A Song A Week

I post one song per week from various bands I've been in over the years.

[songweek]

Switch Crooks - Trend

Another track from the two man collaboration Switch Crooks. 

This song is primarily based on a noise sample that I created by taking the data from a GIF image file of the logo of a BMX shop called "Trend" and inserting it into a WAV file. The resulting sound had some kind of a tempo of it's own that we crafted drum loops around.

I also created a short Flash video / slideshow for this track...

Click here to view the Flash video for Trend (opens in a new window)

[songweek]

Bred By Dred - Bushunters

Sometimes it's hard to remember who wrote what in a band but in this case due to the various personalities involved I am 100% sure I wrote this one. Guitar parts, drums, lyrics were my contribution while our bass player sang this one with his awesome and aggressive style really making the song.

I kind of wish we concentrated more on this aggressive style instead of trying to add "quality" to our songs but at only 1 minute long we would have had to write 40 of these to fill up an album.

All the other punk bands that I was influenced by, from the '80s, had their anti-Regan songs and I just took the same idea to the next term by writing about the original George Bush. What an asshole. :)

[songweek]

100 Tongues - Downside

Another track from our 4 song cassette released in 1992. This song was a bit more spacey than some of our other songs that showed our post-punk, Jesus Lizard and similar influences and instead showed our "jam band" side once the song makes it's way through the verse chorus a couple of times.

In the middle section starting from the 3 minute mark you can hear hand drums, multiple bass tracks with various effects while the guitar lays back for the most part until the crescendo which get's into pure noise territory near the end of the song.

[songweek]

Switch Crooks - Sixteen

Switch Crooks was a project I started in 2001 where I worked together with my friend Casper to manually edit together sound samples into drum loops that were used as the basis to create these songs.

We built up most of the beats manually in a waveform editor from samples pulled from songs or records which gives them a more natural cadence and then those larger loop files were looped together again to create songs.

The piano in this, and the drums, are both distressed, suffering from an ultra low bitrate sampling that gives them their distressed sound. 

For a few of these songs I also created videos mashed up out of archival photos and sometimes with line drawings sketched over them. Here is the video for sixteen:

Click here to view the Flash video for this track (in a new window)

[songweek]

Switch Crooks - Sixteen

[songweek]

100 Tongues - Blind

This song was recorded for our 4 song cassette release that we sold at shows etc. It had an amazing cover drawn by a friend of the band that featured a long tongue that unfolded down from the cover when you opened it. For some reason I have no copy of this artwork or of the amazing gig posters we had drawn during this time period... for some reason I never saved any of it or it was all lost somehow.

I played guitar and sang on this track and I'm sure I wrote the lyrics but the music I'm not so sure. Sounds like something I would write but Mike, the bass player in this band, used to contribute a lot of the riffs in our songs as well. The ending/bridge riff and guitar solo in this song was changed between this recording and previous recordings because I noticed that the previous riff I "wrote" for the solo sounded exactly like a Neurosis riff that was on their latest CD at the time. Imitation and flattery and all that but once I realized we wrote a new part and at the same time shortened up the song a bit.

Really fun song to play and fun to listen back to after all these years.

[songweek]

100 Tongues cassette release 1992

[songweek]

Noise Floor - One More Time

This is a great song in my opinion, all around from the bass melodies and different effects on the bass guitar, to the vocals to the arrangement. All I did on this track was write my drum part and play along. All I had to do was lock in with the bass line on this one and play some drum fills and push the tempo along as it builds and builds throughout the song. 

I did break a drumstick somewhere in the middle of this track and we kept the take anyway. I wish I could go back in ProTools and copy and paste that tiny section where I was playing one-handed while picking up another stick but we couldn't do that type of thing back in those days. 

[songweek]

Bred By Dred - Such A Loss

One thing that strikes me when I listen to these tracks back after a good 25 years is what a good job the engineer did making our crappy gear sound decent in the studio although that didn't stop us from making some mistakes during the recording sessions.

One point of contention was in my guitar tracks (panned to the right hand side). There was a high pitched squeaking sound in some of the songs that we couldn't figure out how to get rid of and I was getting a lot of criticism of my playing from the other guitar player.

Listening back now the cause is obviously the lower strings coming in contact with the top of the pickup during heavy playing or palm muting but we had no clue at the time. A couple of turns of the screwdriver and the problem would have been solved but in those days we just put the pickups as close to the strings as possible for more volume and didn't know any better.

Another funny gem in this recording is right at the finale where we messed up the ending guitar pull-offs a tiny bit and if you listen really carefully you can hear the sound of someone yelling "fuck" bleeding through the drum mics.

[songweek]

Heavy - Throatpunch

Heavy was a project that I played drums on in the early '90s that taught me a lesson that I was able to apply to my next band Steve. Let me explain.

The idea behind Heavy was to create 4 piece that would be high energy 100% of the time and would play nothing but head banging tempo songs. Sort of the ultimate live band for small clubs.

The three of us, guitar, bass and drums, came together as smoothly as any band I've ever been in and sometimes the songs would come out nearly finished first time we played them. Everyone just clicked but we couldn't find a singer.

I couldn't sing and play the drum parts and neither the guitar player or bass player wanted so sing so we just practiced as much as we could and got the songs dialled while we looked for a singer.

Practice space was hard to come by and eventually we ended up in an unfinished basement of a house with no PA which made it hard to audition singers but we still gave it a shot until one day the basement was broken into.

We lost all of the guitar player's gear basically dead ending the band right then and there. We never found a singer so we never played a show and with the gear gone we never would.

By the next band I had learned. Even while we looked for a bass player to finish the band we still recorded a demo as soon as possible and got out there playing shows. We actually played all of our shows without a bass player but at least we got out there.

[songweek]

Behind The Wall Of Sleep - Seventy-Nine

A demo project that has been evolving under a few different names.

Drone/doom/sludge/stoner metal. Downtuned and layered riffs.

(2 posts in one week, yes I missed a week already.)

[songweek]

Bred By Dred - Killing For Science

Recorded in London, Ontario in 1988.

Killing For Science is a song I played guitar for, sang, played drums and wrote the music for... except for the 2nd bridge riff which I realized later was almost exactly the same as the bridge riff from an S.O.D. song called "Kill Yourself". If someone else wants to take credit for writing this song then they can admit to stealing the riff too but sadly it was me. It happens sometimes.

The lyrics were written by Phil and then I turned it into rhymes which is something I would often do to make the songs easier to sing and easier to remember. The subject matter is pure '80s hardcore which often tended to cover these political or moral subjects. Killing For Science is about the product testing on animals which would never be done in this day and age but was common in the 1980s.

Thankfully animal rights groups started releasing photos of the testing and the practice was quickly abandoned partially due to the bad PR and partially due to smaller companies like The Body Shop building huge businesses by providing "natural" products guaranteed not to be tested on animals in any way. The bunnies thank you.

[songweek]

Olf - Black Sabbath

Olf is an electronic project I was doing in the late '90s, mostly inspired by underground hip hop like Kool Keith and some of the rock flavoured stuff of groups like Goodie Mob. 

Lots of rock and metal influences also crept their way in which is very apparent in this track.

This song is constructed entirely of samples and scratches from various Black Sabbath albums ranging from their first album all the way up until around Sabbath Bloody Sabbath or so.

It's important to point out that all the scratching was done digitally using a sample pulled from the albums. No actual vinyl was harmed during the making of this recording.

[songweek]

Steve - Sometimes

A track from a 4-track cassette demo recorded in 1996 in our practice space in Vancouver, BC Canada.

This tape is as far as I know the only recording that exists of this band and although the quality is a bit low-fi it worked fine as a demo tape. Basically we just plugged four microphones into a 4-track recorder, pressed record and played through our set.

The band started as two guitar players, Charissa and I, we wrote a few songs and then managed to find an intact bass and drum duo and hit the ground running. The band's first rehearsal was great but then the bass players girlfriend decided that she didn't want him playing in a band anymore and ordered him to quit after the first practice. Unbelievable.

And so the search for a replacement bass player began. We tried a bunch of people out but couldn't find anyone who fit the bill. After wasting a bunch of time we eventually came to the realization that we should just start playing shows anyway as two guitar and drums trio.

I started to experiment with drop tuning in a bunch of songs to help make up for the bass frequencies and Charissa would switch to bass for one song. We would have sounded fuller with a full time bass player but we filled up the low end the best we could.

I was singing in this song with the vocals recorded direct off the PA system which had a bunch of reverb on it which explains why the vocals sound so distant. We both played Fender Stratocaster guitars, Charissa's guitar is on the right hand side and my guitar is on the left and Rob the drummer in the center.

[songweek]

Steve live at the Brickyard now known as the cafe Nelson the Seagull

[songweek]

100 Tongues - Blockhead

From a 4-track demo cassette recorded in 1992.

This song was written by Mike the bass player and was totally his style with this way it progresses along and rarely repeats itself. Really fun song to play. This band was a 3-piece and I played guitar and sang most of the songs except for one the bass player sang and this instrumental song. I'll post some of the songs I sang on later.

We recorded this demo tape mostly live on a borrowed 4-track machine. Track 1, 2 and 3 were drums, bass and guitar recorded live. Then we overdubbed vocals and lead guitar sharing track number 4. Actually turned out to sound pretty good considering we spent exactly $0 on this tape and recorded it in a living room. It was good enough to get us a bunch of shows around town anyway.

The whole recording was done in 2 days in the living room at a house at 4th and Scotia which was a worn down old rental that the drummer and bass player shared. The place was falling apart but was a great place to party and play music. The house has now been demolished and there is now a community garden on the lot but the house lasted a lot longer than I expected it to based on how it used to shake.

The nasty fuzzed out guitar tone opening this track up was probably my first foray into the land of fuzz, cranking it into my Marshall JCM800 until it sounded like it was getting destroyed. By the end of my time with this band my Marshall was totally melted down with all the abuse I put it through but after a replacing the caps and tubes it's back to a working state again.

[songweek]

Behind The Wall Of Sleep - Nautilus

This is a self-recorded demo track from a project I've been working on for a while under various names. I've been working towards blending the right balance between all the types of metal I like the most from super slow doom to melodic grindcore to open chords and alternate tunings. This song is a decent mix of mid tempo metal with some alternate chord shapes melding into some traditional double bass drum thrash in the middle bridge part.

While I remember here's some notes on how the track was recorded. All the instruments were recorded with my laptop using a PRS guitar into a Yamaha modelling amplifier version of the Marshall JCM800. I played the bass tracks using a  Peavey Patriot bass and midi programmed the drums.

Vocals to be added if or when I ever find a practice space where I can yell my head off without bothering anyone.