reRealize

Well its been a while.... but I do have a good excuse. During the past 3 months I had the pleasure to work in a real recording studio in Bolivia, Cantvs Studio to be specific. I got the chance to produce and engineer my first LP, a ten song album for a new Bolivian band called Illimani Beat and to help out with the recording of other higher level artist and directors like the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos who where recording the soundtrack for a new movie. If that wasn't enough I got to meet incredibly talented musicians, but more of that in another blog. What I want to talk about today is the last song I got to record in El Salvador. This happened after I had left for college when I was back for vacation for not to long and we decided that the only reasonable thing to do was record another song. This project includes as always Marito Rivera and Carlos Escalante (Ñanga) and this time we also got to record  with Daniel Milla. The song called "Realize" titled by Ñanga because he did what most of us consider the harder part which is writing the lyrics, which he also did for the first song I posted (Moon). I started "writing" the song while I was in college but by that I mean I came up with a cool sounding chord progression and a few licks, the actual composing of the song began when we all got together and finally gave the song texture and form. If I recall correctly the recording of this song took about 3 days, that includes moving all the instruments and organizing my room so we can record there, writing the song and constant trips to McDonalds. We recorded all the instrumental in my room and for the vocals we got the pleasure to, again, work in Marito's studio. As always the hardest part of the writing process was coming up with a melody we could all agree on and thats probably what took the longest to figure out, other that a challenge we had was that we only had a fretless bass to work with which meant that it became very imprecise and that took a little bit longer to record. Its also worth mentioning that there were different opinions about the backing vocals, not everyone was too happy with the way they sounded.

One of the main reasons for which I'm posting this song and blog almost half a year after we actually recorded ( and the reason for the title) is because the version of the song I'm uploading with this blog is a new mix of the song that the previous "final version that everyone else has". The reason I did this is because after training at work over the summer I realized how many mistakes there were in the mixing and editing of this song, and that also goes for the song I already uploaded. For the new mix of this song I gave the song a better panorama that it didn't have last time, more precise and cumulate depth and a better equalization process. In other to give it a better panorama it was mainly a work of setting a better space with use of the simple paning techniques that distribute the instruments in a more organized way, for example splitting the drums left and right depending on their actual position while recording. For a more commutative depth instead of giving each channel its own reverb track I created a new auxiliary track with a new reverb I got at work and passing all channels through that. For better equalization I used new software I got from work that made my old EQ software look like a kids toy and I actually got to apply some of the stuff I learned in my "Physics of Sound" class from last semester. However I'm sorry to say that I did some rookie mistakes during the recording that now that I found them they were beyond repair in post-production given that they were recording mistakes and I don't only mean some peaks but some other stuff that I wasn't able to clean up, nevertheless I still feel this new version is much better than the original one.

Realize Mix by Electric Axis

I will (hopefully soon) be adding a few blogs giving new mixes of the songs I previously uploaded and a few blogs about my experience in a recording studio. Those might take a little bit longer to be up just because I want to upload them with the songs I produced and since I had to leave right after we finished mastering I don't know if all copyright have been processed and I don't know what kind of licensing they got (hopefully Creative Commons) as I figure that out I'll upload them.

(thats Fito Paez I got to see him front row in London... it was amazing)
also its very late and I don't really feel like proof reading this one so lets be nice and ignore all the fuck ups in my writing

Dany

The song I want to talk about today gives extreme mix feelings. The song title is "Dany" for no real reason other that we felt like calling it "Dany." The reason this song gives me mix feeling is because the whole song was composed, written, edited and mixed in less than 24 hours, this makes incredibly proud, but it always leaves me thinking we could have made this song so much better than what it actually is now. The reason we rushed the song is because that was the first time me and Mario Rivera (aka Marito an amazing musician far better than myself) were given Marito's dad studio for the day, well initially we were giving the studio for only the day we ended up spending the whole night there. Thing is, we were given the studio and we were as excited as a, not to sound too cliche, a child finding their first boner. I packed up my guitar and my laptop went over to pick up Marito and head down to the studio only to realize we really didnt know what the fuck we were about to do. On the way there we were listening to my new Imelda May Album, an artist I have to thank Ceci for showing me, and as we were listening to the 8th track "Smokers' Song" we noticed we liked that bass line with a rockabilly style to it so once we were sitting down on the studio with no idea on what to do we came up with the bass line that you hear right after the intro of the song. Which now that I've told were the idea actually comes from if you listen to the song you can do nothing but say "wow that sounds like a pretty cheap imitation" and I might even agree with you to a certain level. At this point we had a far to basic idea of what we wanted to do and time was limited so we started recording.
Marito being a jazz musician came up with the intro to the song which has a strong jazz feel to it with a few soft guitar licks on top of it, the intro is my personal favorite part of the song. Right after a few attempts we got that part down and we jumped straight to that first bass lick we came up with, except of course we didn't have an actual bass so all the bass parts were recorded with Marito's keyboard. we decided it sounded to empty so we decided to put a guitar part following the same notes as the bass except that I decided that it might be a good idea to have them slightly out of phase, looking back at that decision I'm almost sure it wasn't the best I now feel it feels more messy than creative. We later came up with the chord progression for the chorus which was first recorded in the piano and then we added a very dirty distorted guitar on top. Right after this we noticed the change was to agressive so we added a pre-chorus. at this point we figured out the structure of the song and finished recording what would be the backing track, except we didn't have drums in the studio so it was purely the keyboard and guitar.
After finishing that we took a quick drive to a near by Burger King and had a fast dinner, we entered the studio at 4pm it was now midnight and we hadn't eaten anything. Once dinner was over we started on what we both consider our weakest part: writing lyrics and settling on a melody. We started with the melody, we started playing the verse part of the song over and over while we where each in a different part of the studio humming different melodies that could fit the backing track. This whole humming thing was very frustrating, every time I thought I had something good I would quickly forget it or when I thought I definitively had it after showing to Marito it sounded horrible. after a few hours we came up with what would be the melody for the song, and now it was time for the lyrics. I dont really know what it is with lyrics but in a way they always make me uncomfortable its now really the fact that I dont like people reading what I write, which I usually dont, but its more of a "I'm not sure this makes sense" sort of feeling. we started writing and re-writing for a few hours till we found a first verse and a chorus. Marito started taking takes and takes and recording almost became frustrating, I'm glad Marito is as picky and dedicated to what he records as he is, but after 13 hours of recording it can get very exhausting.
Slowly but confident we finished recording the voice and started on working in the solos, for both of us this came more naturally. at about 6:30 am we left the studio.
Walking outside was a huge shock, I knew how late it was but since there were no windows on the studio having the sun just slap you in the face was, well, shocking,
I dropped Marito off, fought with the traffic because it was the morning rush hour I got home at about 7:30, slept for 6 hours woke up had lunch picked up Marito and headed back to my house to record the drums. As we listened to the song to put a drum track to it we found so many mistakes that at this point we just couldn't fix we had to work around them. The most curious one was the one at about 3:40 at which for some reason was some extra time between the pre-chorus and chorus, we just made the best of it and added a small "drum solo?" thing, I really liked how that sounded. One more thing I should mention about the drums and you might have noticed already is that I had no crash cymbal, my drumkit is as cheap as it gets and you can tell by that distinctive "this drum sounds worse than a bucket and branches" sound and at that moment I didn't even had the crash, oh well something else to work around. After that I edited and mixed which I admit is not my best work but here it is:
Dany by Electric Axis

I ask only that when you listen that you do so with good headphones or speakers, mainly because when I showed this to my dad I did so in a car with a shitty sound system and the song sounded so empty and bad I was incredibly embarrases when he heard it, even after I told him it only took a day to do. Anywho  I hope you enjoy it and feel free to leave any comments or rants about it.

Moon

What I want to show on this post is the first original song I wrote with my old band, The Electric Axis. However, please let me give a brief history of the band first. Marito, Nanga and me started playing for a physics project that although required no musical factor to it we essentially turned it into a music video. After playing for a while we decided we needed a name, since none of us could come up with a creative enough name we ended up calling ourselves Drupi & The Blowfish, which would later become Marito and Drupi & Blowfish and eventually Marito Drupi and Nang. At this point we realized how dumb the name had actually turned out to bee so we threw that out. And so, again, we didn't have a name and you have to understand that we didn't actually need a name. we weren't playing any gigs none of our friends knew we had a band but we still wanted a name, immature and childish? probably. Eventually we realized that our biggest musical connection was the one and only Mr. Jimi Hendrix and so we decided to dedicate our band name to him, so we cose two albums recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Axis: Bold as Love" and "Electric Ladyland" and from there came The Electric Axis. To be completely honest the bands success is, sadly, that of any high school band. We started playing, we had a few small shows where the audience were our close friends and family, we recorded a few original songs, and we all went of to college. I find the most enjoyable part of being with this band to be the small shows we played but what I'm most proud of are the songs we were able to compose and record.

Moon is the first song we composed and recorded. I wrote the main concept in my guitar as soon as I got my dunlop cry baby, and if you pay any attention to the song you'll quickly notice the over use of it in the rhythm guitar. we recorded the whole song in my room using an M-Audio Fast Track, Pro Tools M-Powered and my slight knowledge for recording music. After showing my idea to Marito and Nanga they quickly found their parts on the project Marito focused on the drums, bass and backing vocals while Nanga focused on the lyrics and melody, of course everyone helped each other out to te point that I dont see any particular part of this to be an individual success but a collaborative effort. If memory serves me right it took about 3 days of work spread over a week to write and record this, after I edited and mixed it this is what we ended up with:
Moon by Electric Axis

As for the lyrics of the song I'll clarify what they mean. This song shows the story of a blind man begging the moon for its sight back and the moon eventually giving the blind man his sight. The sung part by Nanga is the blind man the spoken voice by Marito is the moon and the guitar solo by me is the act of the moon giving the blind man his sight back. How on earth we ended up with that will forever be beyond my understanding.
I hope you enjoy the song, I know it has several flaws but keep in mind this is our first song, all suggestions are welcomed.

First!

SO.... I've been wanting to start blogging for a while now but never really started, but hey, finals week is the best time to find a new way to procrastinate, and here we are. The main reason for not starting this earlier is simply because I didn't know how to fill a whole blog, I still don't, but seeing that El Hombre http://hoptap.blogspot.com/  started inspired me and I want to join him. Now, my style might not be as entertaining or original as his (which you should go find out by yourself) but I really want to at least try this.

Lets see now, for the time being all my music projects are on hold given that college and living in a tiny dorm makes it a bit harder, not imposible, but harder to write record or rehearse nevertheless I stil try to push all my projects forward. In a way to make sure music doesn't die on me I'll be applying for a music minor soon that way I never have to stop. However being on a huge campus does have huge advantages, one of them: clubs. Starting next semester I'll be the president of the racquetball club plus being a director and editor in one of the film clubs, which is at the moment recording one of the short films I wrote! The film won't be done till next semester but I'm still very excited. The film I worked on this semester won best screenplay and best actor in the Universities Spring Film Festival and although I was only taking care of editing for that one I'm proud that I was part of it. Other older projects include original songs recorded by me and a couple of friends that I'll eventually start to upload.

I think I'll dedicate this blog to upload some of the work I've made and some of the work I will make (songs, short films, maybe a screenplay) and I guess give some background history on each. Anyways thats all for now its 3:27 AM and I have to wake up in 5 hours. So I honestly hope whoever reads this can enjoy it.