at 1128 Historic W. Mitchell St. in Milwaukee.

1 – Reaching Scarlet will be playing live on WMSE (91.7 FM on your radio dial) on Tuesday, Feb. 10th at 8:00 PM. It will be like we’re playing live in your living room, and you won’t even have to feed us!

http://www.wmse.org/djs/midnight-radio.php

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First things first: the Reaching Scarlet EP “Distraction” is available for download, for realsies.  Here’s a link to the Amazon page:

Distraction

I’m assuming it’s up on iTunes, eMusic, and Napster, but I don’t have any of those programs on this computer so’s I can’t check.  But if it made it up on Amazon I will assume that it’s on the others.  If anyone has those and wishes to chime and say that it’s up, that would be coolio.

Also, since I’m pimping downloads like some sort of downloading pimp today, here’s a link to Amazon’s 99 song Beethoven download.  Much like the Barnes & Noble self-published classics, I wholeheartedly support making classical music and literature made extremely affordable.  When you can buy this much music for $2 and Shakespeare’s complete works for $10, you’d almost be a fool not to.  I’m about 60 tracks into the Beethoven download, and I’m already up to a gig of music.

The 99 Most Essential Beethoven Masterpieces

SlickDeals comes through again in the clutch.

Being a musician isn’t always lucrative, monetarily speaking.  Unless you hit it big (David Hasselhoff big), money doesn’t just throw itself at you.  Or does it…?

There I was – breaking hearts and causing women both young and old to swoon – at Club Anything, an interesting venue/bar at about 5th & National,  when it started to rain money.  Reaching Scarlet was kicking ass and taking names, despite the fact that I was still dying of pneumonia (or the flu, whatever) and our singer had just flown in mere hours earlier.  We were rocking so hard that we created dollar bills.

I don’t recall if we were playing or if we were between songs, but in a burst of confusion and possibly wind, money literally started falling from the ceiling.  Real money.  Not just a few stray dollars, either; there was somewhere between $75 and $100 falling from the ceiling.  You can see in the picture below, in which I am holding a dollar and looking confused, that there is a small ledge above the stage upon which are many Tim Burton-esque skeletons.  To the right of them, and out of frame, is some more miscellaneous crap.  That is the section from which the currency precipitation originated from.

It was an interesting chain of events to watch.  I think that at first people thought it was fake money.  I thought it was fake money.  After a moment, a few people noticed it was real money.  Some people went right for it (Casey), while others were reluctant, wondering what in the hell was going on.  We certainly didn’t know.

It dawned on me a few moments later that most people probably thought that we were responsible for literally dumping money from the ceiling.  It seems reasonable enough, as we were the band playing at the time.  To be completely honest, however, we have no flippin’ idea where the money came from, why it was up there, or what made it fall.

I have a theory, though – Club Anything has a large fan that they use to blow on the crowd when things get crazy during Deviant Sex Night, or whatever they host there when ska bands aren’t playing.  (Look at their website sometime.)  I think that they turned on the fan sometime during our set, and a bunch of singles from some previous promotion in which money gets dumped from the ceiling were blown free from their hiding place.  Chaos ensued, and the rest you already know.

Reaching Scarlet rolls hard, but we don’t roll hard enough to dump free money away.  Someday we’ll have a runaway budget, but not today.  We’re all incredibly confused by that particular chain of events, but maybe it will work in our favor and we’ll have more people at our next show, hoping against hope that we start making it rain with singles, just like Jack Nicholson in the first Batman movie.

I would just like to point out that I made it all the way through that post without making a joke regarding making it rain with singles and strip clubs.  Until now, that is.

PS – I’ve been playing Secret of Mana and it rocks.  I also downloaded Super Mario RPG, another great SNES game.  Ah, retrogaming.  It’s hip to dismiss retro games as foolish quests of nostalgia (he said so on Zero Punctuation so it has to be true, right?), but good games are good games and these, my friends, are great games.

…or something like that.  Saturday was the evening of Reaching Scarlet playing with The Meeples at The Cactus Club in Bayview.  I would have to say (without hyperbole) that it was the best thing that’s ever happened ever.  Some of my best friends in the world (Jim, Greg, Sarah, Buck, & Shannon) drove from far and exotic places (Stevens Point, Oshkosh) to see both Reaching Scarlet and The Meeples kick all sorts of asses.

I was really proud of both bands.  Reaching Scarlet played an extremely tight set, especially considering this was the first show with the updated roster.  All of the work doing rehearsals and recordings finally came together in an explosion of awesomeness.

Similarly, The Meeples played what I would consider their best show ever.  I think we were all on top of our game.  We all made a few bucks, gave away and sold a ton of merch, and everyone made some new friends.  The turnout was very good, and we even got some cool pictures.  This is one of the few pictures I’ve seen from the show so far (others will make their way in over time), which was once again taken by our good friend Chad who managed to capture all of the The Meeples in their Meepley glory.  Everyone except Eric, though.  He’s playing the drums in the back.  It’s a very important job, but doesn’t always lend itself to good photo ops.

Many thanks to everyone that came out to the show!

The Reaching Scarlet 3-song CD is still getting worked on.  Hopefully we’ll be able to mix it in the next weeks or so, and then it just needs to get mastered and printed and copied.

In unrelated news, Carlos Zambrano pitched a no-hitter.  The Cubs won again today and Ted Lily had a no-hitter going into the 7th.  The Cubs should play displaced-hurricane games at Miller Park more often!

In other unrelated news, we closed on our house on Friday.  Manifest destiny!

I just realized now that I misspelled the category “Reaching Scarlet”.  Meanwhile, some band in Idaho named “Reacing Scarlet” rejoiced over the spike in internet attention.  Seems I can’t do anything right these days.

BTW, I downloaded Chrome last night.  I don’t have much to add to the same praises/complaints that have been floating around the internet, though I heard that they amended their EULA to exclude the nasty part about Google taking the rights to material published while using Chrome.  Good for them.

It’s cool and all, but I have Firefox so tweaked to my liking that it will be a while before I give it up for anything else.

Tonight I finished up all of my parts for the recording.  As I write this, my band members are slaving away in the studio… I wish I could have stayed but tonight I had to leave early due to various conflicts.  I’m not done by any means, though.  Next up is mixing, another process that’s surprisingly time consuming.

For me it’s fun to record because it means that someone’s actually listening to the bass parts that I’ve written and evaluating them.  The same is true for everyone else in the band.  I’ve grown a new appreciation for each part that everyone’s written because I’ve had the opportunity to listen to them all on an individual basis.  People like to know that someone’s paying attention to what they’ve done, so it’s nice to have someone listening closely.  Kevin, our recording engineer slash producer, has a great ear and gives us excellent feedback.

On a completely different note, I found a song that I slapped together during the time when I moved up here and I was really bored.  It kind of sounds like the music that would be played in a Volkswagen commercial.  I had actually forgotten about it and was quite excited when I found it.

On a completely different note, I’m going to go download Google Chrome now and see what the fuss is about, and then go to bed.  I just talked to Casey and he said that everything is going fine.

Recording music is a deceptively difficult process.  It requires a completely different approach from what most musicians are used to, which is playing live.  The best comparison I have is that playing a live show is similar to being a theater actor while recording is like being a movie star.  In a live show, anything goes.  You get the job done, bing bang boom, and it’s over.  There are minor slipups in any show, but they’re gone before anyone knows what happened.

Not so when it comes to recording.  Recording is a long and often painful process, during which everything that seemed simple before becomes horrendously difficult.  It’s take after take of meticulously analyzed snippets of songs often done out of order and in conditions that are not at all conducive to creating art.

Here’s a brief overview of how the process works.  It’s much more than setting up a few microphones in a snappy looking room and having everyone play until you nail a good take.  Oh, how I wish it were that simple.  In reality, each person plays one at a time, the results layered until the song is complete.  The action starts with the drummer – recording the drums is easily the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of recording.  Setting up the various microphones (depending on how many you have access to) can take hours, and tuning and tweaking the drums until they sound great involves even more time.  How many microphones are set up and how meticulously they are placed depends on the sound engineer or producer.

After getting everything set up, the drums will still eat up a lot of time as they take a long time to actually record.  The drummer will play wearing headphones while the bass, guitar, and sometimes vocals play along, getting piped into the drummer’s phones.  These tracks are called “scratch tracks” as they aren’t part of the final product and simply serve as a point of reference for the drummer.  Sometimes, the drummer will play along with a “click track”, which is essentially a metronome set to the time signature of the song.  This click track is playing in the headphones, along with the rest of the band, in order to keep a consistent tempo throughout the song.  When playing live, there are numerous unintentional tempo changes that happen as a function of the band and the drummer.  Songs will speed up and slow down by very tiny amounts, but no one really notices and life goes on.  In the studio, however, the musicians are recording something that will be listened to over and over and over and over and over and over and is indelibly set down on a medium that cannot be changed once everything is complete.  As such, the drummer literally needs to keep perfect time throughout the whole song, without screwing up.  Even the very best drummers get hung up on the click track.

When it’s all said and done, the drummer has to A) Keep perfect time B) not have a single slipped stick, screw up, dropped beat, or misstep and B) still play with a good feel and make it sound “good”.

Talk about performance anxiety.  While under the microscope of having to play perfectly in the studio, the musicians still have to create art, which is exceedingly difficult as the day moves on.  Don’t forget that bands are on the clock while they’re in the studio, paying large amounts of money by the hour and on a shoestring budget.  This is yet another mental obstacle that has brought many well-trained musicians to their knees in frustration.  Time is money, and each flub and take sucks up more precious time.  The more takes that are required, the more the musician gets frustrated and worried, resulting in a poor performance that requires even more takes.

Once the drums are done, each musician then goes back and records his or her part, often listening to the same scratch tracks that the drummer listened to.  Usually the bass records after the drums, then guitar, then keyboards and or horns, and finally vocals.  Depending on the instrument, musician, and producer, this part of the process can either go really slow or really fast.  Good musicians can make it go fast due to their proficiency, and good producers usually make it go slow because of their attention to detail.

When Reaching Scarlet entered the studio to record on Sunday, we had a simple goal: record three songs in one ten hour day and then come back on a different day for mixing.  Three songs in ten hours should be simple, right?

Hmm… not so much.  In fourteen hours we got drums done for three songs and bass done on two.  We had some miscellaneous keyboard and clean guitar parts, but we it still left us with essentially another day of recording left to do.

There were a lot of factors that made us go over time, which I can go into later.  At the end of the day, however, I think that all of the extra time we spent getting done what we got done will result in an excellent recording.  I’ve been in situations where we’ve recorded something that’s “good enough”.  Just tonight I went back and listened to some old CDs with old bands and cringed at the parts that we accepted as passable due to time and/or patience constraints.  It hurts.  Once you record something, it’s there forever.  There’s no dicking around in the studio and I’m glad that we’re taking the time to do it right.

Having said all of that, recording is awesome because it makes you feel like a rock star, even with all of the crappiness that goes along with it.  It’s an exciting process that makes you feel great about doing what you do.  It will be a while before we have a finished product, but I’ll give a few more updates and post links to music once we have it.