Reminder:

The last RedCam Radio show will air next Sunday, December 5th at 12pm PST. Make sure you tune in! I’m putting together THE most awesome playlist ever created (in my opinion) so that we can go out with a bang! Call (503) 768-7104 if you have any requests- I’d be happy to play your favorite song for you.

Catch ya then! And thanks for listening to RedCam <3

-Marli

RedCam Radio is back! Tune in Sundays from 12-2pm PST to hear the best music around. I’ll be playing everything from T.I. to Taylor Swift to Gaga. Check out on-air interviews with your favorite bands and concert ticket giveaways as well!

The first airing is this Sunday, September 19th at 12pm PST. Tune at www.klcradio.net

-M

By the way, how awesome was the 2010 Video Music Awards last night? The performances by Usher, Taylor Swift, and of course, BIEBEZ were amazing. And did you see Lady Gaga win Video of the Year? (surprised? yeah right! I voted for her) If you did not see her acceptance speech check it out below. Can’t wait to hear “Born This Way” next year! Ah, at least MTV did one thing right this year…

AND, Meridene is giving away their second album single “Parade Of Fools”: http://www.ambledown.com/mp3/meridene_paradeoffools.mp3

Make sure you check out the amazing tour diaries they did for RedCam below!

]]> http://redcammagazine.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/meridenes-sophomore-record-available-for-pre-order-now-free-download/feed/ 0 RedCam http://redcammagazine.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/meridene-tour-blog/ http://redcammagazine.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/meridene-tour-blog/#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:11:37 +0000 RedCam http://redcammagazine.com/?p=513 ]]> Meridene, an amazing four piece pop-rock band from the Midwest, is on tour right now and they have been awesome enough to show us what life is like on the road. Apparently it involves some Lady Gaga singing and a Target adventure. See their video blog and journal entries below!

Watch Video Blog: Meridene Tour Blog 1

*8/18/10 – Shitty Barn Sessions – Spring Green, WI

We traveled to Spring Green to play Shitty Barn Sessions. It had a great atmosphere, great people, and free Furthermore beer. We met Chris and Aaron, the “businessman” and brewer of Furthermore – Aaron showed me his secret beer lab where he brews his alien beer experiments. We stayed over at Brian and Erin’s house, hung out with them, Jaime Hansen (recorded the show), and Ian and Allison Hansen. We also tried Irish moonshine, which was great. In the morning we woke up and ate an excellent homemade meal of scrambled eggs, English muffins, bacon and orange juice. Awesome. We got a bike tour of Spring Green, WI with Brian, and then he drove us around and showed us Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, school and barn. He wasn’t home.

*8/19/10 – The Swing State – Lake Villa, Illinois

From Spring Green, we traveled down to northern Illinois. We played at a venue that I would describe as a college party-type house in the middle of a parking lot on a slightly busy street across from a gas station with “The Swing State” spray-painted on the back of the house. It’s a hookah bar. The first band was called, “Sanders and the Island of Misfit Toys.” They were akin to a very energetic mix of Los Campesinos!, WHY?, and something else… We all liked them a lot; very cool stuff. We stayed in a very nice hotel that night, recorded some video for our tour blog, and then woke up to Rachel Ray and Jerry Springer rating hot dog joints in Chicago.

*8/20/10 – Chicago, Illinois (a travel day)

We burst upon the Chicago skyline as soon as Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago” came on one of our iPods in the van. We went to a few record stores, where I bought a copy of the new Lower Dens record. We met up with our friend, Jake Shuda, and ate some Char Dogs at Wiener Circle. Yummy. After a bit, Jake departed and we relaxed, did some walking, and then drove to Rock Island, Illinois for our Daytrotter Session the next day. We ate Mexican food and got another hotel. I shared a bed with T. Carl Ives. Over the sheet, under the blanket.

*8/21/10 – Daytrotter Session – Rock Island, Illinois

We worked with two great guys there, Mike and Matt (Mike’s assistant). We recorded four songs in an hour and a half, and then sat down and listened to them. We were amazed by the recording quality. It was very exciting, and it was a really cool place to be doing what we were doing. We salivated over posters of Bazan, CocoRosie, and The National, finding it hard to believe that they had also done Daytrotter Sessions, in the studio we were currently in… We had a great talk with Matt, who is a very nice, quiet, and friendly guy. We all confessed that we wanted to give him a huge hug before we left (none of us did which was our only letdown after our session). We hung out in Rock Island for a bit and ate at a small Chinese buffet. We drove to Dubuque, Iowa and played at The Lift for a benefit show for a guy who had been in a bad accident. The venue was a really cool brick basement venue with a bar room and a room with the stage.

*8/22/10 – The Project Lodge – Madison, WI

I had an Ale Asylum Hopalicious at Logan’s Bar in Madison. Two actually. Excellent beer. We played at the Project Lodge, which is a small, artsy venue that is used for shows of all kinds as well as an art gallery every couple weeks. Balthazar had a lot of great photography up. It was a very fun show, and it was great to have Madison friends come out. We were interviewed by Zach Cherney of Madison’s Emmie Magazine before the show; we all liked him a lot as well. We talked about bands, music festivals, television shows and movies we watched when we were young, and Jersey Shore. We found out that Titus Andronicus played at the same place (very small venue, popular band) and drew a crowd of 150, packing it completely full and out the door. All in all, we had a great night, and a great first half of tour.

- All words by Dave Power (drums) -

check out more from Meridene at www.meridene.net

What is your job as an Audio Engineer?

My job is to translate an artist’s performance into Pro Tools software, or an audio workstation. I handle all of the technical stuff, like choosing the microphones, choosing what electronics I want to run [the music] through, what preamp I want to use, if I going to use an equalizer or any kind of effects. I’m the guy who makes all of those decisions, whereas all the musician has to do is focus on his performance.

How did you get involved in Audio Engineering?

I started playing the guitar a long time ago and eventually, I wanted to record myself.  I set up this tape deck to do so and I was like “Well, why doesn’t this tape deck sound the same as the records that I hear all the time?” Then I said, “I need to use a computer because everyone is using one of those”, so I started plugging my guitar into my computer and blowing up sound cards, which I had a lot of fun doing. Then I met Paul Gibbons , who taught a recording class at my high school and he referred me to go to Fredonia to study audio recording and music business. Since college, it has just been one thing after another. [Overall], it was me being a guitar player, wanting to record myself, to just diving really deep into it.

Some would say an audio engineer and a producer are the same thing. Is that true?

Sometimes those paths cross, but there are other times where it’s both a producer and an engineer and being the engineer, I have to answer to what the producer wants.

Have you ever done both?

A lot of the time, it ends up being that you do both because most [musicians] who come into the studio either don’t have the budget for a producer, or if they do have a producer, the producer knows what they want, he signs off on everything, but the engineer throws in a couple of ideas as well. The engineer always has a hand in the production that’s going on because he’s working all the knobs. If there isn’t a producer and [for example] there’s someone in the other room singing,  I might say, “You need to change the way you sing this line right here, you’re losing some syllables here, get a little closer to the mic, back off the mic for this part, etc.” So as an engineer, I still do a lot of production.

What do you think of home studios vs. recording at an actual recording studio? Is one more efficient than the other?

A home studio is great to put song ideas down and if you want to spend a lot of time working on something. It takes a lot of time because people working in home studios don’t have all of the technical background. In an actual recording studio, you can come in with whatever you want and you don’t have to worry about any of the technical stuff. All you have to do is focus on playing your instrument and being creative and putting 100% of you into your songs. You don’t have to worry about re-clipping in Pro Tools, or that you were playing too loud on this one part and now you have distortion. I take care of all of that, which saves the musician a lot of time and frustration. [At a recording studio] the musician would get better results because their head isn’t in two places and I’m not trying to knock home studios. I know a lot of people who have done great stuff in their home studios.

For those musicians out there who don’t have the funds to record at a recording studio, what do they need to build their own studio at home?

It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing hip hop, you can get away with a computer, an mbox, and one microphone and that would work fine. If you want to record drums, or a full band, that starts getting really really pricy and really really hard to do. To do drums, bass, guitar, and vocals at once, you’d need a lot of equipment, software, and then isolation booths.

Sounds like to make a quality record, it would be cheaper to just go to an actual studio then.

Exactly.

Kyle Wierzba

Audio Engineer

Audio Magic recording Studio

Buffalo, New York

When I was at the 2010 Vans Warped Tour last week, I noticed that a lot of kids were failing at pushing their way through the crowds for very simple reasons. So here is a list of things to do, and not to do, in order to get front row, or at the barricade, at ANY show (yes, any show. From All Time Low to Lady Gaga) without making people want to kill you. Believe me; I have had everything from gum put in my hair to having my foot cut open at a 3oh!3 show. Being polite is key.

1) Do not wear flip-flops OR skirts. This is important, which means most people ignore it. When moving through a crowd, you are not the only one shifting positions, the whole crowd is. So you will stumble sometimes, lose balance, or someone might even step back onto your foot. Wear sneakers, comfortable shoes, anything that will protect and cover your feet completely because you will easily have a broken foot in 5 minutes. In addition, you are going to get very close to people while you are moving through the crowd so no skirts. Skirts rise…very easily and you do not want your butt on someone and I am sure they definitely don’t want your butt on them. Plus, to have to look at your feet or your skirt every two seconds will distract you from the goal= getting to the front. And other people will weave around you if you’re constantly pulling your skirt down.

2) Start from the back and not the sides. Why? Because sides are hard and usually more packed. Everyone sees the sides as an easy way in and the back as taking too long. That’s actually the opposite.  The back/middle is easier because people leave more gaps in them for crowd-surfers, mosh pits, etc, which leads me to my next point….

3) Crowd-surfers and moshers are your best friends. When they move you do too! What does that mean? People go crazy over crowd-surfers. They sway to lift those kids up and carry them wherever, so when they sway, weave in front of them. You’re not pushing or forcing your way in and when the crowd-surfer is gone, they won’t even notice that you moved in front of them. You can easily move 5 rows closer to the front with a crowd-surfer. Same with mosh pits. People in the pit aren’t paying attention, they’re moshing, and people around the pit are either watching or trying to back away in order to not get hurt. So when those circles open up, you can do two things: A) run through it. This is dangerous, but you’ll move a lot faster. B) Go forward along the sides of the pit. This is way less dangerous and takes 15 more seconds.

4) I like to call this one “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick”: Identify the groups of people in front of you. Friends will lean towards each other to chat or even to dance so be nimble and quick when you see those groups creating gaps and move in front of them. This way you are still not pushing. You’re kind of skipping, ya know?

5) The Angle: move around people at an angle. Like, literally turn your body to a 90-degree angle, shoulders first, and maneuver around people. This sounds dumb because people should know this, but you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen people try to shove their whole bodies into gaps between people. Move at an angle THEN straighten yourself out once you have room.

6) Start moving from the back to the front before your favorite band’s set starts. Otherwise, you’ll spend the entire set maneuvering your way to front instead of watching the band you came to see. I advice you start two sets ahead of time if it’s a major band/show.

I hope that this helps. I use to go to shows and stand in the back because I did not know how to get to the front and I did not want to fight my way through crowds of people. Then I realized, “I just spent $20 to get in and I can’t see shiznatch! If I wanted to hang out with friends and listen to We The Kings, I could turn on their CD at home for free.” So I found a way to weave through crowds without making enemies, (I’ve actually made more friends) and to me, there is no better seat in the house than front row. However, there’s nothing wrong with sitting in the back with your friends and listening to your favorite band. That’s awesome too

www.myspace.com/aftermidnightproject

Check it out!

www.shorelinesend.com

www.myspace.com/averypkwy

www.myspace.com/confide

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