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TweedBlog: the Tangleweed blog
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The blog was started by the Chicago-based acoustic Americana group Tangleweed to document their activities as working musicians. It has since expanded its mission to help engender greater interest and understanding of American vernacular music. The blog i
Recent Posts Tagged With 'recordingblog'
More Merry Christmas, from the Kennett Brothers (repost)
Today’s post is more reposty goodness for the holiday season. Enjoy Here’s another song from the Kennett Brothers’ long out of print and now ridiculously pricey Xmas CD, Santa is Real. This time, it’s the Kennett’s perfo...
Hot mastering action
It’s difficult to convey with words the excitement of listening to your new record 37 times in a row and deciding whether the break between the first and second tracks should be an eighth of a second longer. This picture will have to suffice. ...
Masters of our domain
We finished mastering the new CD tonight. Billy, Paul, and I worked with Mike Hagler to sequence the album and burn the master. The masters sound natural, not the headache-inducing square-wave distorted stuff that’s the norm nowadays. Must slee...
Good interview with Bob Weston on mastering
I stumbled across this last night while preparing to attend tonight’s mastering session for our 3rd CD, Most Folk Heroes Started as Criminals. We like Bob Weston a lot. He engineered our first CD, and has recently opened a mastering studio in C...
The new record will be called…
…Most Folk Heroes Started as Criminals We’re mastering it tomorrow (Thursday) night with Mike Hagler at King Size in Chicago. Unless something changes over the next 24 hours, here’s the track list and sequence: Side 1: Sandy River ...
Naming tracks for an unnamed CD
We’re in the home stretch for our as-yet-untitled 3rd CD. Here’s the probable track list: California Short Life of Trouble The Logjam Sandy River Belle Pain in My Heart Trishanku’s Heaven The Takeup Reel/ Cold Frosty Morning/ Grey ...
Quick studio postmortem
We had a hugely productive day yesterday at King Size, pushing our as-yet-untitled third CD closer to the finish line. We were also honored to have the great photographer Paul Natkin join us for a quick photo shoot. More later....
Don’t drum and drive
This just popped up on YouTube yesterday–a video of an anonymous drummer playing along to our first CD while driving the streets of Chicago. If the author would like to play some steering wheel with us sometime, he should drop us a line. The...
Fun with drunken Irish Karaoke
Here’s a fun little artifact from the Where You Been So Long sessions: a version of the Leaving of Liverpool (MP3) without vocals. When we record our tunes, we usually do the instrumental tracks as a group, and then overdub vocals. We had done ...
Shots from last Sunday’s session
Work on our third CD is progressing nicely. Here are a few shots from our session last Sunday, by the author of this post, with a non-cameraphone camera. We tracked six songs, so we have basic tracks for 15 songs. Work on overdubs will begin next wee...
Studio postmortem
We had a remarkably productive session with Mike at King Size yesterday. We cut six (!) tunes, far more than we had expected. In all, we have basic tracks for 15 tunes. We’ll take stock of what we have over the next few weeks and see what will ...
Back to the studio
We’re heading back to King Size this afternoon to cut more tracks with Mike. We have a couple tracks that we want to cut for sure, and a couple that we’ll take a crack at if we’re feeling good. I just had a set of the World’s ...
Merry Christmas from the Kennett Brothers, part II (repost)
Today’s post is more reposty goodness for the holiday season. Enjoy Here’s another song from the Kennett Brothers’ long out of print and now ridiculously pricey Xmas CD, Santa is Real. This time, it’s the Kennett’s perfo...
Merry Christmas from the Kennett Brothers (repost)
This is a repost of a post I wrote last year. Enjoy, while I take the rest of the day off. Santa is Real, the Christmas record my old band the Kennett Brothers put together, is long out-of-print, and, thanks to the efforts of obsessive Wilco completi...
Studio shots from Saturday’s session
Here are a couple blur-ific camera phone shots from our last session at King Size. Click to see a larger version. My camera phone doesn’t take especially good pictures in low light, so, save the shot of hot apple-eating action with Billy below,...
Quick studio postmortem
We had a good day today recording with Mike Hagler at King Size, though both Mike and our banjo player Ryan Fisher were feeling poorly. We tracked five songs, and added some overdubs to the tunes we tracked last time. The song list: The Takeup Reel/...
The Loudness War
Here’s a nice, concise demonstration of the reduced dynamic range in contemporary CDs, a good companion to the article Scott posted earlier in the week (how loud is your band’s new CD?). I grew up with LPs. I miss dynamics. We’re...
How ‘LOUD’ is your band’s new cd? Interesting Mastering article
Here’s a link to a very interesting article about cd-mastering and the overall trend towards GETTIN’ LOUD in the age of the ipod-shuffle, courtesy of Chicago Mastering Service. Maybe I’ll do a little analysis of some Tangleweed wav-...
