Ovipositor Summer Update

Ovipositor is making moves…I mean, you know, for as many “moves” as we do make, which isn’t many, so any moves are big moves, right?  Anyway, check it…

Colin developed and launched an all-new web site for the band, complete with history, streaming music (listen to all three records!), and a pay gate to buy all three albums. Sweet.

We’re still working on the screen-printed packaging for the Oakland Minor CDs (cover pictured here), but you can buy it as a digital download or disc (we’ll get it to you in a special limited edition package of some sort) through the site, and we’ve also got some business type deals in the works that will land the records on all the major online retailers in the coming months. More on that soon.

In the meantime (and thanks to the networking prowess of drummer Mark Pino), we’re basking in the glory that comes with getting Oakland Minor reviewed in the latest issue of The Big Takeover magazine — Issue #64, with The Decemberists on the cover. I can’t find the review on the site, so here’s a scan of it:

Finally, one last note about shows…We don’t really have any booked right now. One of the three of us is out of town at any given time pretty much all summer, which has made booking shows particularly challenging. But we’re still doing our thing at Colin’s Beatnik Dungeon weekly, so the next time you see us live, you’ll probably hear a whole mess of new stuff. We’ll let you know when that happens. In lieu of live show news, here are a few songs from our last show at the Starry Plough in Berkeley back in March…

Ovipositor, “Burning Breath”

Ovipositor, “Intermission”

Ovipositor, “When I Die”

These songs were recorded with a Zoom H2 (captured as 320kbps mp3, using the 120-degree mic array), which was set in a mic stand afixed to the front of the sound booth. No effects were applied to the recording.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Since I’m the only member of Ovipositor who’s got a page on Facebook, I took the liberty of setting up a fan page for the band. If you’re on Facebook, hit it up, add yourself as a fan, and write something nice about the music or us as people (if you hate the music).

Check it out — click here.

Weekend Hustle: AES, 111 Minna Rap Show, Ovipositor Mastering Session

Had one of those crazy busy weekends.

NERD

It all started on Friday at the AES (Audio Engineering Society) Show at Moscone Center in downtown SF. It’s the nerdiest audio nerdfest I’ve ever been too, and it goes down in SF every other year (alternates between the Bay and NYC). I have to be there for work, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get certain degree of personal satisfaction out of it. I record bullshit at my modest home studio (Maxin’ & Relaxin’ Studios, Oakland CA), and play in a three-piece rock band, so audio geek shit is kinda interesting to me…at least, in a much as it relates to what I’m doing.

After running through all the dope boutique outboard studio gear, new microphones, and niche software plug-ins, I found myself short of interest. This took all of five hours. Not that there wasn’t some excitement afoot — DigiDesign’s ProTools 8 and Cakewalk’s Sonar 8 were released with much fanfare, but since I use neither in my studio, those demos were of cursory interest to me. Still, it’s not like I was there against my will.

I had plenty of opportunity to get my nerd on, and the Universal Audio both alone made the whole day a worthwhile venture. The top-notch pro-audio manufacturer was showcasing all kinds of crazy-awesome stuff: new UAD-2 cards, which I’m told they can’t make fast enough to keep up with demand (and I believe it, I have a UAD-1, and I freakin’ LOVE it); the 710 Twin-Finity tube and solid state preamp and DI; the LA610 MKII channel strip; and the Moog Multimode Filter plug-in for the UAD-1 card (I know where my next $200 in nerd-related expenditure is going).

I looked at — and at times tried (and invariably failed) to find the rational to invest in — a lot of other cool stuff too, like Eventide‘s digitalModFactor effects pedal, which, among other things, allows users to update it by downloading new software from the internet; Radial Engineering‘s Phazer Box and new Phazer Bank; Line 6‘s Pod Farm amp and effect modeling software; and handheld field recorders — the Marantz PMD60, and the Sony PCM series handheld devices, which are both pretty cool (Marantz wins; the Sony doesn’t record to MP3).

ART HOUSE MUSIC

Since I spent the day looking at all the shit people use to make music sound good, I figured I’d go to a show and watch some people actually play good music. After AES, I headed over to Less Respect $tudios, drank beer, watched Olberman and listened to G-Pek play with his new Serato set-up for a few hours while a crew gathered. Eventually we made our way to 111 Minna to catch the homies TopR and Grand Invincible. It was starting to rain, but that didn’t keep people from hitting the spot; it was already kinda jumping off when we got there at about 10:30, and it just got more and more poppin’ as the evening dragged on. SF’s own Melina Jones set it off, and she kinda killed it. Grand Invincible — DJ Eons and Sacred Hoop’s Luke Sick — laid down the smokey golden era jams and TopR is still pissed at the world, and really good at explaining why. Good rap show.

Bonus: Half of the art currently on the walls at 111 Minna — which is primarily an art gallery, for those of you who aren’t knowin’ — is by Henry Lewis, the painter and tattooer who has been working on my left arm sleeve. It’s been a while since I’ve seen his painting, and it’s better than ever. Check it out this month at 111 Minna.

NERD, PART 2: UNDERGROUND SOUND

Saturday afternoon, slightly hung over from the night before and tired as hell from having to get up at the crack of dawn and get on a day-job-related conference call, Colin and I hit Mr. Toad‘s in SF, where we met mastering engineer Ben Adrian to sit down and master the new Ovipositor record, Oakland Minor. The subterranean mastering suite is dope, a simple setup with a single mastering station, a small couch, muted moveable sound walls and carpet, and two huge, really great sounding Dunlavy SC-IV monitors.

I know the record isn’t ever going to sound as good as it did coming out of those Dunlavys, but it sounds pretty good in my living room, in my car, and coming out of the puny computer speakers in my office, too, so I know Ben did a good job. We’ll be working pretty hard to sound that good when we play live again in December at the Hemlock.

Ovipositor Mixing Session

A few weeks after tracking 12 new songs for the next Ovipositor record, Colin and I went back to New Improved Recordings in Oakland the other day to mix the album with engineer and studio owner Eli Crews.

[Geek Alert] Compared to recording, mixing is a long, focused and sometimes tedious process, essentially taking the rough tracks and going after each element, every bit of sound that was recorded. In our case, that was 12 different drum tracks, two bass and two guitar tracks, scratch vocals, and a couple of tracks fed by stereo room mics. That was all captured during the recording session a few weeks ago, and Colin had since added some new layers of guitar and vocals, which he recorded at home and added to the session tracks for mixing. Earlier this week, we went through each track adding effects and stereo positioning, and mixing everything into clean, cohesive sounding songs fit for public consumption. Well…as fit for public consumption as Ovipositor can be.

Because we mixed as much of the record as possible in one day (as opposed to a well-funded mixing process in which entire days are spend working on a single track at a time), Eli opted against using all the really dope outboard gear he’s got at NIR, and we went with effects plug-ins to achieve the sounds we wanted. I love the sound of analog effects, and there’s something really studio-romantic about spending hours twiddling knobs to dial reverb, compression, etc., and I would have loved to use that stuff. But Eli’s got a full complement of Universal Audio effects in the studio computer, and that stuff sounds great, plus, unlike analog effects, the digital stuff is so easy to use quickly so we got through most of the record in about 10 hours.

There are still three songs that need to be mixed, but Colin’s doing those himself at his home studio in the next week or two, then we’ll send the record off to be mastered and replicated to CD. It’ll still be a while before we’ll have it “ready for market” (Colin’s an old-school screen printer and designer, and has a scheme to do up 100 limited edition custom packages), but come October, we should have something to offer. In the meantime, I’ve got a baby and a nursing mother to attend to, I could use some time in front of the drum machine, and Colin’s got some other stuff going on, so Ovipositor will be taking a couple of months off. Look for us to break out again at the Li Po Lounge in Chinatown, SF (or similar dive-y venue) as the winter holidays approach.

Ovipositor Recording Session

I play bass in an Oakland three-piece rock band called Ovipositor. I guess it qualifies as an indie rock band, though that term makes me cringe these days. The music we make is not qualified by tight pants, lip piercings, trucker caps, or anything even remotely deemed emo; our music is more akin to the kind of punk-born indie rock that was coming out of Chicago and Seattle and D.C. and Austin in the early and mid-1990s — you know, when indie rock was fun and loud and brash and kinda drunk and a little sloppy and maybe even a bit dangerous.

I’ve been with the band since late last year, when I put an ad on CraigsList.org looking for a drummer to play with (I had just bought this ungodly huge bass cabinet and a great amp, and I needed to get it out of the house before my girlfriend left me or the neighbors called the police; I figured the easiest way to do that was to find someone to play with and some place to play). Mark, the drummer, responded to my ad and asked if I’d be willing to play with a drummer and a guitar player. I went to their practice space, guitarist Colin’s basement studio, and we worked through some stuff for an hour or two. They asked me to come back.

I hadn’t played music with other people in a really, really, really long time and I had no idea what to expect. I wouldn’t say we clicked right away, but there was something there…I mean, something other than the fact that no one else had responded to my CraigsList ad, and no one at all had responded to one that they were running for a new bass player (their previous bassist moved to New York). But there was enough of a spark to keep it going.

So it kept going. Two practices a week (give or take), a hand full of live shows and a dozen new songs later, we ended up at New, Improved Recording in Oakland this past Tuesday, with owner / engineer Eli Crews, recording the live tracks for Ovipositor’s as-yet untitled third album.

Though I’ve spent fair amount of time in professional recording studios, I’ve never actually recorded in one, so it was sort of a new experience for me. Of course, it wasn’t much different than I expected, not all that different from the recording situations I’ve previously taken part in…except, you know, better. It took a couple of hours to get things set up — the seclusion of my bass rig in an isolation room, dialing in the guitar amp, troubleshooting the minor annoyances that popped up in the setup phase, and of course, the process of micing the drums — but once were all set, we managed to knock out 14 songs in a day. Which isn’t bad.

The whole day was a lot of fun, informative and productive. We recorded the whole session to 2″ tape, which I’m pretty stoked on, and Colin is now in possession of the digital dump of the tape so he can do vocals and a few guitar overdubs. We’re doing a proper mixdown later in August, and should have media product by the end of September, beginning of October.

In the meantime, here’s a live performance of the song “Red Crust,” an Ovipositor classic, which was recorded back in June at Nick’s Nightclub in Chico, CA. Enjoy…