It's frustrating that it's such a marginal question.... in a way, it makes me wish we were five years ahead or five years back, instead of this weird transitionary period. Y'know, just a few years ago I would have looked at it as a no-brainer. And weird as it seems, I think it'll be a no-brainer in the other direction before too long. I mean, in the end it seems to boil down to Cortex's last point,

- Are CDs going to be, in some foreseeable way, the... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 2:33 PM on July 21, 2008

Huh, I actually didn't realize that small-run production like saulgoodman's was possible-- all of the local stuff I'd googled had minimum run sizes that would have left me filling up my friends' basements with extra CDs. That really does sort of Change Everything.

and thanks for the spotlight, sleepy pete
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 8:53 AM on July 22, 2008

The beautiful thing is that you kind of verge on the "Whole Lotta Love" riff in the chorus. Not accusing you of ripoffery at all-- more like Jimmy Page was eating out of the same Bo Diddley cooke jar.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 1:51 PM on July 17, 2008

Thanks a lot, guys!

After bean-plating it last night at practice, we think this mix is probably pretty close to what the final one will be. The big worry was that the vocals were a little nasal, but we kind of decided that we are what we are, nasal vocals and all.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:01 AM on July 16, 2008

A N T H E M
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 8:01 AM on July 15, 2008

Lush!
(the production, not you. Maybe you, I don't know you IRL)
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:58 AM on July 15, 2008

(that earache thing is really interesting... Huh. I had ear trouble as a kid, too-- never that dramatic-- and I never thought about how it affected musical growth except that I've always figured it was safer to keep my right ear pointed at the drummer, since it's the one that doesn't work as well anyway...)

It's a tough one to nail down, especially since my (and I bet it's like this for all of us) taste still keeps shifting as time goes on.... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:52 AM on July 12, 2008

Thanks... Yeah, it'd be way cooler if the chorus could be bigger, and there are lots of little things about the sound, artifacts from the 4-track, that kind of drive me nuts. Oh, well. That's cheapo 90s home recording technology for you...
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:47 AM on July 11, 2008

Man, that's some Russian drumming if I ever heard it! You sure his name ain't Yevgeny or Boris?

Well, he does have one of those big fur hats... Actually, if I remember it right, we're both playing drums-- Dale's rocking a set of bongos and I'm playing a hi-hat. I remember that because I was really excited at finally being able to use the pedal on a hi-hat properly.

Did he actually sing that low... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:05 AM on July 12, 2008

Wish the vocals were just a shade more prominent; they get a little lost, but that could be my crap-ola earbuds. Pretty cool, though.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:57 AM on July 11, 2008

Wow, that's the catchiest waitress hatchet job I've ever heard.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 9:03 AM on July 10, 2008

I really enjoy performing, but I find everything else involved in gigging to be pretty tiring, and it can be pretty frustrating staying up late to play free (or next to free) for tiny crowds who aren't super responsive.

+1 more. And the further I get into my 30s, the more I feel that way. My band plays about once every three months (which spaces things out enough that the fatigue doesn't bug me too much), at a lot of the smallish venues in... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:23 AM on July 8, 2008

But it's a non-issue because I think we're going to soon be kicked out due to noise complaints. We're the only space left in the building who haven't been already. It's getting rough... the neighbourhood is changing and the yuppies moving in because they enjoy the area's artistic flavour don't like what comes along with that.

ghod, that sucks. Practice space rental always seems to go bad because of stuff like that (that, or leakage and flooding).... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:25 AM on July 10, 2008

Nice and spare.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 8:07 AM on July 9, 2008

Holy shit, I had no idea this was here. This is awesome.

As for recording gear, I'm currently without it, but the reason why is a little awesome: I was settling into GarageBand on my MacBook Pro and really liking what I could do with it. And then, excited to put some guitar down over loops I'd made with the John Bonham tracks that were linked a while ago, I stupidly ran a cable from the Line Out jack of my amp into the mike input of my laptop. It was one of those... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 9:32 AM on July 8, 2008

I actually bought one, but I still can't get any sound in (I can get sound out, though, at least). The situation's compounded by the fact that it's my work computer and I was stretching the "we want you to use it as much as possible so that you'll be a full-on Mac Guy as quickly as possible" mandate a little farther than I probably should have.

We're actually getting pretty close to having a crapload of new Derailleur tracks mixed down (I'd detail the setup for... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 10:21 AM on July 8, 2008

(How big of an issue, if any, is latency with one of those puppies anyway?)

Anecdotally, I saw a lot of complaining about latency when I was looking around for USB sound cards. Can't verify, though, since mine won't let anything in at all. The word on the street seems to be that Firewire-connected external sound cards don't have nearly the latency trouble.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:38 AM on July 8, 2008

I like the double-tracking on the vocals. The high/low sing/speak thing works really well.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:34 AM on July 8, 2008

If I had to give a complaint, it would be about those who only post their songs and never comment. Or if they do comment, it is only on their songs.

I'm a little guilty of this, and I feel bad about it (and that bad feeling then shame-spirals into keeping me away further). Part of it's a legacy of formerly working at a place that really, really policed bandwidth usage-- there was kind of a high barrier just to use MeFi Music, and without casual usage... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 9:41 AM on July 8, 2008

Thanks! Interesting about the double-tracking suggestion... I've been arguing for more of that, too. I'll raise the idea with the committee.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 5:06 AM on May 20, 2008

Whoa. It sounds like being crazy, in the best way possible.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:05 AM on May 19, 2008

Thanks a ton! We have a lot of fun with this one, just opening up and rocking out.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:04 PM on March 24, 2008

Thanks-- and yeah, I think we're going to need to clean up the organ in the intro, too; we found out too late that something was goofy with the count-in on the drum track, and had a hell of a time synching the organ up with everything else. I've gotten to the point where I have trouble judging it anymore because I've heard so many attempts to patch it up that it all gets lost, so it's good to get an outside opinion on it.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 8:49 PM on January 26, 2008

We're from Minneapolis and wear similar sweatshirts... is that close enough?
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:58 AM on January 28, 2008

Wow, this is really, really cool. Shit, nice job, all.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:28 PM on January 26, 2008

This is a lot of fun, nice job.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 3:12 PM on January 26, 2008

I was really surprised as I was figuring out the song how "churchy" the chords sound on their own. Like, even just playing them on an acoustic, it kind of sounded like a hymn. If you played it on an organ, a choir would probably materialize on the spot. So there's another direction cover could go...
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 8:00 AM on January 17, 2008

Thanks! And yeah, Derailleur's the current band. We're even being unusually active lately, with a whopping two shows coming up in the next couple of months. By our standards, that's fever-paced.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:06 AM on September 29, 2007

It's not that often that you hear a tune speed up that much once the drummer comes in. The guitarist, with the opening riff, actually slows down the tempo after the 4-stick count-off. Then the drummer enters after 4 more bars, and it's awaaaaaaaay we go! It's almost like the drummer was listening to some other count-off somewhere else in the universe! That's kind of amazing in and of itself.

Y'know, I never noticed that; but now that you've pointed... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:06 AM on September 21, 2007

Ow, man, your low E is about a half-step flat. Is that intentional?

On the bass, or the guitar? I can say for sure I wasn't doing anything unusual with the bass tuning. On the guitar, Grant might have done a weird tuning or some weird fingering for extra evil emphasis, but it might also have been that his guitar was a little out of tune after a couple of hours of rocking without a tuner handy.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 7:38 PM on September 18, 2007

It's true. I've had it in for your teeth for quite a while.

It's a safe bet that one of us was out of tune; this was recorded about 10 years ago, and we were all quite a ways back in terms of instrument quality and tuner ownership. Actually, I think most of the other stuff we recorded that time (we were just letting tape roll on on of our first practices, in a university recital hall) came out totally ass because of mistuned guitars; I always thought this one sounded... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 5:13 AM on September 19, 2007

I like the swaggery guitar a lot.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 9:34 AM on September 14, 2007

Thanks! I think it's my favorite title, too; except that, even though we're all in our 30s, we all feel like we have to mumble the title whenever a set of band parents happen to be a show.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 12:14 PM on September 13, 2007

I am having some difficulty understanding the lyrics, would you consider posting them?

Sure, but let me warn you, they're very inane; made up on the fly during a practice session where it morphed from warm-up riff to full-on song, and then they just sort of stuck. I'd been rereading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and just started riffing on it.

There's a million-pound... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 9:30 AM on September 14, 2007

The kink got removed from the time signature, about 1/4 of the lyrics were dropped to accommodate this, and guitars were kicked out of the house entirely. Our drummer read some first-aid instructions from a Boy Scout manual, which was played backwards underneath and is the closest thing the song has to a solo.

I sing this one.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 10:49 AM on September 4, 2007

Though the vocals are a bit saturated, it seems to me.

Yeah, this one was recorded on a really old 4-track and then just mixed down on a stereo, so the sound engineering's a little... approximate.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:37 AM on September 4, 2007

Thanks, guys!

And yeah, we run our keyboard (this weird little child-sized Casio thing; we have several others, but this one has the best sound) through a cheapie DOD 3-way pedal that can do echo, flange, or chorus. Then that goes through a little Fender amp that we try to come as close to overloading as possible for the proper right-on-the-edge distortion.

It's a weird keyboard setup, but we get a lot of mileage out of it (the... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:46 AM on September 4, 2007

Some liner notes and background, because why the hell not?

The Red Hay lineup was Grant Weeks: guitar, vocals; Erik Jensen: guitar; Dale Plasek: drums; K. Pille: bass, vocals (Grant and I traded off depending on who wrote the song, a tradition that carries on to our current band). Red Hay never really had a shot because our drummer was a music teacher in outstate MN and couldn't make it to the Twin Cities easily enough for us to play more than every month or two, and we... [more]
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:58 AM on August 31, 2007

Oh yeah, and if you really get Red Hay fever, I recently found some old show posters (including one with a really embarrassing picture of me) and gave 'em a set on Flickr.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 12:17 PM on August 31, 2007

Man, that was a lot of fun.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 10:36 AM on August 31, 2007

You've got a great big voice.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 10:30 AM on August 31, 2007

Ha! Nope, it's my other one, an Epiphone semi-hollowbody. The Evidence Tele gets busted out for balls-out rock songs.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:00 AM on August 30, 2007

(for instance)
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:21 AM on August 30, 2007

SNSRANCH!
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 6:48 PM on August 30, 2007

That's a nice approach. People usually seem to want to punk Hungry Heart up when they cover it; the melancholy attack is good.
posted to MeFi Music by COBRA! at 11:39 AM on August 30, 2007