photographic evidence of the band's latest recording sessions at love one another studios
Showing posts with label loa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loa. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
recording diary 3/13/09
photographic evidence of the band's latest recording sessions at love one another studios
Monday, 9 March 2009
recording diary 03/07/09
we three shirley kids (read: me, joe, ean) spent the eraserheads evening recording new material at joey santos' famed love one another studio. aside from the early acoustic guitar jangle c/o the morris parlor guitar, it was a multi-drive pedal kind of night. we used (in no particular order): a zvex fuzz factory, a vox cooltron duel overdrive, a tech-21 gt-2, a proco you dirty rat, and the beautiful bluberri drive pedal. and instead of going back to the themesongs strat-dominated sound, we used our newly acquired maison lawsuit sg standard, and joe's neck-thru vantage. hooray for new gear hehe.
some interesting moments include:
1) pancho asking - "wala ba kayong mga kanta na may distortion?" leading to a bit of fuzz factory overkill haha
2) the new palm-muted chording in nakauwi na and the lessons learned by engineer joey from his boy elroy recording experience
3) pancho stating "you are such a mammal"
4) ean stating "nonsense yung b-string mo e" (band conflict! haha)
hahaha.
pics!
some interesting moments include:
1) pancho asking - "wala ba kayong mga kanta na may distortion?" leading to a bit of fuzz factory overkill haha
2) the new palm-muted chording in nakauwi na and the lessons learned by engineer joey from his boy elroy recording experience
3) pancho stating "you are such a mammal"
4) ean stating "nonsense yung b-string mo e" (band conflict! haha)
hahaha.
pics!
joey documenting the scene, ean tracking with the vantage, and joe chilling.
engineers pancho + wacky having a well earned panciteria san jacinto break. note pancho's penchant for calamansi.
-owel
-owel
Sunday, 19 October 2008
themesongs track 5
"together forevers"
most noteworthy is the amazing snare sound that joey santos gets on this song, the release/decay of that 80's hit is really what makes the song! also, forevers is the selena solo track for this album, and the first of many selena oriented songs. the owel-sung demo version released on the today is tshirt day comp was a take-off point, but where that was a stalker-ish "sigurista" lovesong, this is an out and out guarantee of sorts. and and the outro, where selena and the synth duet into this papapa-fest is this suprise that came about while we were recording. the live version of forevers used to include a "time after time" outro, where we'd sing time after time haha. but the album version couldn't include that, of course, so we had to figure out something, and then amazing amazing amazing selena just pulls out of her indie-pop hat this papapa phrasing and papapa melody and then we were all "do that on the synth!" and then that ending comes out and then we were trying to mix it and then during the final mix of that joey has this miscue where only a few tracks were faded out and then what happened was a gradual fade, leaving selena's voice and the guitar chord, and then that was another OMG moment.
i remember the time when after recording most of the basic tracks for forevers, me and joey santos really considered it the least like-able of the shirley tracks so far, so we kept on figuring out ways to re-do it, but then the gang vocal recording day came along and i guess what we just needed were the "barkada" shouts and the voices of the whole band + melvene (sobrang lamig ng boses ni melvene!) on the sing-along chorus. also featuring the keys (as in susi) in tribute to a song on the rivermaya green album (plus points for whoever figures that out hehe)
i love you ang bandang shirley! see you at our fans' day and debut premiere!
-owel
most noteworthy is the amazing snare sound that joey santos gets on this song, the release/decay of that 80's hit is really what makes the song! also, forevers is the selena solo track for this album, and the first of many selena oriented songs. the owel-sung demo version released on the today is tshirt day comp was a take-off point, but where that was a stalker-ish "sigurista" lovesong, this is an out and out guarantee of sorts. and and the outro, where selena and the synth duet into this papapa-fest is this suprise that came about while we were recording. the live version of forevers used to include a "time after time" outro, where we'd sing time after time haha. but the album version couldn't include that, of course, so we had to figure out something, and then amazing amazing amazing selena just pulls out of her indie-pop hat this papapa phrasing and papapa melody and then we were all "do that on the synth!" and then that ending comes out and then we were trying to mix it and then during the final mix of that joey has this miscue where only a few tracks were faded out and then what happened was a gradual fade, leaving selena's voice and the guitar chord, and then that was another OMG moment.
i remember the time when after recording most of the basic tracks for forevers, me and joey santos really considered it the least like-able of the shirley tracks so far, so we kept on figuring out ways to re-do it, but then the gang vocal recording day came along and i guess what we just needed were the "barkada" shouts and the voices of the whole band + melvene (sobrang lamig ng boses ni melvene!) on the sing-along chorus. also featuring the keys (as in susi) in tribute to a song on the rivermaya green album (plus points for whoever figures that out hehe)
i love you ang bandang shirley! see you at our fans' day and debut premiere!
-owel
Monday, 22 September 2008
themesongs track 1
"kagabi nanaginip si morrissey na may nagmamahal sa kanya"
xmaslights was recorded first, around november of 2006, with this coming a close second. we were going for a "rivermaya covers goldenboy" vibe, with the prominent acoustic guitar and heidi's analog yamaha doing the bleeps in the background. i remember being really unhappy about how it sounded in the early mixes, so we replaced some of the acoustic guitars with electric guitar overdubs. another curious thing about the recording is the chorus guitar part, where the harmony riff is actually more prominent, the live version sounds nothing like it and i love that.
my favorite part in the song though (aside from the alarm clock intro, which totally makes this song work) is the solo in the middle, 1:30 or so into the song. the guitar doing the solo is actually just a scratch track, to be replaced by another electric guitar overdub (possibly with one of our stratocasters, this album was very stratty, featuring my green squier strat and joe's maya and pacifica strats) but then during the mixing, me and joey santos (i love you joey!) couldn't find the actual solo take. i remember him shrugging and saying "ok na naman yung scratch a.." hahahaha i love loa. anyway the super thing about the scratch take that i recorded is that i make a mistake on the second pass, but it sounds like a deliberate variation on the guitar line haha. as mark villena would say: "that's a very human element!"
if you listen closely, there's also a new synth part that comes into the solo, that's from marco harder's roland jx3p, i love how it just blankets the whole thing without being totally overpowering. i really love the sine wave square wave saw wave synth sounds and cheapo drum machine loops, so this song is an exercise in those things, hehe. plus! the early days of ang bandang shirley saw songs written specifically for loops, we just used my old casio tonebank keyboard for all percussive purposes hehe.
the words came after the riff, like most of the songs i write. inspired by the smiths' (duh haha) song of the same title, but i was going for more of a hopeful pov. wrote this around 2003, so this is 18 year old owel talking hahaha.
yehey
-owel
xmaslights was recorded first, around november of 2006, with this coming a close second. we were going for a "rivermaya covers goldenboy" vibe, with the prominent acoustic guitar and heidi's analog yamaha doing the bleeps in the background. i remember being really unhappy about how it sounded in the early mixes, so we replaced some of the acoustic guitars with electric guitar overdubs. another curious thing about the recording is the chorus guitar part, where the harmony riff is actually more prominent, the live version sounds nothing like it and i love that.
my favorite part in the song though (aside from the alarm clock intro, which totally makes this song work) is the solo in the middle, 1:30 or so into the song. the guitar doing the solo is actually just a scratch track, to be replaced by another electric guitar overdub (possibly with one of our stratocasters, this album was very stratty, featuring my green squier strat and joe's maya and pacifica strats) but then during the mixing, me and joey santos (i love you joey!) couldn't find the actual solo take. i remember him shrugging and saying "ok na naman yung scratch a.." hahahaha i love loa. anyway the super thing about the scratch take that i recorded is that i make a mistake on the second pass, but it sounds like a deliberate variation on the guitar line haha. as mark villena would say: "that's a very human element!"
if you listen closely, there's also a new synth part that comes into the solo, that's from marco harder's roland jx3p, i love how it just blankets the whole thing without being totally overpowering. i really love the sine wave square wave saw wave synth sounds and cheapo drum machine loops, so this song is an exercise in those things, hehe. plus! the early days of ang bandang shirley saw songs written specifically for loops, we just used my old casio tonebank keyboard for all percussive purposes hehe.
the words came after the riff, like most of the songs i write. inspired by the smiths' (duh haha) song of the same title, but i was going for more of a hopeful pov. wrote this around 2003, so this is 18 year old owel talking hahaha.
yehey
-owel
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
back to the future
there's this memory of being in baguio, december 2005. a post-christmas trip with the alvero family, i was on a couch under a blanket thinking about the band and how we ended up doing a white stripes (eg: me on guitar and zig on the drums) set cause of unforeseen circumstances, and i was using marco harder's roadtone 335, split to two amps w/ the stereo out of a dd3 that i borrowed, so at least i had some of that going on. i remember playing grand finale, habulan, and a really fast tsuper, it was one of those crash and burn gigs that you remember cause it was horrible and exhilarating at once. anyway i was thinking how "i really thought that was the band," something along the lines of "what do i do now" or "where do all the songs go" and under the blanket on the couch up in baguio i get a text message from mark villena, asking if i would be interested in recording with him, as he needed a band to demo @ his tracks job. i go "that would've been great, but i think we disbanded" or something to that effect, and he goes "e tangina sayang yung mga kanta nyo" which was what i was thinking, and i guess the idea of preserving the songs led to the rizal day sessions, recorded dec 30 of 05.
joe was graveyard shift-ing at a computer zombie job, ean was between a rock and a hard place in terms of band membership + friendships, i was having trouble with school (what's new haha), and zig had other bands and i guess i didn't want to burden him with the idea of finding stability in a lineup when he had a lot of other things on his plate. rizal day was supposed to be a graduation picture of sorts, a "hey we had great songs and a good time," postscript. mark was talking about giving labels a copy cause the material was ace and he believed in it, and that was great, but even getting a skeleton of the band together to record at tracks was difficult, so all the "getting signed" talk felt like delusions of grandeur haha.
things changed with the friendster message exchange with selena, cause i was a fan of her old band and her singing, and i wondered if it could be possible to have her on the ep, singing on habulan. she got to the studio and i was all worried about how our music sounded, cause we weren't that "indie" haha and she came from a scene with well-documented snobbery (not that that's a bad thing) but she sang and it was great, and then the proverbial snowball snowballed when we (mr rabara and mr harder) went to eat at the tapa king near the studio, and upon returning we found attorney gaddi playing bass to the early backing tracks of do you videoke, explaining himself with: "may naisip akong bassline eh.."
2005 saw the release of the fearless freaks documentary on the flaming lips. i was really deep into the yoshimi album then, and i was starting to go through their discography in reverse, liking the soft bulletin, falling in love with transmissions from the satellite heart. and i downloaded this thing, and i was all "yeah that's what i want." there was this chaos to their live sets, like there was early video of them having a motorcycle onstage at a bar, using it as a noise/smoke machine, and then some drunken mistake involving the brake and the throttle in some wrong order got the motorcycle flying off the stage. intense.
flashback to early shirley, keyboard + guitar + vocal shirley, with the first gig at the now defunct fox square club, last song was sampung buwan and ean was on guitar and i left the keyboard loop on and i went to the drums and i was floor tom and crash cymbal machine and i was really really really drunk (red horse was the new water) and i jumped from the drum stool to in front of the drums and i didn't really stick the landing, my shin hit the high tom i think, it's a vague memory. anyway the shin still hurts, haha. i wrote songs as skeletons, excuses for jumping around and being noisy and looking stupid.
somewhere down the line we started getting tight, and the songs got a lot more riffy, and gigs like the one we had last tuesday at guijo are reminders of the old days, back when i used to talk back to the audience (ean naalala mo yung bastos na host sa che dati tas nag-sasakyan kita outro for tsuper haha) and when i could jump like this
or when we were thin like this
man that picture tells so much, joe still had his pacifica, ean still had his butterscotch tele, that was the gig before star wars: episode iii came out, and we had this song written to perform for just that night, dv (darth vader) where there's this pseudo rap thing (i was trying to approximate lcd soundsystem's daft punk is playing at my house) and there's this METAL imperial march interlude haha. that was a fun gig, and we've had a lot of those.
the album's still on it's way (after a couple of years of being on it's way) and there are new hitches (letters of consent and film alignments and size discrepancies and whatever else) and i don't know what to think anymore about that album cause i've been living with those songs for quite a while now, the oldest songs on themesongs come from 2002, the newest one (bato) came from 2006, and between the time of writing and the time of release we've written a ton of stuff. my bandmates are fucking intense songwriters and musicians and COOL people and i feel like that's been a secret for the longest time, and when themesongs finally does come out it'll be like, letting other people in on that secret.
and i miss love one another already, and i can't wait to get into the studio again, and i can't wait to start playing new songs, and i can't wait for everybody to hear the album and attach meanings and feelings to songs that i've attached meanings and feelings to and i can't wait to write about the things on that album and show the documentary to people so that when you have your copy and you're listening to it and you're wondering what that weird sound was or why that happened on that song or how cool this band is, then you can refer to the future post about the music or the documentary so you get your question answered.
-owel
joe was graveyard shift-ing at a computer zombie job, ean was between a rock and a hard place in terms of band membership + friendships, i was having trouble with school (what's new haha), and zig had other bands and i guess i didn't want to burden him with the idea of finding stability in a lineup when he had a lot of other things on his plate. rizal day was supposed to be a graduation picture of sorts, a "hey we had great songs and a good time," postscript. mark was talking about giving labels a copy cause the material was ace and he believed in it, and that was great, but even getting a skeleton of the band together to record at tracks was difficult, so all the "getting signed" talk felt like delusions of grandeur haha.
things changed with the friendster message exchange with selena, cause i was a fan of her old band and her singing, and i wondered if it could be possible to have her on the ep, singing on habulan. she got to the studio and i was all worried about how our music sounded, cause we weren't that "indie" haha and she came from a scene with well-documented snobbery (not that that's a bad thing) but she sang and it was great, and then the proverbial snowball snowballed when we (mr rabara and mr harder) went to eat at the tapa king near the studio, and upon returning we found attorney gaddi playing bass to the early backing tracks of do you videoke, explaining himself with: "may naisip akong bassline eh.."
2005 saw the release of the fearless freaks documentary on the flaming lips. i was really deep into the yoshimi album then, and i was starting to go through their discography in reverse, liking the soft bulletin, falling in love with transmissions from the satellite heart. and i downloaded this thing, and i was all "yeah that's what i want." there was this chaos to their live sets, like there was early video of them having a motorcycle onstage at a bar, using it as a noise/smoke machine, and then some drunken mistake involving the brake and the throttle in some wrong order got the motorcycle flying off the stage. intense.
flashback to early shirley, keyboard + guitar + vocal shirley, with the first gig at the now defunct fox square club, last song was sampung buwan and ean was on guitar and i left the keyboard loop on and i went to the drums and i was floor tom and crash cymbal machine and i was really really really drunk (red horse was the new water) and i jumped from the drum stool to in front of the drums and i didn't really stick the landing, my shin hit the high tom i think, it's a vague memory. anyway the shin still hurts, haha. i wrote songs as skeletons, excuses for jumping around and being noisy and looking stupid.
somewhere down the line we started getting tight, and the songs got a lot more riffy, and gigs like the one we had last tuesday at guijo are reminders of the old days, back when i used to talk back to the audience (ean naalala mo yung bastos na host sa che dati tas nag-sasakyan kita outro for tsuper haha) and when i could jump like this
or when we were thin like this
man that picture tells so much, joe still had his pacifica, ean still had his butterscotch tele, that was the gig before star wars: episode iii came out, and we had this song written to perform for just that night, dv (darth vader) where there's this pseudo rap thing (i was trying to approximate lcd soundsystem's daft punk is playing at my house) and there's this METAL imperial march interlude haha. that was a fun gig, and we've had a lot of those.
the album's still on it's way (after a couple of years of being on it's way) and there are new hitches (letters of consent and film alignments and size discrepancies and whatever else) and i don't know what to think anymore about that album cause i've been living with those songs for quite a while now, the oldest songs on themesongs come from 2002, the newest one (bato) came from 2006, and between the time of writing and the time of release we've written a ton of stuff. my bandmates are fucking intense songwriters and musicians and COOL people and i feel like that's been a secret for the longest time, and when themesongs finally does come out it'll be like, letting other people in on that secret.
and i miss love one another already, and i can't wait to get into the studio again, and i can't wait to start playing new songs, and i can't wait for everybody to hear the album and attach meanings and feelings to songs that i've attached meanings and feelings to and i can't wait to write about the things on that album and show the documentary to people so that when you have your copy and you're listening to it and you're wondering what that weird sound was or why that happened on that song or how cool this band is, then you can refer to the future post about the music or the documentary so you get your question answered.
-owel
Tuesday, 5 August 2008
love one another reminiscing
Our good friend, wonderful colleague, talented musician (and heir apparent to the santos family fortune) JOEY SANTOS of the love one another sound production network has written the best article about our band ever, with mentions of Geoff Emerick, Ean's 21st century crooner voice, and PHYSICAL EMOTION. hahahaha.
read the article at the unjob.
MALAPIT NAAAAAA hahahaha
-owel
read the article at the unjob.
MALAPIT NAAAAAA hahahaha
-owel
Sunday, 16 March 2008
missing LOA
i was watching the smashing pumpkins' vieuphoria this afternoon and couldn't help recalling all the footage we've been collecting so that kathy our super videographer-cum-korean-secret-weapon can concoct a cool documentary for our upcoming shirley album launch. we pretty much have the same kooky slice-of-life stuff as the dvd, though they probably can't hold a candle to d'arcy's tea party segment...
one of the interludes was a behind-the-scenes look at the making of siamese dream. manny chevrolet interviewed the pumpkins and butch vig (drummer of then-unformed garbage), the producer of the album. his sober answers to the questions reminded me of master engineer joey santos of love one another studios and his poker-faced replies to our own queries. he and the other sound engineers of LOA were integral in setting the right mood for the trippy artistic atmosphere that our album could only have been conceived in. discussions on light sabers, the making of paper dolls, and the formulation of alternative "papapa" sounds were just some of their invaluable contributions to ang bandang shirley's creative process. this kind of joyous interaction between joey et al. and shirley members seemed to me not unlike the pig-head dance butch vig and another man performed by the engineer's board at triclops studios, which surely must have directly begun the germination of several of the pumpkins' future works of outstanding craft in their heads and hearts.
chevrolet: how do you guys like working together?
corgan: as much as any two men could like working together.
vig: (pause) good answer.
chevrolet: (to camera) i gotta go. bye.
- selena
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Meet the engineers!
Waskan Week Night 1! Kathy gave me scratch n' sniff Ratatouille cards last Saturday and I shared them with the group. Our album engineers, Marc and Joey experiment to see if they really work.
Love One Another rawks!
- selena
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