Keithless Stones

So here we are a few months on.  Rage and Chill is on at least a few shelves, if not in the books.  In the meantime, many changes have come to Argyledom.  We bid farewell to Matt Kassel, our drummer, as he headed back to his native New Jersey to further his writing career.  Check his blog, Cold Jazz, to keep up with his journey.  Our sax player, Ryan Mackellar, moved to Kingston to pursue a Master's degree in History.  Check his blog, the aptly titled Colonial History of Canada.

The remaining Argyles (Matt Dowling, Justin Wong, and me) were excited to play a set at Martin's Space-hootenanny as a power trio, but prospective drummer Andrew Miller (frontman of Parapraxis) instead wound  up playing lead guitar while Matt Dowling took the (drum) throne.  A large part of his brain which had lain dormant since he played drums in high school re-awoke, and he displayed skills heretofore unimagined.  Ryan also drove down for the show, but our set was pushed back several times and the party was shut down by the police before we were able to take the stage.

We quickly found another gig at Gerts, playing pro bono for Borderless World Volunteers.  Our set had a couple of songs from Rage and Chill, but also a lot of new material that I had been working on since we recorded the album.  We have since been practising fairly regularly, and the amount of new material (from both me and Dowling) has become quite substantial.

So substantial, in fact, that we have too much new material for a mere EP.  Which brings me to the main reason for my update: we will be recording a new full-length album this winter.  The sequel to Rage and Chill has yet to be named, although we have already decided against Andrew's suggestion Rape and Kill, concluding it is not violent enough to convey the ferocity of our new material.  But we have a good idea of what songs will be on it, and a much more cohesive style and sound than on the last disc.  I'd like to write at least one song with the band as a group, and possibly get some material from Justin and Andrew.  I hope to have material down by the end of November and the drums recorded by Christmas.

You can catch the new Argyles lineup and material at Trois Minots on November 10th.  And make sure to check back here to hear about the album as it comes together.

(Oh, and the video is from the Montreal-made The Wild Hunt, which I only wish stayed this funny all the way through instead of getting all murder-y.  Still good though.)

Between Loose and Louche

We had the CD release / hootenanny last night.  It was great!  Arthur premiered the music video for 'Headfull' as well, and we were all very impressed.  Watch it here:

AIEEE, NYT

The second day of shooting the music video also went really well, we did many shots of the band jumping in (at least partial) unison in various locations around Montreal.  Arthur edited this week as well, and the cut he showed us looked amazing (can't show you all yet).  He's waiting on a shot of the builders standing around the finished octopus, which apparently requires the use of TV McGill's new crane (!).

We played a show at Martin's place last night.  He's being filmed for a documentary on online poker, and the crew was in filming him and his band.  Our set went well, even considering that I broke a couple of strings and Mott broke one.  We ended it with Dan Mangan's "Robots"; Mott playing Justin's guitar, me croaking into the mic, and Justin in the crowd somewhere.

Here's a pic Carter took at the show.  It's dark but captures the essential oddness of most of what was going on.  Also Laura has posted her behind-the-scenes pics of filming the music video on her flickr account.  Check it out!

Brad Paisley, Semiotician

We shot the bulk of the music video on Saturday, on the roof at 914 Mont Royal and across the street in Kassel's room at 927.  It went really well, a lot of friends came over to simulate a party (which subsequently turned into a real party) and severely flattened the octopus by dancing all over it.  Arthur showed me a few clips and it looks very good.  The night shots of the octopus being 'built' also turned out great, thanks to the exceptionally wide aperture of the lens he was using on the DSLR.  We're shooting the synchronized jumping shots this afternoon (weather permitting), and hopefully we'll have it ready for whenever we finally release the CD.

Here's a shot from the setup, with Kassel adjusting the drums, Ryan warming up, and Mott wandering aimlessly.  And there's the octopus!

Here's a bit later, some more people hanging out, preparing.  We jammed a little after we were done shooting, but got everything down just before the police showed up to stare confusedly up at the roof.

I am yr host

I forgot, we've been working on a music video.  Last Thursday we got together in Laurier park to talk about it.  Arthur, who has been nice enough to lend his talent and equipment to this venture, also showed up and gave some constructive criticism.

Before he showed up, we threw around a few songs, including "Perseus" and "Mixtapes".  I had an idea for the former involving a black-and-white cowboy retelling of the greek legend, which amazingly failed to win a positive consensus.  We finally settled on "Headfull", reasoning that it was an energetic, mid-length song which represented our sound well.  We also felt we could give the video a narrative that wasn't chained (or even necessarily connected) to the lyrics, in a way that some of the 'story' songs like "Red Plaid Shirt" would probably end up being.

We knew we wanted to have a few things going on at once, including the shot of the band playing.  I wanted to have the band on the roof of 914 Mt. Royal, where there is (for reasons unknown) a giant metal octopus.  I had the idea that the narrative of the video would be a few of our friends deciding to build this octopus, drawing up plans, constructing it, and then celebrating its completion with us.  Justin thought that instead of building it, they should summon the octopus by magic, or they should at least be building it as a defence for an alien invasion.  I couldn't see how to show either of those clearly.  I am definitely no visionary.  Arthur said that the story lacked conflict, and so we decided that a landlord would attempt to stop them from building it, and they would have to proceed under the cover of darkness.

The chorus of the song (which, incidentally, you can now stream on grooveshark) has these breaks where, when we play it live, we all jump.  I think Mott (or was it Kassel) had the idea that we could film the band jumping in unison during these parts, so we came up with a list of iconic (to us) places in Montreal to film these parts, including the St. Christophe alley, the line at Romados, and the McLennan Library computers.

We're getting together to storyboard some time this weekend, and hopefully filming next weekend.  I forgot to take pictures when we were planning at the park, so here's a video I took while we were still at their apartment.  Somewhat unsurprisingly (considering his apparel), Kassel didn't make it to the park.

19th Century Notion

Burnt all of the CDs yesterday.  The track names are coming up on Gracenote, which is great.  I got my printer this morning, along with paper for the photo and track listing that I'm putting on the inside of the CDs.  The image quality is pretty bad so I'm going to see if I can get the original image instead of the jpg I got from facebook.  The text looks fine, though.  I finished six copies, with white ribbon, to give to the band.   Once I get the photo thing sorted out I'll do the rest.

So there they are, waiting for the others to join them.

PJ Autoharpy

I went out and got some fixative this morning and stamped, then smudge-proofed the CDs.

There's most of them.  While waiting for them to dry I attempted to master the disk, mixing down each file and adding compression and eq and...quickly gave up.  I'd already done this on the 1-2 bus in the mixing stage, and doing it again seemed redundant.  Not to mention that I couldn't hear any difference.  So I just made sure they were normalized and started and stopped at the right places, then burnt a disk.

 I imported it into iTunes, added the relevant information, then submitted it to Gracenote's CDDB, the database that most media programs use to get artist and track names for albums (that info's not usually on the disk itself).  Apparently it'll take at least a couple days to show up when other computers query the database, but then nobody with an internet connection will have to type in track names.

iTunes needed album artwork, so I just took a shot of a copy of the album with the ribbon on (the rest don't have ribbon yet).

Finally, I listened to the disk.  Turns out I didn't check carefully enough: on "Spagett!" the guitar solo didn't get shifted over when I cut out the silence at the beginning.  Ditto the sax on "Life of Fridays."  Fixing these problems changed the length of the songs, which I anticipated would be no good for Gracenote to correctly recognize the album (I can only assume they go by number and length of tracks).  I carefully made the track lengths match the old ones, and succeeded in fooling my computer into thinking it was the old version.  So hopefully it should be okay.

MAKE 'EM!

The next step was decorating the sleeves.  On the inside, I wanted a band photo on the left and a track listing with info on the right, printed on white cards.  I could do that later, so the outside was what I had to work with.  I got a couple of sets of alphabet stamps and mounted them on a pair of acrylic blocks; one block has "THE" and "ARGYLES" on adjacent sides, the other has "rage and" [and] "chill".  That wasn't exciting enough for a cover, though, so I looked for something else.  I found a stamp that was just a dimpled grid, and cut  a bunch of them off until I was left with an argyle pattern.  Then I bought a big multi-coloured inkpad and experimented with different placements of these elements for the front and the back cover.

Finally I settled on a design I liked, then churned them out.

One drawback to my design is that the CD could fall out if you held it wrong, so I bought some ribbon and a glue gun to put it around the middle of the disk.

There's one done, without the info or pic on the inside as of yet.  I got some printable CDs, and used the same stamps on them.

Unfortunately the ink continues to smudge even after it dries, so I'm either going to have to find some sort of fixative or a new way of decorating the CDs.  I like the way it looks, though, so I hope I can sort it out.

GOLFWANG

While I was finishing the mixing process, I started thinking about making physical copies album.  I wanted to make a short run of nice copies,  not just CDs in blank sleeves.  Or even Argyle-patterned sleeves.  So I turned to my own (limited) record collection, and found that I liked the Old Canes' rather artisanal package design for their second album, Feral Harmonic.  I remembered that I'd seen a video of the people at Saddle Creek assembling them and somehow managed to forget the pain and exhaustion in their faces, deciding that I would try to make something similar.

The first step was figuring out a layout for the sleeve itself.  I found a way to get a 5" x 5 5/8" sleeve out of a piece of 12x12 cardstock, so that's what I ended up doing.  60 sheets, so I figured on an edition of 50 copies.

I forgot all about my camera during the first, uninteresting part.  Just know that I measured out the shape I needed on the sheets of black cardstock, cut them out, folded them, then glued them together with rubber cement.

So there's one finished.  The CD slides into the right side, the cover is just one sheet folded over and glued.

There are 58 of them in a row.  The spine was tricky, in retrospect I think if I had scored the inside with a box cutter, they would have folded better.  As they are, there's no way that I could write the band name on the side.  Ah well.

Day-old Bread

Alright, I admit it.  I have been remiss in both my blogging and album-producing duties.  In my defence, it's very hard to update when all you're doing is adding reverb to the guitar, normalizing the lead vocal, or trying (and failing) to auto-tune the saxophone.  In short, editing is boring, and you didn't miss much.

Over the last couple months, we played every second Monday at Gerts, and in the process contributed to the slow and agonizing death of their PA system.  We also played a show last Friday at Trois Minots at the behest of the McGill Outdoors Club, which turned out to be a lot of fun.  After much deliberation, we chose not to play Mott's incendiary anthem, "M.O.C.I.A.", due to cross cultural sensitivity (and the fact that we've never actually practised it).

Somewhere in that big gap between posts I also put three mixes up on our myspace, which were kind of rushed in order to get a demo CD together for someone at Gerts.  Nothing came of that, other than I was forced to bash some of the songs into shape.  The remaining tracks followed reluctantly over the next few weeks.

On Tuesday, Mott, Justin, Jack, and Spencer came over to listen to what I had and made some helpful criticisms, as did Stephen and Natalia the next day.  As a result, I made some big changes to the mixes and recorded the last remaining pieces - backing vocals, guitar solos, etc.  I also worked on the song order for the album, which proved difficult since the collection of songs that we ended up recording is extremely eclectic.

Here's an impromptu band photo that Connie took at Chantale's.  I'm hoping we can get it to look good enough to put on the inside cover of the album.

The Buck Stops Here

Ryan was back finishing up the sax recording on Friday.  We only had four or five songs left to finish, and even when we had nothing going in we managed to come up with parts fairly quickly.  His playing was good once he got warmed up, bending into some high notes, adding a little style to the lines.  They should command some attention on the recordings, which is great since I never thought we'd have another melodic instrument on most of these tracks.

Here Ryan has just finished the last one, with a certain air of accomplishment.  Except for my and Justin's vocals, we now have everything recorded for the 15 tracks we'd like to put on the album.  We're both going to New York this week, so I guess it'll have to wait until next weekend.  It's a slow process, but at least it's proceeding.

Let It Loose-Ah

I woke up at 4:30 this morning feeling like death would be preferable, and proceeded very quickly to ruin my vocal chords with corrosive internal chemicals.  So singing was out.  Fortunately Ryan came over and recorded some saxophone, and put up with my periodic moans of achy despair.  Not only that, but he got a whole bunch of songs done, 9 in fact.  He always knew what he wanted it to sound like, which was helpful, and we breezed through the ones he had parts for.  The ones that are left are tougher, either because they are largely improvisational or because he hasn't settled on a part yet.  Hopefully we should be able to do them on Sunday afternoon.

We found that stepping a few feet back from the mic allowed us to get a bigger sound, and although the room is not perfect, or even good, at least it's not square.

Bring It Up

After a long school, band, and sickness-induced hiatus, I finally recorded some vocals today.  By my count 5 songs worth.  Just doing 'Crimes' tired my voice out; the new key is much higher than we used to play it.  We did a short set at Gerts (the campus bar) last night in our first biweekly spot hosting an open mic, and we played almost all old songs.  Have to try and fold in the new ones eventually, I guess. 

I've been going through the lyrics in preparation for singing them, changing little things.  I'm surprised at my complacency (or maybe laziness) though, as the majority of the lyrics still stand as I originally wrote them.  Not only that, I've discovered that some of my songs read better as someone else singing them to me, which is odd.

Man, Quit That Noise Over There!

Mott finished up the electric guitar today, and fixed up some previously-recorded ones.  We added a solo guitar track to 'Then Go,' on top of the distorted rhythm guitar on the choruses.  As he was slightly less sick than last time, he also redid the vocals to 'Barfly.' 

Summing up his recording experience, he said "the way I feel about most of these tracks is I could do them better...yeah.  That's it."  That's true, but that could be said of any of our parts, and I think it's more important that we capture a realistic performance, one that is representative of what the Argyles sound like live.  That's the reason I wanted to record this album anyways, to have a sort of record of what we sounded like and what we played when we were together.

The recording process is forcing me to pay far greater attention to what my bandmates are playing than I can during our performances, so in a way I feel like I'm learning what we actually sound like for the first time.  And everyone is learning the songs more fully; we may have played them dozens of times, but there's little things that Mott wasn't doing or that I didn't realize that he was doing - a chord here, a riff there - that are putting the songs in greater relief for me.

This is during one of the takes of 'Barfly,' during which Mott worked himself into a lather even if we were only recording a single line.  Gotta admire the effort.

Do You Like It

Mott was back at it last Satuday, largely unsupervised as I was writing song lyrics with Parapraxis. 
I listened to what he got done yesterday, and he's managing to get some good sounds out of the ZOOM pedal.  I think there's one song where he accidentally hit the tremolo about halfway through while recording, making 'January February' sound like teeth chattering.  That may have to be redone tomorrow, when I hope we'll be able to finish up the electric guitar. 

On the mixing side of things, I've been bringing the replacement toms into the same instance of Session Drummer as opposed to running several of them, to save processing power.  If I need different kits for the kick and the toms I guess I can create one out of the different sounds available, but so far that hasn't been an issue.  I was also looking for a recording of rain on a tin roof to stick at the end of 'January February' and found freesound, an interesting library of field recordings and samples from all sorts of places.  Not sure how or if I'll use any of them yet, but it is funny to see all the things people take the trouble to record.

You can see Justin, Andrew, and Leona in the background.  We wrote a song about some seaweed which longs for the return of high tide.  Justin also drew a picture of someone being torn apart by a giant seagull.

Play Kush part, Fred.

Mott was here today, starting the electric guitar recording.  He is the purest and most unadulterated source of rage in the Argyles, and I wasn't sure how it would translate into the studio, but we got a good half-dozen songs completed, and more started, if not nailed down.  Most of his parts are at least semi-improvised, and even takes of the same material are highly dissimilar.  Which is to say, creative, but unpredictable.  A couple of riffs we ended up keeping today, including one for Cigarette 2-Step, were entirely new, and the songs we have left to record are even more uncertain.  It'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.

He's playing my Mexican Strat (with a Dimarzio X2N in the bridge position), through the Zoom G2.1u pedal, straight into the Audio Interface.  He's also using our friend Alberto's cable, which we took and haven't given back for months.  Thanks Alberto!

Take It Down So I Can Make These Hits Over Here

I worked on editing today, fixing little mistakes in the bass and guitar tracks, making the rhythm match up nicely.  I had been cutting out the noise from the tom and floor tom mics when they weren't being played, but today I tried replacing them with samples, starting on 'Perseus'.  I'm happier with the sound of the drums and the lack of background noise, so I think I'll do that on all of the tracks.  For most songs, I'm opening new instances of the soft synth, because that way I can pan them individually.  I'm finding that the overheads have enough bleed from the rest of the kit that panning them harshly makes it more interesting without sounding too jarring.

As far as tracks to be included on the album, I'm thinking that since we've never performed 'Hold It Together' or 'The Sweet Spot', maybe they should be left off the album (although the parts should still be recorded while we're doing all this).  Without 'Heat', as well, that brings the number down to 15, which I think is manageable.  We could then leave a couple others out later, based on how they sound once they've been mixed.

This is my new setup - I got a new monitor and plugged it through the HDMI out on my computer, relegating the CRT to the tv tray on the right.  I haven't figured out how to detatch one of Sonar's windows to drag it over to the other monitor yet, so I mostly just use it to make notes or look things up online.

Preacher daughter.

Didn't have much time to do anything today, and my voice is not in recording shape, so I just fiddled around with the rough mixes, trying to get them to sound better.  I started panning the overheads and the toms, and working a bit with the percussion strip plugin (PX-64) on Sonar.  I'm finding that above all, more high end is needed for the sound I want on a few of the songs, like 'Red Plaid Shirt'.  Right now I'm applying it straight to the drum bus.

This is maybe the last time you'll see this monitor, as I'm finding it doesn't have enough screen space for me to work comfortably.  I'll see if I can't buy a larger one tomorrow.

Is it Mellow, Brother?

For once I didn't have any band practice, so I got all of my acoustic guitar parts recorded instead.  It took all day, 7 or 8 takes each.  I worked out a little Freddie Green thing for 'The Sweet Spot' as well.  That just leaves the rhythm guitar for Perseus (which Justin does).  I'm going to try to record the vocals this week as well but I have some sort of throat sickness, so they might have to wait.

You'll notice that behind the microphone I have a feather-filled, cotton-shielded acoustic panel to hopefully block some of the room noise.  The guitar is a Martin DC-16GTE and the mic is the Rode NT1-A that I got for Christmas (thanks!).

Yesterday, Clyde.

After a short christmas break during which the album was put on hold and the studio relocated to my apartment, Justin came over on Saturday and re-recorded some bass parts.  I had decided over break that 'Crimes Without Victims' needed to be in a higher key for the vocal part to work, so we redid that.  Then we went through and made sure everything was there for all of the bass parts, even if some stitching together would be required of me later.  If Justin had a recording motto, it would probably be "We can fix that later" or "We can just reuse that, right?"  He's usually right though, and the sound he gets from that bass is better than any way I've found of playing it.

Here's a pic of my room in Delta, where I spent the break.  A couple days before I left I decided to test out my new mic (the NT1-A in the middle of the room) by recording a cover album, as I periodically do.  I like to do the songs in one try but had to do one take for guitar, and another for vocals.  The vocals were hard, because I had a cold and a bit of a fever, so I called the compilation "So Sick."  The guitar I used (sitting on the chair) is my dad's 1958 Gibson J-50.