Thanks for your comments and advice! "7:30 Wednesday" was probably the most rushed dbsong out of the three, so I definitely agree that it's too repetitive. I will try to work some variety in. I'll work on the mixing, too. I tend to record demos while a song is fresh on my mind so I can move on and write other things without worrying about forgetting the old songs. I intended for these demos to be used just to give the other guys in the band ideas for their parts for our live shows, but lately we have been using these demos for promotion and booking. My hope is to, sometime soon when I have a more permanent recording space, to record real drums and polish these into hopefully usable recordings. "Happy", "early 70s" and "British" are all things that I like being used to describe our sound. Being from Washington, DC, the land of Fugazi, it's sometimes hard to be a band without a double kick drum or screaming vocals, but our influences are definitely more Beatles and Kinks, with hopefully a little bit of Wilco and Ben Kweller thrown in. Thanks again! Phil At 08:14 PM 8/15/2004, Mike Carlyle wrote:

I liked "all my chords are major now". The guitar fills are very Paul Westerberg-ey. The drums in that one are a little bit mixed in the background, and the guitar is very prominent. The vocals sound very dry.

One "Wednesday", the drums sound good but beg for a little more variety. That crash cymbal on every single four is something I don't think a drummer would do. I've always tried for variety, natural sounding fills and rhythms, and to avoid doing things a real drummer would not or could not do.

"We'll go east" is probably my favorite, both from a drumming point of view as well as compositionally.

I like your style. I don't know what you intend the demos for. Are you using them to market yourself or as a writing aid? Will you re-record with a real drummer someday?

I really dig that all your stuff sounds very "happy" and has an early 70's british flair to it. I wish you good luck.

On Aug 15, 2004, at 7:47 PM, Phil Moore wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

I've read the list for quite a while now, though I have never actually posted.

My band has been putting together some demos lately, using doggiebox for drums since for the next month and a half I'm not living anywhere with space for a real drum set up. Now that the list is showing some signs of life again I thought that if I posted some mp3s I might get some good feedback. The songs are posted here:

http://www.spudnikpop.com/demos/dbox.html

If anyone has any tips or opinions about the doggieboxing, the recording, or anything else about the songs, I'd love to hear it!

I think that I used the nskit_1dbkit for all the tracks. I've seen references to what seem to be newer conversions of the nskit to dbkits, is there anyplace where those are available for download?

Thanks!

Phil

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At 09:32 AM 8/16/2004, Charlie wrote:

I liked them a lot.

Great! I'm glad.

Some quick thoughts: Drums are good - Mike mentioned the excess crashes on each beat - that is the same mistake I seem to make with all my DB tracks. There is most likely some Keith Moon gene lurking somewhere in the DNA. If you are going to get a meatware version of DB for the tracks in the future, what you have is more than adequate.

Yeah, I'll try to fix that. I had to read through the sentence with "meatware" in it a few times before I realized what that word meant. :)

By the way, iTunes was playing in the background as I was typing this e-mail and the song that came on after yours was by the Strokes. It wasn't until the vocals cut in that I realised it wasn't you.... This may say as much about my ears as you music, but - it does show that you're in the ball park (IMHO)

Wow, any comparison to The Strokes is a good one in my book. Thanks!

What recording equipment/software did you use??

I recorded through an mBox, but I have totally given up on ProTools LE since GarageBand came out. The software amp simulation makes it so much fun to play with that I can live without the power of ProTools. Plus losing most of the advanced features of ProTools has forced me to play more live-like, which ultimately results in a better sound, I think. As far as instruments go, the guitars are with a Fender Nashville Telecaster, the bass is a cheap Squirer that I bought used for US$90, and the keyboard parts are played with a Casio CTK-691 (I think that's the right number). The vocals are with a condensor mic I found on eBay for US$50. Thanks for your input! Phil