Beat Kitchen

Thank you to everyone who made it out to Beat Kitchen to see us this past Sunday! It was our first time playing the venue and we had a blast! The staff was amazing!

We were lucky enough to play with Loom, from UT, and Exotic Animal Petting Zoo, from the greater Chicago-land area.

Beat Kitchen thought we did a great job and said they would keep us posted on future shows.

We are hoping to go back in to Blam Studios some time in June.

Loon!

Hex: It sounds like there's a bird in our recordings!?
Bailey: I know. It's awesome!

We just finished recording at Blam Studios tonight. We did a lot of layering on the tracks and with the help of Sean we produced something that we're all very proud of. We beefed up the songs and made them as epic as we thought we could while still keeping the idea of each of the two songs.

Sean is working on the mixes this week and we should have the two tracks by the end of the week.

On Good News we did a lot of cool stuff with the cello and even have some acoustic guitar in it as well. We also did some additional instrumentation that gives it a little more of an eerie feel.

Blam

Yesterday I was at blam tracking scratch tracks for Good News & Seahorse. It went pretty well, I think. I had to do everything to a click track so it took me a moment to get it down, but not as long as I thought it would.

Tonight Ursula goes in to record her parts.

Recording

Well, it's that time again. We're going to bum rush Blam Studios this week to try to get a couple of songs recorded for a soundtrack. We were asked to record Seahorse and The Monkey and the first three minutes and thirty seconds of Good News.

Unfortunately do to everyone's schedule we're going to have to do our recording in a slightly different manor than we're use to. I'm going to go in and lay down some scratch tracks for the songs to a click track. Ursula is going to come in on either Wednesday or Thursday to lay down her parts then on Saturday we're all going to come in and track the drums, guitars and bass.

I pray that this works.

Seahorse and The Monkey is now posted!!! Last night I went over to Jeremy's to check out the mixes that he did on the tracks. As for now we grabbed three of the songs we recorded.

Unfortunately we were a little rushed in the studio and we thought we could pull it off. As demos they work fine so I think with the three that we picked people will be able to hear what we sound like.

Tonight we're going to go around Chicago to put up posters for our show at Kinetic Playground. I've asked Dave to help us also. Hopefully we can get a lot done in a short time.

Keeping up with CANYON

Well, it's been forever since we've updated anything on here. I'm sorry for that.

We moved in to a temporary home until February, then we'll be moving to our permanent space. We've had a couple of practices since the move and things are going well.

Just this past Saturday Ursula tracked a bunch of cello on Sentence Fragment & Evil Shenanigans demos. We're waiting for the mix downs so we can get them mastered.

Editing, take one.

Last night I went over to Jeremy's to start working on the editing and mixing of our songs. Unfortunately while we were recording one of the mics we used had some sort of short so every once in a while there would be a frequency spike. Jeremy was going in and editing them out. Surprisingly, it didn't effect the songs.

We're going to try to get two or three songs done before we do some of the radio shows. Hopefully we'll have them in time.

We're also working on some buttons to give away at our shows.

Mix

Yesterday I went to Black Lion Audio to transfer our mixes and start some minor editing on the tracks. We dumped all the .wav files on to disk so Jeremy can take them home and start working on the mixing. On Monday I'll be heading over to his place to hear what he has so far and help sort out all the tracks.

We still have a lot of editing we need to do. When I recorded I used multiple amps so we have to go and pick which tones sounded the best for each track. Eventually we have to record Bailey and Ursula as well.

Recording, part II

Yesterday we finished up what we could in the studio. Five songs, rhythm guitar, bass, drums and percussion were done. For the most part it sounds pretty good. We still have a lot of work to do. Hopefully everything tracked well and all the parts are pretty tight. I have to go back and re-track some clean guitar parts for Good news, I'm not on fire and maybe Ice Box On Western.

Jeremy took the tracks and is getting the mixes worked on. Once the basic mixing and EQing is done I'll go in to do some editing on the tracks. We did some extra layering so we can do some minor editing.

I just sent out some e-mails trying to get us some interviews to promote our shows in February here in Chicago and in Milwaukee. Hopefully we get some responses back.

On Friday we played at Elbo Room. I know I didn't have a chance to post anything up about it before, I apologize. During one of our songs Eric from Tiny Speakers/Arctic Fox came up to do some vocal work for us. Here are the lyrics for what he did on Good news, I'm not on fire.

here are my branches inside this fortress
in there i will un-weave gold into the the mouths of horses fed for
when the time will come to go...but, there's nowhere to go.
decide which sign will mother my pain, it's going to happen anyway.
cut it up, throw it all in the fire
the glowing ember eyes, sears the softer side.
dear mother at my feet which soaks in kerosene
father fills me full of straw, strikes a match onto it all
read between the print extra! extra! listen closely please..
the light still burns deep inside
good news, I'm not on fire

I plan on working on some sticker designs. Hopefully we'll have some by our next show or our Feb 13th show at the latest.

Studio Time

I am dead tired. Tonight we had our first recording day. We spent about 12 in the studio working on our first ever E.P. We're hoping to get five songs done but by the looks of it we may have to settle for four songs. As of right now we have Seahorse and the Monkey, Evil Shenanigans, and Sentence Fragment IS a Sentence Fragment practically done.

Right now Cain, Brandon and I are just recording the structure and back bones of the songs then Bailey and Ursula are coming in to lay down their tracks. We're also hoping to create a short interlude based off of Seahorse and The Monkey. It's going to be mainly piano and cello. We'll see if we have time to pull something like that off.

Our friend, and Radio One Chicago DJ, Jeremy McLean has been kind enough to record and engineer the sessions. We are currently recording at Carterco Studios. Lou from Penthouse Sweets was kind enough to lend us his amp, I think we'd be lost with out it!

We've mainly been using three amps while recording. There is a Fender Bassman, a Vox AC30 Custom Classic, and a Marshal 1959 combo amp re-issue. Any time we've had to do a lot of clean guitars I've been using the Vox and a Fender Roc Pro 1ooo together. With the more distorted stuff on the album I've been using the Marshall and the Fender Bassman with a Boss blues driver. The sound is a little boomier than I was hoping for, but it is pretty fat and fills up a lot of space on the songs. It's a pretty big wall of sound that we've been producing with the combination of amps we have.

As for Cain, he's been using his Fender bass and his standard bass rig. We have him direct in and also mic'd, from what I'm aware of. I could be wrong.

As for Brandon, he is also using his standard set however he just recently purchased a new Ludwig black magic snare. From what I remember it's a 13" x 7" which is fairly interesting. It's adding a new dimension to our sound.

Ursula is going direct in and Kevin is using a combination of the Fender Bassman and the Marshall.

I'm dead tired so I'll post more details tomorrow.

Hex