WEDNESDAY JULY 2, 3008 "The impossible deadline:"
Friday - “Let’s record this song Sunday and do our press release Friday. Ok”
Sunday May 4th 2008...5 days and counting…
We setup shop in Joe’s basement where he has a control room with studio glass peering into the drum room and a vocal booth within the control room. He invited his friend Grahm Espe who brought his recording gear and microphones. Graham does sound at The Electric Company in Utica and runs his own recording studio http://mixedjam.com .
We started getting drum sounds and about a half hour later ran through “Know Yourself” so I could lay down the drum tracks. It was alright but I knew I could get the vibe better. We kept the second take. Kenny and Kris were next (guitars). I went upstairs for a beer and a smoke. It seemed like only a few minutes went by when they called Chuck in to lay down the bass parts.
Now here it was about 3 hours after we got there and we were ready for Joe Sweet. In Brand New Sin’s experience, the majority of the first day of each recording session is wasted on getting drum sounds. This is probably due to anal retentive producers/engineers who either A.) want to experiment B.) know that the band is charged by the hour and can’t resist the urge to stretch each valuable minute for their financial gain C.) don’t know how to get the sound they want or D.) I don’t know how to tune my drums. It must be D.
Joe is a one take guy (for the most part). When Joe was done with the vocals Graham went through each instrument with us asking our input on the tones. Then Kenny and Kris sang their harmonies. We got a rough mix and went home.
Now we needed to mix it, get it ready for streaming and downloading, setup the new website, schedule a photo-shoot, announce the new singer, new website, and new song through the media channels and get the song uploaded to our retailers (snocap.com, altsounds.com and apollotunes.com) by Friday.
Why the rush?
Hindsight:
We landed a show back in December that was slated for June 14th “Operation Metal Siege” in Coney Island with 40 bands. I got in touch with Ed from Bullistic (who set us up with the show) and let him know that our singer left the band so we wouldn’t be able to play the June show. He said we should wait because we just might find a new singer by then. I said “OK”. Tentatively, BNS was still on the bill. Ed was right!! We found Joe Sweet. As we got closer, the organizers of the festival were getting excited and asked when they could run a press release. I asked the guys if they still wanted to do the show and it was unanimous. We decided to announce the press release [about OMS as our debut with Joe Sweet] on May 9th– great idea. I asked the OMS people to keep quiet until we announced it. We don’t spam our fans with needless floods of email messages so when we have news it’s usually BIG NEWS (the world had assumed that Brand New Sin was history.).
Monday – photo shoot with D The Shadowman (Uticaphotography.com)
We drove out to Joe’s house and got in his mini-school bus. That is one kick-ass ride. Kenny brought his boom box so we could jam out to the new song and get a handle on the mix-down. Graham hung out with us. We met D at an abandoned warehouse with holes in the floor, broken glass, ripped walls, stairways with missing steps: dark, dreary, scary…right up our alley. D has an amazing eye. Check out some of his work http://uticaphotography.com
Next step – the website.
Joe’s girlfriend, Chip Ramos, owns www.digitaldesignportal.com. She does fantastic work. She had the same time frame as we did. While we were proofing photographs, listening to remixes, and setting up the foundation of the re-issue of Brand New Sin, she was busy designing our bad-ass splash page segue into the first glimpse and sound of the new singer of Brand New Sin.
In the interim Graham was sending us MP3s of new mixes through email. We would listen and email back our notes and comments and he would change the mix and send it back. It's a real efficient way to collaborate with someone who lives 50 miles away. Imagine what Lennon and McCartney could have done with this technology. They never would have left their homes.
This is exciting shit. It’s nerve-racking shit. I’m an optimist for the most part but even I was skeptical. In order for this to happen, 9 people had to have their shit together in synchronicity throughout the week.
Here it is, Thursday night. I typed in http://brandnewsin.com...Uh oh.
Damn, I gave Chip the server information with the username and password. Did she get it wrong? Did she give up on us? She’s probably not ready. Shit.
It was 11:30 pm and I started changing some of the layout just in case. I’m not a very good web-designer but I pride my self in functionality and user-friendliness. I was just about to save the last file and upload it to the server but for some reason, at about 12:30 am, the server was busy. I got some strange error message about the hosting company not allowing me to upload the new home page. Great, now what? For the hell of it, I hit the refresh button on my browser and saw this: http://brandnewsin.com AWESOME!!!! Chip and I were working on it at the same time.
Friday morning (cross your fingers)
“BRAND NEW SIN MAKES SWEET CHOICE FOR NEW LEAD”
The next morning we were on the front page of the Local section of the Syracuse Post Standard thanks to Mark Bialczak (music editor) who conducted interviews with both Joe and I Wednesday. He kept our secret and did as he promised. It was all over the news wire and the rest is history. I need to credit Mark for his knack for staying true to the message we try to convey in our press releases. He doesn’t get carried away with putting the ‘journalist spin’ on a story.
BRAND NEW SIN would like to sincerely, whole-heartedly thank Chip Ramos, D “The Shadowman”, Graham Espe, Mark Bialczak, Joe Sweet and everyone at Apollotunes.com for making our impossible deadline become a reality!
Sad news: Unfortunately, Operation Metal Siege in Coney Island never happened. The co-organizer, Shannon “Hacksaw” Maginn, passed away in a car accident a month before the scheduled event. Our sincere condolences go to her family and all that were close to her.
Here are some brief video clips. You'll need Quicktime.
(sorry about the audio quality)
http://brandnewsin.com/joetracking.MOV
http://brandnewsin.com/kennytracking.MOV
http://brandnewsin.com/kennybellytrack.MOV
http://brandnewsin.com/tracking-grahamworking.MOV
http://brandnewsin.com/joesbus.MOV
1 comment:
The first three posts here appear on the same day. I copied them from my old blog page when i created this profile.
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