Harbor Sounds Records, a net label on which Stereo Zoo is a part of, has formally launched. Our debut “Rotten Apples EP” was one of the initial releases of the label, but with the public launch comes a mixtape of several artists, and the track “Empty Streets” is featured. The complete mix is streaming below:

Also, a free download is available here:

There will be more mixtapes to come after this!

Just a quick note to mention that Harbor Sounds Records, a netlabel that Stereo Zoo and a few other artists are a part of, will be launching soon. We will be issuing a series of mixtapes of varied styles and influences, with geographic origins ranging from Taiwan to Northern Ireland, New Jersey to Mersey. The first mixtape will arrive very soon!

Four More Years, the other band I play live in, has released the album “Collider”. Check out the Bandcamp page here. Another show soon might be on the horizon, and there have also been some exciting things happening regarding a Netlabel that we’re starting together. Stay tuned.

New music! The brand new Stereo Zoo release: “Rotten Apples EP” is now playing below, and on the listen page. It’s four tracks, and there’s a free download of the opening number “Whiskey Kids”. It’s also available to buy (technically, pay-what-you-want) on Bandcamp, which should get you a better quality version than what’s streaming. Stay tuned regarding physical copies. I’ve also started a Facebook page. Enjoy!
 

Back in Belfast, Northern Ireland on a temporary basis. While I’m here, I’ll have the opportunity to work on some music. As time has moved on, and I have moved from recording to recording, the production quality has increased (and the instruments used have been of higher quality). That places me in something of a dilemma regarding older recordings: whether or not to rerecord those using better tools and techniques. However, at this moment I’m leaning towards just releasing some pretty complete stuff on an EP…demos/earlier versions exist for a reason, and the creator tends to develop an overly critical ear after working on something for a long time (as opposed to the more forgiving ear I experienced listening to my stuff after being away from it for a couple weeks). Watch this space.

Meanwhile, it was nice to see a couple things happening in Belfast. The 13th annual Cathedral Arts Festival is going on at the moment, with a bunch of live acts, and I also made a recent discovery of the non-profit Oh Yeah Music Center, also in the Cathedral Quarter, which seems to offer recording studios, practice space, a venue, and a few other things. Interesting – we haven’t had anything quite like this in Belfast before.

Times are good…I recently got a hold of a Taylor 114ce. It’s an amazing acoustic guitar (well, Taylors are generally quite good) which also has pickups and can be plugged into an amplifier or, of course, a computer. Recently I’ve been recording a lot of acoustic guitar, doubling a mic track and a direct track in the same performance, and mixing to preference.

My previous acoustic was an Ovation Applause AE128: a fairly sturdy, travel-friendly, attractive, but nonetheless entry-level instrument. The new guitar makes the first sound like a toy…However, there are certain thresholds when it comes to guitars, and diminishing returns past a certain point. While the Taylor is much superior to the Ovation, better Taylor guitars – which can get really expensive – aren’t going to be better than the one I have now by the same order of magnitude. In other words, I won’t need to upgrade to another acoustic guitar for a long, long time.

The more I develop recording-wise, the more I’ve come to appreciate that good recording involves eliminating “weak links”. And one more weak link has been eliminated now. Given that I have a lot already finished with my old acoustic guitar (including the song I posted last month), I don’t know that I’ll go back and replace every single guitar part at this point. But it’ll absolutely feature on future recordings – of which I have a couple dozen in demo form. Such is one paradox of the home recording revolution…what am I going to do, not record a drop of music until I’ve spent thousands of dollars on a home setup? Sigh…

Rebooting ES. Everything else is pretty much done. I’m hoping to fast track this one.

Welcome to 2012. In the midst of recording and rerecording a host of different tracks, I took the time to develop a little idea I came up with last year. Fairly simple verse-chorus-verse stuff, which is what I like about it. It was produced relatively quickly and features some of the new production techniques I’ve been working with. I kind of consider it a “version 1″, in that there are a few parts that I might redo eventually, but for right now I’m pretty happy with it, and I figured I’d upload. Enjoy!



 

 

A small update – I’ve added a new tab which has a few links. Just a few at first.

Rerecording of WK is going fairly well. Will probably put it to the side fairly soon and focus on FEC.

Another thing I should add: I got a new guitar recently. It’s a Fender Stratocaster…well, the mid-range Mexican-made version, but it’s still an extremely playable and versatile instrument. This has actually been great for my recordings, because there’s nothing quite like the single coil twang of a Strat, especially when I feed it through one of the amps in Guitar Rig. This would be a “clean” electric sound, which sounds distinctly different from an acoustic guitar, or the Parker guitar which imitates an acoustic with piezo pickups. Having both in the mix at the same time makes for a really nice blend. The song I’m working on at the moment, “Whiskey Kids”, has a good bit of that going on.

Someday I’ll get the full American version, but in the meantime I have other priorities in terms of recording equipment.

You know, this home recording revolution has been really great and all, putting the power into the hands of the people, but it’s also a little absurd that we’re all buying our own recording equipment – sometimes entire studios – individually. I’ve been considering what hypothetical situations would make this a lot easier. Plenty of thoughts for the future.
 

 

Back at last – I kindof took the summer off from recording, as I had a lot of stuff going on. It was a bummer in a way, but it also meant I could get some distance and come back to the tracks with some objectivity. This week I was back to recording, and I was happy to find that a) the tracks were in decent enough shape as is, and b) thanks to learning a lot more about production over the last little while I was finding many ways to make them better.

What I have been doing musically in the last couple months, however, has been exploring more tones, and specifically, guitar pedals.

Since the software I use comes bundled with many, many effects, I’ve been happily using a bunch of them on recordings. However, there’s nothing like sitting down with a specific pedal – doing it the old analogue way – and really learning its strengths and subtleties. My priority has been distortion pedals, since they can be so fundamental to a guitar’s character. So far I have six dedicated distortion pedals, which run in a kind of loose spectrum of heaviness.

I should mention, first of all, that I use a great program called Guitar Rig when I play through my computer. It has a bunch of famous amps simulated – also very fundamental to a guitar’s color – plus a ton of effects based on famous pedals. It makes for a nice preview of certain effects before working out if you want the real amp or pedal. Otherwise, you can just bring your laptop to a show, plug in direct, and simulate all of this high-priced equipment. The program can be overwhelming in the amazing range of options, and I still feel like I’ve only skimmed the surface – perhaps I’ll talk more about it at a later date.

I’ll start with the first distortion pedal, then, the Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive:
 

 
“Overdrive” is the weakest type of distortion, and it’s good for classic rock and blues. I’ll play some Pearl Jam leads, and if you put the gain down really low it’ll give a bit of grit to a clean electric guitar. I was recently learning “Broken Levees Blues” by DJ Shadow (although he might have sampled it from another blues song) and the SD-1 really helped. I’m not sure how the SD-1 ranks among overdrives – the Ibanez Tube Screamer is the really famous one – but I’m perfectly happy with it so far.

Next we have the Boss DS-2 Distortion:
 

 
This is actually the successor to a pretty famous pedal, the DS-1, which has an extra setting for solos, with pronounced mids. Now, when you say “distortion” it can be an all-encompassing term, but it’s actually also a specific effect. The DS-2 is a great, all-purpose distortion, which sounds fairly standard simply because it’s been used on about a million records over the years, from Steve Vai, to Nirvana, Foo Fighters, RHCP, and ton of other artists. It’s great for those dirty Nirvana bar-chord riffs, but solos too, and if you turn the gain right down it’s almost like an overdrive. If nothing else, I’d say it’s the most all-purpose, versatile distortion pedal I own.

The Digitech Grunge pedal is something of a modern classic…
 

 
It’s similar to the DS-2 in many ways, but has a specific dirty, biting quality to it i.e. grungy. However, you can’t turn down the gain as with the DS-2 and use it as an overdrive, so in a way it’s a one-trick pony. This was one of the first pedals I got, and admittedly, since I’ve adopted the DS-2 it’s kind of a forgotten child of mine. However, I’m sure I’ll return to it, and I’ll also mention another great quality: when you use it with a flanger it sounds incredibly spacey.

The next pedal might be the most famous of all – it’s called the Big Muff Pi, and I have a more compact modern re-issue:
 

 
This is in a different category from overdrive and distortion…this is a “fuzz pedal”. This has also been used by many artists on many recordings, and may come across as a one-trick pony at first with its creamy, sustained, messy fuzz. I’ve found that it’s good for a few things, however. The first is, of course, the wall of fuzz, which sounds great when playing Smashing Pumpkins, for example. Actually, I have trouble turning this thing on and not playing the main riff to “Cherub Rock”. But it’s also great for leads, and playing the solo to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” sounds incredible. Lastly, it’s good for bass guitar. There’s a bass version available, but the original sounds fine – it’s great for grinding, punky bass lines.

Death By Audio are a young company, making hand-made pedals out in Brooklyn, and I’ve got the Fuzz War:
 

 
This almost seems half way between the DS-2 and the Big Muff Pi, having both the grit and mess of a fuzz pedal, with the bite of a distortion pedal. This best of both worlds is good for bar chords, and perfect for anything with a garage quality. However, higher-pitched solos don’t seem to work as well with the DS-2 or Big Muff…the pedal seems to lose its character unless you get pretty aggressive up in the higher registers. As with the Big Muff Pi, the pedal is also great for grinding bass.

At the end of the spectrum is the Danelectro Black Coffee Metal Distortion:
 

 
This was something I bought when I was a teenager and basically wanted the heaviest thing I could find (before I realized that heaviness, energy, or aggression, has do with a bunch of different things in a song). Danelectro are on the cheaper end of pedal manufacturers, but this is by no means bad – like the Grunge pedal it sticks to a certain tested sound with not much variation. It’s good for modern metal of any kind, or some Pantera etc. Long term, I would probably check out a Boss metal pedal, but at the moment the heavy stuff I’ve recorded is more hard rock than strictly metal…as a matter of fact, I think many of the original hard rock and metal bands just used overdrives anyway.

So those are the six pedals. I actually have my eye on the Boss Mega-Distortion, which is known for nu-metal chords – something I’m not that into – but also good for Tool-like leads which could be fun. This seems like it could be the last link in the distortion spectrum. I also want to check out more overdrive pedals at the other end, as I’m sure you get a lot of subtlety. Have I actually been using all of these pedals on my recordings? Well, not yet…the finished stuff I’m working on at the moment is more acoustic, so I’ve been using Guitar Rig for clean electric tones, and of course recording acoustic guitar. However, these pedals are all part of the many musical explorations that I’ve been making.