Mistakes not to make while recording… and the benefits of listening to your brother.
So for the past 18 months we’ve been recording the new t.o.t.s. album. I don’t like to play live or practice while I’m recording… it’s hard enough for me to focus on recording t.o.t.s. and playing with two other acts to have it all happening at once. That’s me though… and it was a totally fucked decision. Turns out the rest of the band HAS wanted to play and practice while working on the recording… my brother in particular expressed this to me and honestly, I felt like a real asshole. As a result, we’ve moved into record/practice mode right now and I have to admit, I couldn’t be happier. The current line up of Blight, Lars, Ericah and myself is EPIC. Without ANY reservations I can safely say that this is the absolute strongest lineup that t.o.t.s. has ever had. This hasn’t been really evident to me up until now.. we usually record in pairs or individually so all four of us aren’t ever present while in the studio recording (another mistake but with a decent chunk of material left to record this will be changed). Anyway… the practice sessions have been amazing. The combination of personality types in the same room working on these songs has taken them all to new heights, old tracks and new. There’s no way I could possibly convey my enthusiasm adequately in this post, but I promise promise PROMISE you, you will see it on the stage and on the new release (whenever we’re done!).

A follow up on the mobile blogging dealio I mentioned in the previous post… I built a new site www.chvad.com that is loosely based around the ideas mentioned above. It’s structured around utterz, wordpress, blip and flickr. The site isn’t really band related… more of a personal site for me and updated via mobile almost 90% of the time. Experiences, images, videos, whatever.. sometimes art related sometimes just shit with friends. It’s got information about all the other stuff I’m into and will eventually get a little more filled up and organized. I’m slowly noodling with it so we’ll see what happens.

Lights lights lights…
I am considering moving my current lighting platform over to a PC based solution to consolidate what we have to deal with live a little better. I’ve always been into lighting but this could potentially be a pretty costly endeavor so I’m moving slow…

In other non-t.o.t.s. news:
We’ve finally found a drummer for The Qualia (Chvad on synths) and we’ve bumped up the practice time a lot for this act so The Qualia should be performing live pretty soon in NYC and surrounding areas. More on this and shows dates when they happen…
Mr. 1234 (formally The 1234, Chvad on guitar) has booked a couple of private shows to test out our new lineup. Of the three acts, Mr. 1234 will probably be the first out of the gate to resume playing live.

When the doors open it’s going to be a floodgate of live shows around the east coast for all three acts.

That’s it for now.. I’m sure there’s lots of other shit to mentioned but there’s always another post.

Rock!
Chvad

PS… you punks better be reading Blight’s bizarro clown comic!!!!
http://blightproductions.wordpress.com

Mobile tech and t.o.t.s….
So while the CD is still being slaved over I decided to take a break from it this weekend to work on new tech for t.o.t.s.. Basically, I’ve been looking for ways to integrate news distribution for t.o.t.s. and thanks to a wicked new service www.utterz.com I’m one HUGE step closer. This is seriously cool. With one transmission either from a computer or phone I can send audio, video, still images and text to a number of resources I frequently update including wordpress, flickr, youtube, myspace, yahoo groups, livejournal, facebook, twitter and more. I’d love to just have one source of info distro to cater towards but it’s a HUGE assumption to make that anyone, even a fan, would like to go out of their way to get info on your project. That being said I believe that a sound promotional strategy in ANY medium is to be as omni-present as humanly possible. This certainly helps. This ALSO has the great benefit of being timely as it’s integrated intimately with mobile tech. If you are on the road, you can easily keep a steady flow of band/art related content happening from where you are without any extra gear… just a phone. Show updates… news to the fans, cancellations, cool pics from the stage.. WHATEVER. I’m WAY excited about using this on the next tour.

Just a short update this time…

Rock!
Chvad

HAHAHAHHHAHAA!!!!! Finished a new track today.. “Whatever Happened to Carson”. I’m fucking jazzed about this song. Everything worked out perfectly on it. This fucker has been a sword in my side for a while. A lot of guitars and a lot of ebow action… and that was the problem. i needed some new stuffs to make the tone of the geetar perfect and the tech21 reverb worked like a charm.
Still a lot of work left to go but there’s a shit load of tracks waiting to get mixed so… baby steps and all.. the CD is coming along nicely.

Finished the mix with a bad case of SHINGLES BTW. Shit hurts… More on that HERE.
That’s it.. now it’s off to get my character up to level 60 in Mass Effect!

-chvad

In the making: t.o.t.s. “TROTW”. Post 10:

So it’s been a bit since the last update… I’m not even sure where to begin. We’ve made some great progress on the “The Return of the Wetlands” but as usual there is still more to go and again, as usual I’ve managed to occupy my time with way too much stuff. As the album currently stands, there are 4 completely wrapped tracks, another two that should be done as of this weekend and a group of others in various stages of development.

Time time time… working on bringing The Qualia to the stage has been long and challenging so far and has also occupied a great deal of time. Also.. to make matters even more dense, the other band I play in “Mr. 1234” has resumed practice again after a brief hiatus. Working in both bands in addition to t.o.t.s. is both a good and bad thing. Good in that I am always engaged differently… bad in that time is extremely critical now more than ever due to there being less of it available. I am also working on yet another soundtrack for another indie horror short… the good news is that these tracks will be rearranged into material for “The Return of the Wetlands”…. that’s pretty exciting for me because I’ve been wanting to do some material like this for a while and haven’t had the need to push myself to try it out. It works REALLY well in my opinion and the couple of tracks this soundtrack has inspired for t.o.t.s. are pretty fucking cool.

Continue reading In the making: t.o.t.s. “TROTW”. Post 10: →

Trying to get this shit done…

Been one year and one month on this next release… I JUST breached the halfway point. If someone sees the next road sign gimme a heads up.

There’s a whole lot of stuff that gets made that never sees the light of day… Brainstorm sessions, scratch ideas, the results of experimenting with new gear etc… I’ve decided to post all of these during the making of “The Return of the Wetlands”. What parts of these, if any, will see the light of day I have no idea.
tots_scrtchdsk_20071125:
[FLASH https://www.outside-the-skin.com/tots/audio/TROTWL_blog_audio/tots_20071125.mp3 w=200 h=40]

Finally got a chance to do the news letter day before yesterday. Ultimately, to cover all the sites I usually post on, it took about 3 hours from start to finish. This time also includes getting screen captures from the new t.o.t.s. Second Life endeavor and getting new merch coded into our online store. Yesterday I knocked out a review for DarkSonus and spent the rest of the evening troubleshooting the equipment we’ll be using for Qualia performances.

Started looking into new lighting gear for t.o.t.s. today and submitted an application for NXNW.

Finished up the SMP remix today. I wound up recording new guitars, drums and synths for the track. Instruments used: Alesis Ion, CS6x, GURU, Sonar (ver. 4) and the Eastwood Delta 6.