I still keep in touch with the bassist and the drummer. The singer and I seem to have had a falling out. Seems he and his girlfriend were insulted by the fact when my wife and I got married they were only invited to the reception...but then 90% of our family and friends were in the same boat.

We were married in a court room by a judge and only allowed a limited number of guests. By the time all the immediate family was invited there was only room for us to have one friend there...since he was my friend and his girlfriend was my wife's friend we didn't feel it was fair to invite one and not the other to the ceramony and opted for another of our long time friends who was single....seems even though we explained that we only had room for one person and didn't feel it was fair to invite one half of a couple and tell the other they couldn't come. They obviously didn't see it that way and haven't spoken to us in 4 years.

The way I see it is if they can't understand we were only allowed limited people in the courtroom and family took priority over friends. The only reason we didn't invite them to the actual ceramony was because we didn't want to choose one or the other and risk causing friction between him and his girlfriend. They obviously weren't as true friends as we'd thought, because true friends wouldn't have stopped talking to us when we were trying to avoid having them fighting over which of them would go since there wasn't room for both.

The bassist lives just a short distance from me and we occasionally get together for a few drinks; and the drummer is in Korea teaching English and returns to Canada every few years to visit.

I admit, the guitars are slightly out of tune...I probably didn't have the patience to keep rechecking the tuning after every take. Looking back, I should have been a bit more anal about that; but I don't find it's that bad...it doesn't seem to ruin it.

Kinda like on another song I'll be eventually posting later, the drummer screws up but we didn't bother fixing it. He couldn't use a click track and was playing to a dummy track of the guitars and vocals and said he couldn't get the headphones loud enough to hear clearly over his drums. I recorded the guitars on the dummy track to a click track though and then went back and redid my guitars they way I wanted them to sound.

Dont get me wrong bud, I adored that track. I'm too used to bloody iComp where everything seems so perfect, yet is wrong. I dunno, personally I got a few kicks up the ass on here, and 99.9% of them helped, I feel this is the greatest place to post tracks because although it may or may not seem to be harsh or whatever, its usually only advice to make something better.


Better that than go to iComp and feel like everything you do is so good, when deep down you know yourself that there are bits need sorting. I hope this sort of explains where I was coming from with my comment.

You had a registry office wedding? I'm interested as myself and Dee dont want fuss, sure she would love the whole 9 yards, but we both feel that a quiet ceremony would suit us, because we are quiet-ish (haha) and personal sort of people. No mess, no fuss, just get things done.

Man, I loved this song, its good musically and lyrically. The drummer sang? Not too bad dude, could have been worse, he could have been Ringo!!! We all live in a yellow submarine!? Exactly. Fuck'n hell.

It needs a tightening up TDS, but thats it, nothing more or nothing less. I could say that about some of my stuff but a lot of it actually needs a lot of input, as I said, this doesnt, just some minor tweaks.


All in all I like it dude.


EDIT: I had to come back to this comment, as I just heard the worst piece of recorded music since the Spice Girls on iComp, yet it has 5 stars and some great comments. WTF, WTF, WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why do we even bother????

it's all good FDM. I actually appreciate that someone can point out something that could be fixed, no matter how minor it might seem. No offense was taken. I welcome it...besides these recordings are over 10 years old now; I can look back objectively on them and recognizing that my knowledge of how to do things has grown; I feel I could definately produce a superior recording with the right tools and time to learn how to implement them.

Thanks by the way for the props on how the song is written. By the time this was recorded, the drummer, bassist and myself had played the song for about 3 years starting with our previous band; so we had lots of time to work at the arrangement, which for the most part had been unchanged from the time of our first gig together to this point...we just added a bunch of stuff while recording like all the extra guitars.

I remember that I composed the harmony lines for the solo on the day we recorded them by writing out the main solo in tab form, then I chose what parts to harmonize and worked out the parts on paper. It took about 2 hours of composing and about 4 passes to get the version heard on the recording.

As for the wedding:

If you don't want all the fuss, the registry wedding is the way to go. But if you plan to have some form of reception, there's no such thing as small.
We planned on having maybe 30 people at the restaurant with us and it ended up to be 100.

For us, we didn't have the money to have a big wedding...those attending our reception also had to pay their own meal. In fairness to them, we requested that nobody bring gifts as we already had everything we needed and no space for trinkets (not that they listened, but whatever) We were together for some time before getting engaged but the wedding itself was a bit rushed since shortly after our engagement my father-in-law was diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzhiemers disease and my father was diagnosed with cancer. We felt it was best to go small and be able to have them both at the wedding than it was to make a big production of it.

I might eventually redo this one and do it all myself...of course right now I only have a Tascam US-122L interface for my pc to work with and no mics yet. I hate how my guitar sounds going direct...maybe when I get my Traynor YCS50 head, the speaker compensated line out will make enough improvement that I can wait for an instrument mic. Eventually I hope to get a decent condenser mic for vocals and maybe a drum machine and midi keyboard. I can rent or borrow a bass from someone (the bassist from the band currently has no instruments...he's apparently been struggling financially and sold all his gear).

No offense to my old drummer, but I never liked his voice much and he's the guy singing the lead on this one...if I had it my way the band's actual lead vocalist would have sang the song and we would have tried to get a decent backing vocal out of the drummer which could have either been burried in the mix or left out completely if we weren't happy with it.

Some of the other stuff I'll be posting later has Serge singing the lead. But most of what he doesn't sing on still has it's moments in the other instruments.

As for the production of these recordings. I think if we had proper mics it would have made a huge difference. All the instruments and the vocals were recorded with the same 4 dynamic mics we used for our vocals during gigs. They were great live mics but not designed for studio applications. Also the 8 track console wasn't the most user friendly thing when you started layering tracks like we did. It we could only use 4 tracks simultaneously and had 8 virtual tracks per track. Some of the songs I'll be posting later use close to 24 tracks of instruments. The 8 track wasn't designed for such an ambitious recording project but we made due with what we had. Also, as mentioned with my feeling that I could get better guitar tones, a better understanding of how to get separation in the mix between instruments by manipulating the EQ and placement in the stereo field compared to back then would probably make a huge difference.

I'll see what I can do...If there's no option on the hosting site to allow downloads, I'll look up some place that does when I get time.

Sorry Steve,

I'm at work right now and don't think I have a copy of the files with me, but if I don't have it anywhere I'll send you a copy when I get the chance.

if I remember right, it was Poet's Lore I sent you wasn't it?

funny how that one came about... we jammed on those 2 chord progressions the day before we recorded our demo and then decided to jam on it some more when we got into the studio and got really frustrated with one of our more challenging songs. This was the only take on the instruments and totally off the cuff.

Later we learned a few parts off the recording in addition to the progression and then used it as a way of filling space when we didn't have enough music to fill the set (say when we were expected to play more than 2 hours or when another group booked to play with us didn't show). It was constantly evolving...maybe sometime I'll post all the different recordings I've got of this song together for comparison.

Sometimes the difference was subtle, sometimes it's very different. This came about at a time where I'd been studying Jazz for about a year and was finally starting to make sense of a lot of the theory and concepts that my guitar instructor had been showing me. It was the first time I'd played anything with a jazzy sound or feel without a conscious effort and truly improvising my solos. I guess not so much that it took so long to understand it, but this was the point where I was comfortable enough to play that way without forcing it...without thinking about it and letting the music flow out of me.

I've got another song I'll post later called Painted Smiles that's basically my first solo effort...I wrote the song completely on my own, sang the lead vocal and all guitars, except for bass which I showed the bassist what I imagined for that part and he bassed his part on that. The solos are all improvised and there is an acoustic solo as the main guitar solo... tried using a distorted electric tone and it just didn't work no matter how much I tried and when I tried the acoustic it just clicked.

I'll look into that farlow...seems lots of people have compatability issues with whatever media player the host site I'm using is supporting.

I might need to get a different host.

Steve Aguilar, the 90's is primarily what was influencing the band at that time, with some influences from the 60's through to the 80's thrown in for good measure... most of the recordings I'll be posting in the next while are from 1997 to 2001; so you'll basically get that 90's sound to some degree.

Poet's Lore was recorded in 1999 and I find it's got some of that 90's sound, but has a very strong Doors meets Santana kind of vibe.

Some of the tracks I'm loading later are during the 7 String fad...which by the way, I'd still use the 7 String if I hadn't needed to sell off my excess gear when I stopped doing the band thing and needed cash for when I decided to go to college. I didn't save the 7 string for original works excusively and sometimes used it on songs that weren't written for 7 string, like Alice Cooper's Long Way To Go.

Maybe someday I'll pick up a cheap 7 string somewhere... the Dean I used to have back then was amazing for the price I paid. $300 Canadian, Grover Tuners, Tunomatic style bridge with strings thru the body, not sure what the pickups were, but they were impressive for stock pickups in that price range. The body was basswood and the pickups were direct mounted to the body with a bolt-on maple neck and rosewood fingerboard. If I stumble across a 7 string for around the same price that compares to this thing in terms of sound and feel, I might just grab it