So this is a little thing we wanted to start getting running. Since Cain graced you with his duck metaphor we again appear to have gone quiet. So we’re going to try and keep you updated (hopefully) monthly...(ish?) On what is going on BEHIND THE SCENES at masses.
Since the release of our ‘I Couldn’t Be Happier’ EP, we have been playing all over the place: down in London, all the way up to Hull and Preston, and everywhere in between. We’ve had some good experiences and some pretty fucking terrible ones (one of the better ones being an extremely drunk James taking out a load of lighting with his ridiculous height whilst onstage). I’ll try and do this vaguely chronologically. But I’m so drunk most of the time I’m not even sure how old I am, never mind the order of things that happened over the last few months.
So we played our EP Launch at the library, which we all thought went pretty great. We played the songs well, sold quite a few tickets. We did this sweet deal where you get a ticket, EP and a t-shirt for £10, which seemed to go down well. Only to have it ruined in the critics eyes by our on stage 'antics’ I was extremely loud onstage into the microphones, hurling t-shirts at people and generally making a bit of an ass out of myself. Cain made a bit of a whoops by saying we don’t care if anyone buys a CD or not. Which is probably for the best being as we didn’t sell a SINGLE ONE. Although I personally think it’s because we sold them all to people with the tickets before the gig! But it still doesn’t look great. So all in all what was in itself one of our better performances was tarnished by a few extremely minor things which were all the reviewers focused on!
We went a little quiet after that as we locked ourselves in the studio again to get a version of our new single 'In Circles’ ready enough to shoot the video to! We had a great time doing this. We teamed up with filmmaker Alec Birkbeck who worked so hard with us to get a product that we were all really happy with and I think I speak for everyone in the band when I say I can’t wait for you guys to see this. The song itself is obviously awesome, it’s one Cain has been sitting on for a long time and we’ve taken it and a band and somehow made it even better than it was when Cain demoed it out. We’ve been playing it for a while so if you’ve come and seen us you’ll have heard it in some form or another. We’re constantly changing and adapting our live set and we like to 'road test’ songs, so you may have heard a few iterations of quite a few songs!
So going through this we launched ourselves into the next run of gigs. I’m not going to go over all these in too much detail, as they were pretty standard gigs, we had some great experiences and some big fuck ups. We had our first inevitable synth death at our first London gig, which was great. George’s computer (through no fault of his own) completely just packed up on us mid set. So we launched into a synth-free version of In Circles while he sorted it out and everything went smoothly. We had a pretty frustrating incident of a sound engineer (who will obviously not be named) off dancing with a girl in the middle of our set when the bass completely cut out for a while and Cain had to stop singing and shout at him to get him to come and fix the problem. Which was obviously great fun.
We’ve recently placed 3 new songs (with another two on the cusp of completion) into our live set and it has really transformed us as a band. The last 3 gigs we’ve played we have absolutely destroyed and featured on a few acoustic session/radio appearances that have gone really well. Keep up with us on our social media if you want to hear more of these as we’re lining a few up!
We’re sorting out the release of 'In Circles’ now. Slated for release in July, and lining up recording time to get another 7 tracks down to be release across 2 ep’s at the end of the summer and during the winter sometime. These will coincide with a tour in December, which is also being organised.
Recorded music is, in my opinion, the most incredible creation i’ve ever known. It’s nothing short of magic, an area where music meets physics, electronics, computer science and psychology. Culminating in a few minutes of audio that has the power to take us all somewhere that transcends emotion. It is a truly powerful thing.
I find it difficult to pinpoint my first love of a musical recording. I remember waking up every morning as a kid to my older brother blasting ‘Sgt. Peppers’ as he got ready for school. I remember my Dad waking the same (and incredibly moody in the morning) brother with the start of Pink Floyd’s 'Time’. The first record I truly had that was mine was 'Is This It’ by The Strokes (I think). But none of that is particularly important aside from the fact that without all those tiny moments and experiences I probably wouldn’t be sat here writing this right now.
It’s hard to point out one exact moment that defined your entire life from that moment on but I remember mine as if it were burned into my memory. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I was in my older brothers room, I don’t know why. I was probably being a dick (I used to do that a lot). Pouring water on his bed perhaps? Sometimes I used to spray furniture polish all over his braces, it’s a good thing he didn’t wear them… But I was in there and I saw a guitar in the corner, that my Dad had gotten for my Mum for one of their wedding anniversaries. A crappy 10 year old Epiphone with strings that were (possibly literally) older than me. I remember just picking it up and asking Mum if I could learn to play it. She went and dug out some of those 'teach yourself acoustic guitar’ books that every household inexplicably has whether there are musical instruments present or not, and off I went!
I ask myself often why I didn’t give up, I couldn’t even press the strings down to the fretboard because I was so small and it was so poorly set up. My young mind rationalised this into; 'Well it must be MEANT to be like that, the chord must be made up of the strings i’m not blocking with my fingers!’ conveniently omitting the presence of frets and that fact that my pitiful rendition of 'House of the Rising Sun’ didn’t sound anything like the original (or any other) version. But for some reason I persevered. There was another period where I thought that guitar tab was meant to be played one line at a time. So I would play the high e string of a 'block’ of tab, then the B, G, D, A and E, before moving on to the next bit. I realised there was a problem when I was my Mum's face when I told her what I was playing as meant to be 'By The Way’. I asked around and realised my foolishness.
I eventually learnt how to hold down the strings and the other key milestones, learnt to play 'Comfortably Numb’, learnt to play 'The Song Remains The Same’ and carried on like this till I was smashing out Paul Gilbert and Joe Satriani.
I remember one night I had another one of those 'moments’. I downloaded a version of Audacity and was recording a cover of (all the guitars from) 'Seize the Day’ by Avenged Sevenfold (don’t judge me I was 15). Obviously it was awesome and I was having a great time trying to match all the guitar tones and panning positions and levels (again, I was 15, fuck off). I remember, again weirdly clearly considering I’m viewing this portion of my life through a weed tinted haze, thinking, “I wish I could do this as a job.” From that day onwards I had a plan. I enrolled in college not soon after and took all the subjects needed to take a music tech course at Uni. I somehow managed to scrape together the grades required whilst doing enough drugs to kill a small elephant every weekend, got into Uni and managed to get myself sorted out enough to get onto a work placement at Peak Studios.
I remember coming in for my interview and being interviewed by none other than James 'The Grove’ Grover. (Our bassist) A baby faced Cain Cookson was sat in the office (We were briefly introduced). George then started later that year. The band was formed in the front of Cain’s car on the way to pick a bunch of the new interns up from hospital after an EXTREMELY minor car crash. They all got compensation and we were all jealous.
So I guess I should probably get to the point of this rambling, vaguely autobiographic introduction. The point being I am masses’ self proclaimed recording nerd. Cut me and I bleed stereo microphone techniques and eq presets. I will be making a series of blogs/videos and whatnot about how we went around recording and mixing our music, seeing as we did it all ourselves and we’re very proud of it. You should poke your nose in if you’re into all this stuff. You might even learn a thing or two.
Ableton was always a piece of software that I had been meaning to get my head around; I’ve seen people do some incredible stuff with it in a live context, and that definitely appealed to the synthesist in me. So when this opportunity to be in a band as a synth player came along, I knew that Ableton was the route I needed to take to be able to get the most creative freedom whilst playing live.
For those of you who don’t know, Ableton allows you to do pretty much anything you can think of in a live capacity, but for now (as I’m still learning the full extent of the software, how to play the keyboard and also how to sing properly) I simply use it to trigger various pre-recorded sounds and play my synth parts live over the top.
As it stands, the masses Ableton Live set looks like the picture at the top. It looks fairly complicated, but is actually a lot simpler than it seems. Basically, the set list goes from top to bottom, with the colours denoting different songs. The column on the far right denotes the different songs and their respective sections, with the white cells separating the songs for easier differentiation. One row of cells indicates one section of a song, so each song is split up into its component sections (verse 1, chorus 1, middle eight, etc) and then all the different instruments in the song are split up into various columns going from left to right (percussion, synth pads, fx, etc). The section at the bottom of the screen is the mixer section, where I can control the various levels of all the instruments and my synth parts, although this is rarely needed as all the elements are mixed accordingly before they are placed in this session. There are also a few hidden sections for various other features, such as a panel that tells me where I’m sending all of the tracks and what effects are in use.
The way that I control the software at the moment is that I use pads located on the top right of my keyboard (pictured below) to tell Ableton to play the different sections of the songs, which then triggers the various instrument parts to play. In future, I would like to be able to manipulate these instrument parts on the fly (triggering reverbs, effects and various amounts of fuckery), but for the meantime I’m just concentrating on playing the synths live.
To play live, I use the M-Audio Axiom 49 (pictured above), a 49-key keyboard with 9 faders, 8 endless rotary encoders and 8 drum pads. Now the really difficult part was getting this to work with Ableton the way that I wanted, and it is still a source of great frustration and endless adjustment (which will become the source of inspiration for this forthcoming series of articles). At the moment, 7 of the faders pictured are mapped to the volumes for the various synths I actually play live, with the other two being the volume for the reverb bus and the master output level. Over on the right-hand side, another 7 of the rotary encoders (knobs) are mapped to send a certain amount of each synth to the reverb bus, to make some huge and possibly horrible mess for the louder sections. On the far right, only 4 of the drum pads are being used at the moment to navigate my way through the backing track and trigger each section. I chose to use the drum pads for these over the usual transport buttons located under the encoders (play, stop, fast-forward, etc) as these were going to be buttons I needed to push very regularly and whilst playing the synths and singing at the same time, so I opted for the biggest buttons on the keyboard. This is a very primitive setup at the moment, and I hope to expand it’s potential in the future as I learn more about both the keyboard and Ableton itself.
Now onto the various amounts of routing. At the moment I use an Edirol FA-66 audio interface (pictured above) to output all of my sound. This hooks up to my laptop and Ableton to give me a total of 4 outputs, all of which are currently being used. The first output is for the backing track, which consists of the instruments in the songs that I don’t play live and just trigger from the software. The second output is purely devoted to the synths that I do play live. The reason for splitting these two up is that it gives the sound engineer at the gig more freedom if he needs to mix it in a certain way. I always try and match the levels of synths with that of the backing track so that they mix well together, but it’s always good to have a flexible set-up on your end as you never really know what the situation is going to be like at a gig venue before getting there.
The third and fourth outputs are dedicated to a monitoring feed for me and John (our drummer), so we can both hear the backing track when we play live in our earphones that we wear onstage. The way this works is that within Ableton I have set up two different auxiliary buses, where I can send various parts of the backing track at different volumes to create two different feeds depending on what each person wants to hear in their earphones. For instance, John mainly wants to hear the click track so he can keep in time, and in turn keep the rest of us in time (as it stands no one else gets a feed from my laptop, so we all rely on keeping to John’s rhythm to keep us in time with the backing track - fortunately he’s a pretty good drummer and has no problem playing along to a click track). This differs with my feed, where I mostly want to hear the synths I’m playing and some of the backing track so I can keep track of where we are in the song.
In order to hear what I’m playing through my on-stage earphones, I use the Samson S-Monitor headphone amp. This accepts the feed I provide from Ableton through a normal jack cable, and has the added bonus of being able to provide me with a feed of my vocals as well if I plug the microphone on stage into it. This allows me to make sure I’m singing in tune by being able to hear the backing track and my own vocals clearly, giving me plenty of peace of mind. Saying this, I have encountered a problem when playing live where it is fairly hard to hear myself through the earphones, and I usually just end up being able to hear Johns drums coming through my microphone and subsequently into my monitoring feed. This is most likely as a result of always being placed next to our drummer when playing live rather than a shortcoming with the hardware (being a five-piece band playing in small venues means there’s never a lot of space on stage, and as the member that has to move around the least, I’m often placed out of the way in the back, which of course is by the drum kit).
In the future, I hope to expand this setup so that every member of the band can get their own personalised monitoring feed from my laptop. Being able to hear all the elements is critical to our band members during a live show, as there are times when we are solely relying on the backing track to keep us in key when singing, and also for audio cues for the next sections. This wouldn’t normally be a problem in the right kind of venue, but being a small band playing at small venues can mean there is often a less than idealistic monitoring setup, so occasionally one of us will barely be able to hear an important part that could drastically effect the outcome of the live show.
Oh and BTW, all masses. music available on iTunes and Apple Music:
http://itunes.masses.band
And all the other usual places:
http://masses.band
http://www.facebook.com/thisismasses
http://www.twitter.com/thisismasses
http://www.soundcloud.com/thisismasses
http://www.thisismasses.tumblr.com
http://www.thisismasses.bandcamp.com
http://www.instagram.com/thisismasses
Ok to celebrate the release of our first music video, "Waiting", I'm going to write a post listing everything I know about how to make a good DIY music video, with no budget and minimal experience of cinematography! But first a rundown of how it went with this particular video.
I've made around 5 - 10 music videos for various bands and projects I've been involved with (to varying standards of quality and depending on what you count as a music video).... The "Waiting" video is probably not the best technically but I’d say it's certainly the boldest and most effective so far.
Our criteria were that we needed the concept to be:
- easy and quick to film with minimal equipment and no budget
- easy and quick to edit (we had a busy schedule)
- quirky and eye-catching, something a bit different with possible viral appeal.
So the initial concept we settled on was to be like a living painting, a stark non-moving image of the band while the world passes them (us) by. Initially we wanted to film it on a couch in a field in the rain, but our schedules and lack of van (for couch transport) forced us to reconsider. We ended up filming in the carpark outside Peak Studios, on plastic folding chairs at night... This gave a more urban nonchalant feel than the bleak Yorkshire countryside in the winter rain would have, but either way it works with the song so it wasn't too big of a compromise.
So we sat almost motionless in the biting cold for 30 minutes, lit by car headlights against the cityscape backdrop, then time-altered the footage to match the pacing of the song. It was filmed in one shot so the editing only took around 2-3 hrs, rather than the days a normal video would take to edit... This is one of the major benefits of any one-shot concept.
However there were two major problems to solve after that point:
1) the footage was very noisy and blurry at full size (1080p)... I had to de-noise then sharpen it and reduce the footage to 720p to make it useable. Then I went for a very stylised high-contrast colour correction, and a jerky lo-fi type video effect to further reduce the noticeability of the grainy footage and to give the stylish feel I wanted.
2) despite the artistically bold concept, we had to admit that the lack of movement in the video was not bringing out the best in the song... We agreed to overlay the lyrics, in a brash way, not in the aim of deliberately making a 'lyric video' but just as a way to add punch and energy to the visuals, and to define the different sections of the song more clearly. I actually think the text overlay make the image even stronger and more visually striking, so it was kind of a happy accident that it turned out this way.
So that's the case study - in the next post I'll give my top tips on making DIY music videos according to what I've learned from my own experiences.
Oh and BTW, all masses. music available on iTunes and Apple Music:
http://itunes.masses.band
And streaming on Spotify:
http://spotify.masses.band
And all the other usual places:
http://masses.band
http://www.facebook.com/thisismasses
http://www.twitter.com/thisismasses
http://www.soundcloud.com/thisismasses
http://www.thisismasses.tumblr.com
http://www.thisismasses.bandcamp.com
http://www.instagram.com/thisismasses
The conclusion to the saga of Cuban Keith! I've already explained the story behind all this in the previous post, so I'll talk briefly about the design side of making this artwork.
Thematically the 3 pieces of artwork (Dive, Waiting, and I Couldn't Be Happier) are deliberately consistent(ish), not just in terms of narrative but also in "look". Generally I like the look of hi-res photography used in music-related artwork, and I thought this was a good starting point for the first masses record... I wanted to use strong eye-catching images, and ones that were colourful but in a non-too-happy way, for reasons of both marketing and art.
This photo, like the last, was shot by my brother on a trip to Cuba, and it always stood out to me as one of the most striking from that collection of his. Thinking about it now, I guess it always subconsciously reminded me of that scene near the start of 28 Days Later where the guy is walking through a deserted London. I'd been wanting to use this photo as an album cover for a few years, but never until now found the right project that suited it.
Besides the photos tying together, the design around the photos is meant to be consistent... Of course we have our standard logo on all 3 covers, then in the same font (I think) and the same formatting we have the song titles.
Every time I make any cover art, my default place to put the artist name and title is in one of the corners, usually whichever corner is most sparse due to the image used... I'd say this is a good baseline, you can't really go wrong but the only issue is that it's quite conservative. In this case that was good as it let the photos speak for themselves. There's very few critical decisions you make when creating cover art... As long as the result is eye-catching nothing else really matters too much.
One other thing is that I always like t-shirt designs that use the album cover, so we made the limited edition Bridge tee to go with this release... 50 in black that have almost all sold out now, then we'll do 50 in white pretty soon, and then it'll be time for our next release and a new t-shirt design...
Get em snapped up while stocks last!
I suppose I like to be very literal, but in a clever way... Yes the song is called Waiting and the cover art is a picture of a guy waiting, but it goes a lot deeper than that!
At the time our first single Dive was released, the plan was to include Dive on our debut EP and for Waiting to be the second single from the record. (This plan eventually changed but anyway...) We wanted all our artwork to be thematic, so each time we release an EP/LP all the artwork for the singles will relate to the main album cover. The point with this cover is that there's a subtle storyline running from the Dive cover, to this and then to the cover for the EP.
The story (although very nebulous) is that of our fictional anti-hero Cuban Keith, and his struggle to come to terms with the way his life has turned out… Yeah he appears to be waiting, but he’s also reconsidering his life choices… he’s talked himself down off the ledge from the Dive artwork, and now he’s thinking what’s left for him to do. In the next installment (the EP cover) we see him riding alone off into the distance to start a new life somewhere else.
It starts very bleak and dark, fitting the mood of those songs, but the story ends with a message of hope, reiterated by the EP title "I Couldn't Be Happier". I can't speak for Keith personally(!), but it's my assumption that he's happy because he's realised that all the stress in his life was caused by other people, and if he breaks ties with all these people he can just be content to be himself alone.
To be honest the narrative was an afterthought of this cover and mainly served to tie it to the next, helping us pick a photo for the EP art. When I first made this cover I was half joking - it amused me to make an anonymous old man the centrepiece! But when we saw it finished, we agreed that the stunning level of detail captured within the photo (taken by my brother in Cuba), gave the image a compelling humanity when paired with the word "waiting", and we thought it would be a strong image for the cover art.
When we later imagined up the story, it was a fitting echo of the misanthropic sentiments behind the record, so it seemed to me quite poignant and noteworthy enough to explain here! Hope you agree...
