No Ryan. Sadness.

We needed a night off from the constant editing and mixing thing so we decided to go out to Louie’s Trophy House to play a few songs for their open mic night. It was great to play with these guys again. Unfortunately, we didn’t have Ryan since he was feeling under the weather; Erik jumped over to the kit and we went with one fewer guitar. We played a few originals and then invited some people up for a “super-jam” (really it was just Artios with Jeff on drums, thanks Jeff) at which point Mike busted out his EWI which can make some impressive sounds.

SLOOOOOPEY SECONDS!!

Last night was also the last night of our beloved race league for this year. The team is not restricted to Artios members but four out of five are in the band. Ryan has class on Tuesdays so he can’t make it. We had free pizza and several pitchers of beer. Good times. Never mind the fact that our team placed dead last; we got first in drinking.

Hey Artios fans! We have been hard at work the past couple months and its about time for an update as to the progress we have been making. Where to start?

We finished up all of my lead vocal parts for the first 7 songs on the album. Most of the harmony parts have also been completed for the first 7 songs. While working on doing harmony parts for “Baron01″ we brought in our good friend Hal to help fill out our group singing section.

Sorry there hasn’t been a post in a while.  I’d come up with some great excuse but I don’t really have one. I bought an acoustic guitar over the weekend so I suppose I could use the excuse that I’ve been playing that. We’ve actually been quite busy lately. We got Pat‘s acoustic guitar track recorded for Down in Flames. We’re also half way through Erik‘s vocal harmony part for These Four Walls. Unfortunately he’s got a cold or something similar. Playing an instrument with a cold is annoying but the instrument’s not affected. Singing with a cold is a whole other story and he’s been fighting to get a good tone. We got a good chuck of it done, though. Pat also came up with a additional harmony for the bridge of These Four Walls that sounds killer.

Mike got his hair cut last week. If you don’t know Mike it probably sounds like we need to get some better material to write about. If you do know Mike you’re probably struggling to comprehend what you just read. He’s had long hair for a while now and last week he got most of it chopped off and donated it to Locks of Love.  They will take the hair and use it to make wigs for children suffering hair loss due to medical conditions. I’m not sure if he plans to grow it out again or not but it was quite a shock when he walked into the studio.

This post isn’t music related so sorry about that. If you’ve not heard of Minecraft, it’s a cross-platform computer game that’s incredibly addicting. It’s available for download for a small fee (20USD last time I looked). The basic idea involves using the materials available to build an unlimited world of structures and devices.

Patrick and I have been playing recently and building a nice world. If you want to join us you can log in under the multiplayer section to:

Server: artiosband.com

You won’t be able to change anything once you log in. If you want to participate, send me an e-mail and I will add you to the operators list.

…the bad news is we didn’t have any time left to record anything. We started out by getting Mike’s amp up in the attic of the barn. This wasn’t easy to begin with; in case you hadn’t noticed (or don’t live in Michigan) it was very hot today. So we got Mike’s amp up and running and were about to track when we noticed an obnoxious buzz in the microphones. We switched it out with Erik’s amp and realized that had a buzz in it, too.

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Well we finished all of Pat‘s piano parts for Barn 01 tonight. He had two parts we tracked. There’s a deep heavy part underneath the light poppy part you may recognize from our live shows. Being able to record multiple passes gives us so many more options for part-writing. Who knows, we may even add an organ part.

I also got a chance to play around with MIDI. This method records the keys Pat presses as individual events rather than capturing the audio produced by the keyboard (we did record that too). This will let us take his part and add or change the sound made by his keyboard during mix-time. It might save us the trouble of re-recording the part if there turns out to be something we wanted differently.

Below is what the part looks like. The red section shows the part Patrick was actively recording at the time. The grey section underneath that is capturing which keys he’s pressing (MIDI).  If you want to hear it instead of just seeing it, make sure to watch for the release of this song down the line.