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I recently finished recording bass tracks for some friends of mine. I'm the current bass player for this band, but only until they find a replacement for the guy that they fired.

 

Give it a listen and post your honest opinions of the material. Be as brutally honest as you care to be, I have plenty of opinions about this band's material and what they should/shouldn't be doing. To put it bluntly, you're most certainly not going to offend me.

 

Six song sampler! - it's like a deli tray of music.

 

Late September Dogs offical page

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The bass and drums are the BEST PART! :D Good job on the tracks, B-Naz! The production and mix sound good. I heard the full songs last week, and I think you already know how I feel about the material. ;)

 

But for other readers' benefit, I will just say that honestly, the songs don't do a whole heck of a lot for me personally. I'm sure a lot of people would dig it, but from a critical perspective, I don't hear a lot of hooks or good melodies there, which is kinda important if you want people to like your music.

 

I might also add that the drummer on the tracks is my husband and Half Zaftig drummer Pete. ;):cool:

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YAH!!!...GREAT STUFF!!

 

....very slick!!....the lead singer reminds me of a cross between Pat Benatar and Alanis Morissette...and you've got a solid backbone goin' on!!!.......Keep tearin' it up!!!

 

Cheers!

:thu::thu::thu:

Have you hugged your bass today?
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Originally posted by LizzyD:

But for other readers' benefit, I will just say that honestly, the songs don't do a whole heck of a lot for me personally. I'm sure a lot of people would dig it, but from a critical perspective, I don't hear a lot of hooks or good melodies there, which is kinda important if you want people to like your music.

Yep. There is a severe lack of something to latch onto in most of their music. Some of the discarded guitar tracks from this project were embarassingly bad attempts to add a hook or melody to the already 'complete' songs. I'm glad the guy mixing the album had the same thoughts that I did about those particular tracks.

 

Originally posted by LizzyD:

I might also add that the drummer on the tracks is my husband and Half Zaftig drummer Pete. ;):cool:

I can't believe I didn't mention something about that in the original post. Oops.

 

Yes kids, this album features the Half Zaftig rhythm section on loan. Pete and I laid down our parts nearly 6 months apart and at the beginning of the project I wasn't slated to be the bass player. Ah, how the world turns.

 

The complete story, for those who might be interested in the gory details and whatnot:

 

Let's go back to, well, say mid 2002. Sometime in late 2001/early 2002 I was the bass player for Late September Dogs. I had informed them 6 months prior to the fateful evening I'm going to describe below that I wanted out of the band. I wasn't the right player for them. Unlike the rest of the band who were commited to doing ANYTHING it took to get all rich and famous; I had a house payment to make and a very good day job. I wasn't going to walk away from that to do a self-funded tour of the country with hopes of landing that big record deal. I didn't want to be the element holding them back from their aspirations of rock stardom.

 

So 6 months come and go. Still no real solid bass players have auditioned for the band. I'm at every bass player audition to listen and give my opinions to the band after the victim, err, person auditioning left. Most of the people that auditioned were 'bass holders' as opposed to 'bass players'. By this time, I'm getting rather sick of the 2-3 night a week rehearsal schedule for a project I want to get out of as soon as possible. As fate would have it, the guy who took over for me was in the audience the night of my last show with them. He came to check out the band after his rather mediocre audtion that he had a few nights prior. Well, after the set, the lead guitar player and I exchanged some words and I said, "this was my last show, I'm f*&king done." Hardly one of my prouder moments. This was mid 2002. They hired New Guy (I'm not using his real name on purpose) by default, because they had shows booked and they needed a bass player immediately. The lead guitar player and I talked about a week later and we remain friends to this day. Sometimes you say stupid s**t that you don't mean in the heat of the moment, ya know?

 

Dig, so I go and see them a few times with New Guy playing bass. New Guy was, uhh, yeah. I didn't agree with his note selection and basically his overall approach to the songs so much. We'll leave it at that.

 

Let's remove a bunch of stuff and fast forward to September of 2003. The band wants to record a CD. They don't have a drummer now, because the guy that was playing with them left for the same reasons I did. Through some interesting events, Half Zaftig uber-drummer Pete gets a call from Late September Dogs inquiring about his services to layeth down some drum tracks for their album. He agrees and they spend a long weekend in a local studio laying down drum tracks for 9 songs. Pete is a monster.

 

This is where things get interesting for those of you who were sleeping up till this point. Instead of spending more money on a real studio, New Guy and the lead guitar player have home studios setup; lead guitar player has a Sonar setup and New Guy has the ProTools Digi001. The idea is that all the guitars, keyboards and vocals will be recorded at lead guitar players house and New Guy will do bass tracks at his place.

 

Right now, it's the last week of September or the first week of October, no one can really remember for sure. New Guy takes a copy of all the drum tracks home and starts working on recording bass tracks. The rest of the band waits for the bass tracks to get completed before recording anything else. November passes... December.. January.. still no bass tracks. Sometime in early March, New Guy shows up to rehearsal with the long awaited and much anticipated and other words that end in 'ted' completed bass tracks. Yay! It only took him 5 months to record 9 songs! These certainly must be the best bass tracks ever with that sort of time invested in them. The band listened to them. Their collective response was, "We waiting 5 months for THIS?!??!"

 

They phoned me up and asked if I could record bass notesessessses for their album and that they were firing New Guy. I told them I'd be glad to do them and to get me the files so I could start working on it right away. For reasons unknown to me, it took nearly 3 weeks for them to fire New Guy and then get me the files. Oh well. The timeframe they gave me was, "anything faster than 5 months". I informed them that wouldn't be a problem.

 

I recorded everything over a weekend, with the exception of the song "Unmade" which took me close to three weeks to get done. I struggled with writing a part for that song that I liked forever. I had something like 30 tracks of bass ideas recorded by the time I came up with what is going to be on the album. Eventually I'll go into painfully drawn out detail about the recording of this album over at my website.

 

In case you were wondering, New Guy's bass tracks were on there when I got the files. I didn't agree with his note selection and basically his overall approach to the songs so much.

 

There you have it. The sorted tale of how Pete and I wound up on this album together. The whole recording process of this album was a comedy of errors and continues to be even now. I really hope everything works out in the end for these guys. They are all good players and their songs are listenable. They want to be rock stars so bad and there isn't any reason why they shouldn't.

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Hey Bump! Ain't music just the wackiest business :D

 

Sounds good man. I have to admit that it sounds like you get drowned out when the guitars come in. But I am listening on computer monitors so take that with a grain of salt.

 

Cheers

Nothing is as it seems but everything is exactly what it is - B. Banzai

 

Life is what happens while you are busy playing in bands.

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I love this girl's voice and the band can clearly play the ass of most of the bands selling lots of units at the moment.

 

I'm not sure that in this ultra-commercial rock market that the tunes are hooky enough to really grab attention on a first radio play (or first play in an A&R office). Also I'd love to hear the girl really rip into some of the louder tunes. (Make her drink four cups of strong coffee and listen to half an hour of Rage Against The Machine before she cuts her vocals.)

Free your mind and your ass will follow.
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