The Plague Years, Apostles & Bullpig

Great show on Saturday night. The Plague Years were good... and loud. Unbelievably loud. Really enjoyed those guys as well as their do it yourself lighting setup. All the way around they were a pretty thorough outfit. Apostles set was really good as usual and besides a lot of pictures, I also took video of them playing the song Countach so I can splice it with other live footage and a few video clips to put into a video. Here are some of the pictures from the evenings Apostles set:

The Return of Shoegaze

Last night I saw a fantastic show at Founders Brewery. Headliners Weekend with touring support act Young Prisms and local opener Walden (Pond). What a great show. Check out all of these guys as soon as you can because they rocked my face right off. The bands were all great and it was nice to see a show featuring the shoegaze genre in Grand Rapids.

This Saturday brings an Apostles show at Mulligans. I'll probably bring my camera out and take some pictures of that show. They'll be playing with The Plague Years and Bullpig. 


That's about it for now, I think.

Studio time and pedals

Short one today. Going in to finish up work on vocals for Heavier Than Air Flying Machines tonight after work and enjoying a day off tomorrow. (Well, a day off from the day job, anyway.) Practice for both Expunk then Chance Jones in the evening.

Speaking of Expunk, Jef wanted me to make a diagram of his pedal board setup like the one I threw together recently of my own. It was a rather quick job and nothing fancy, but you get the idea. I'm pretty sure I got it mostly right even though I had to go from memory and a very blurry picture.

 Sweet stuff on there, people. Imagine both of those rigs colliding with each other very loudly.

Waiting on my boost pedal kit to arrive in the mail from General Guitar Gadgets still. I'm looking forward to assembling that next week.

Gear rules. Life is good.

Local Music: Ozenza

Ozenza is back to a three piece after the departure of their guitarist Kremo. They played at the very tiny venue Rocky's last night and sent seismic tremors throughout the greater Grand Rapids area. Unfortunately for some odd reason(poor setup/system configuration) you couldn't hardly hear the vocals even though they were the only thing going through the PA. Despite that, they killed once again. I couldn't locate my camera I had purposefully brought, so I made do once again with ye olde trusty camera phone. These are the results:

Rock.

HTAFM at Cold War Studios

Heavier Than Air Flying Machines went into Cold War Studios with Rick Johnson yesterday for what ended up being a 10 1/2 or so hour session to record the album we've been wanting to do for a while. I believe Jaymes has something in mind for the title of the record, but I can't recall what he initially mentioned a couple of weeks ago. We had a great time recording there, but it was definitely grueling in terms of physical exertion. We got all of the instruments recorded as it was done live with baffles set up in the room. The only overdubs on the record will be vocals, group shouting vocals, samples and two different segments of guitar. The idea was to maintain as much of a raw live feel as possible and we accomplished that. Jaymes and I are going next Tuesday to wrap up the remainder of the vocal parts, samples and small electronic keyboard bits. We've got a decent number of options for where we want to send it out to get mastered, so that is yet to be decided. The microphone setup for the drums was  much more complex than I've had on my set before. The entire microphone setup as well as a few pictures of what we did are below:

Scratch Vocals-Shure SM7B

Group Background Vocals-Audio Technica 4050


Guitar-SM57

Bass-Sennheiser MD421 II on the cab and another line ran direct.

Drums:
Hi Hat-Audio Technica AT3031
Snare(Top)-Shure SM57
Snare(Bottom)-Shure SM58
Rack Tom-CAD M179
Floor Tom-CAD M179
Kick Drum(Inside through port hole)-Audio Technica ATM25 (I think)
Kick Drum(A couple of inches off from front head)-ADK 51TC
Ride Cymbal(Underneath)-AT3031
Left and Right Overheads-Audio Technica 4050

The Never-Ending Guitar Setup

So I figured I would indulge myself by posting what I have going on at the moment for my guitar setup. Slow news day, I know. Anyhow, I am working on getting a dual amplifier setup going just for tonal fun. That being said, I just need to get an ABY splitter box to be able to run from my pedal board to the two different amps. I stacked everything up the other night and took a picture of it(not how it's going to actually be setup, but I couldn't resist).

Kind of reminds me of a guitar version of an old school big screen television. On top of everything is an Epiphone Valve Jr 5 watt tube amp that I will run through the bottom cabinet which was a custom made cabinet loaded with celestions(can't remember what model of speaker they are). The other amp is a vintage Acoustic 150 solid state head with a matching 6x10 speaker cabinet. That's right, boys and girls. 10 speakers total. I'm not usually one to get into solid state amps, but this old Acoustic sounds really cool. On the right are two of my guitars. One is an Epiphone Les Paul 7 string with a Seymour Duncan JB in the bridge position and the stock pickup in the neck position. The other is a somewhat recent acquisition that I posted here about before. It's a Fender Deluxe Nashville Telecaster with a 3 single coil Stratocaster style configuration.

As for the pedal board, here's a list of what's on there in order of signal chain:

Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner
Boss SD-2 Dual Overdrive(Modded by Eric's Audio Repair)
Russian Big Muff Pi(1998 version 2 I think)
Digitech Whammy reissue
Ernie Ball Stereo Volume/Pan
Boss DD-3 Digital Delay
Hardwire RV-7 Stereo Reverb
BBE Sonic Stomp

I used some photo editing software to throw together a detailed picture of what is on my pedal board as I haven't taken a picture yet, so here's that:

Gear rules. Life is good.