On Tuesday, December 29, 2009, Wrong Side of Dawn will be playing its first live show in over three years! We will be the featured artist at an open mike at acoustic venue The Lickety Split in Philadelphia, located at the corner of South St. and 4th St. (401 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147). The musicians actually start playing at the open mike around 9pm, and we’ll probably be playing sometime between 9 and 11, we’ll post an update if we find out our exact set time. We’ll be displaying our softer side, so perhaps you’ll be able to hear all of the nuances to our music that you might miss when we annihilate your eardrums at our louder concerts Please join us! There’s no cover charge, just awesomeness. (This is a 21+ venue, our apologies to our younger fans.)

I’m happy to say that we’ve found a drummer who will be able to fill in at least temporarily, enabling us to book gigs without worrying about whether we’ll have a full lineup to play them. We’re still looking for a drummer who wants to be a more permanent member of the band though, so drummers please e-mail us at band@wrongsideofdawn.com or call me (Nelson) at 703-942-9378 if you’re interested in playing with us!

The lovely and talented Karen Rustad has been with working closely with Wrong Side of Dawn since its formation. Karen was there at our first rehearsals, with just me and Brian before we had any other musicians to work with. Karen has repeatedly lent us her artistic skills, doing an amazing job on the cover art for our old EP and the Grinder’s Tale 3P, and she’s currently working on a draft of the cover art for the upcoming Stay Awake album. She also did all of the graphic design and most of the web design for our beautiful website. [Incidentally, she's currently looking for work. Maybe you could help her out? ]

In addition, Karen is a serious singer and songwriter in her own right, having sung in choirs for many years, contributed her voice to musical groups such as Tryad (you can hear her singing lead vocals on “Beauty” from their album Listen) and written and recorded several wonderful tracks on her home computer. We had good experiences with her contributing vocals and some keyboards to our previous album attempt, so it is no surprise that we brought in Karen again to help us compose and sing the backing vocals on the “Stay Awake” album.

Adapting live vocal harmonies for a studio album

Karen has been performing at open mikes etc. with me since before WSD took its first steps towards recording a studio album. One song that she sang with me was Break Free (which is an ancient song that I originally wrote when I was in high school), and she wrote her own vocal harmony part to accompany me. On our previous attempt at recording this album, Karen simply sang the exact same vocal harmony that she sang when performing as a duo with me. However, this didn’t work quite as well with a full band, because Karen sang what amounted to a vocal solo during the bridge, at the same time as Brian’s guitar solo. Having two “solos” going at once made the song sound a little busy and disorganized, although there were a few nice interactions between Karen’s singing and Brian’s lead guitar.

When we started recording Break Free again at Portrait Studios for “Stay Awake,” I asked Karen to try writing some new harmonies that would be more choral and less busy-sounding, to avoid the problem of it sounding like there were two solos at once. Karen obliged by singing two-part harmonies, using them to create chords rather than an entirely independent melody line. I think the resulting backing vocals step back during the main part of Brian’s guitar solo in the bridge and give him more space, but also sound more impressive in a Cranberries-esque fashion. Naturally this is impossible for Karen to sing live without help, but that’s what’s great about studio albums, they free you from limits such as how many people you can put on stage at once.

Auto-Tune

Another issue that we had to confront frequently when recording with Karen and mixing her parts was when and if to use Auto-Tune. This is not because Karen has bad pitch, she’s probably on key more often than I am. This is because almost all of her vocal parts are harmony parts. Brian and I could get away with being a little loose with pitch when singing by ourselves, but whenever we bust out the vocal harmonies, any sourness in pitch is immediately and painfully obvious. Although some of Karen’s parts came out fine, we ended up having to use Auto-Tune extensively in some passages. One passage in “Out of Time” couldn’t even be saved by Auto-Tune (which says bad things about my ear because it sure sounded in tune to me when she recorded it) and we ended up having to throw out her part in that section. Whenever we discovered that Brian or myself were irreparably out of tune during mixing, we could re-take that section on the spot, but Karen wasn’t around during the mixing process, so it was a case of Auto-Tune or die. If someone is doing a difficult vocal harmony (or something similar) and you can’t get them in the studio again easily to fix any problems, I recommend that you record multiple takes and save them all, just in case there are undiscovered problems with the take that you thought was perfect.

For the record, Brian and I would have preferred to not use Auto-Tune at all on this album. We generally went for a straightforward “live” sound on this album, we didn’t want to sound too heavily processed and suspiciously clean. However, there is a trade-off between the time necessary to re-record a passage and the time required to Auto-Tune it. If you’re perfectionist enough to go and fix every little note by re-recording it, you’ll be spending a lot of time in the studio, and a lot of dough (unless you own the studio). Besides, if you have to do a zillion re-takes for each section to get it right, how much more genuine is that than Auto-Tune? Aren’t you using machines to cover up your shortcomings as a musician either way? The best, most “genuine” and impressive way to avoid Auto-Tune would be to practice until your vocal cords bleed, and then sing the song perfectly, without requiring any re-takes or Auto-Tune. Sadly, we just aren’t that good yet, and reality forced our hand.

Surprise harmonies

The vocal harmonies in the chorus of The Grinder’s Tale (listen around 2:55-3:15) came as something of a surprise to all of us. In one of the last recording sessions, we entered the studio with the vague mission of “add more vocal harmonies to the album” because Mr. Gutkowski (my old Latin teacher and indie rock mentor) had said something about how great vocal harmonies separate the pros from the amateurs, and we had agreed with him wholeheartedly. Brian came up with ideas for a couple harmony parts in his car while driving to the studio, singing along to the rough mixes. Karen had a different idea, however, and that sounded good too. So we figured, why not put all of those harmony parts on the record? Karen went off into another room in the studio alone with my iPod with the broken earbuds singing and re-singing the harmony parts until they gelled, and then we recorded the 4-part harmony together.

Similarly, the harmony during the “oohs” on Last Warning was a last-minute addition (listen around 2:44-3:04). I said something like “Hey Karen, Brian sounds kind of lonely in that part, why don’t you go help him out and add a harmony part?” The toughest part was the last note of the harmony. Karen tried a couple different notes, but nothing sounded right except that 2nd we have on the record. Karen was like, “You really want it to end on that dissonant note?” And we were like, “Yep.” The suspension resolves, sort of, when the rest of the band comes in, but dissonant or not we love it to death.

Karen’s interview

N: Karen Rustad, you’ve just finished recording all of your vocals for the Stay Awake album. How does it feel?
Karen: Uhhhhhheehhhhhhhhh [Karen fakes dying]
N: Speak words, woman.
Karen: Nah, it’s good. I’m glad we got it done in time – barely. I’m happy with the new harmonies we were able to add on, maybe. We’ll see… It’s something different!
N: Alright. And what was your favorite song to record?
Karen: Probably Contained. It was easy. And, sounds good as ever.
N: OK, least favorite?
Karen: Break Free took too long! Ohmigod! I think it’ll sound really cool, but it took *forever*, and I had problems with pitch, until I realized that it’s a lot easier if you only cover one ear.
N: Interesting. So just having one ear outside the headphones…
Karen: Yeah, even though you have a monitor feeding it back to you, for some reason it’s a lot easier if I hear my voice for real, rather than it being broadcast back. A lot easier for me to adjust.
N: OK! And how do you think the album is coming?
Karen: I think it’s coming really good! This is wayyy better-sounding than the previous attempt. And I expect it’s going to be really playable and I hope that it gets lots of interwebs attention
N: Alright, well, thank you

We have successfully found a new bassist! His name is Andres and we’re very impressed with how quickly he has learned all of our songs. Unfortunately, the drummer we were going to use for live shows had to cancel on us. We don’t dare book gigs without a drummer, so it is vital that we find at least a temporary drummer ASAP. Can you help us?

If you are a drummer, and you think you could help us play at least a couple gigs per month for the next few months, we’d like to jam with you! (If we work well together, longer-term arrangements can be made.) Please live in the Philly/NJ/NYC area, we’ve been practicing in North Brunswick, NJ but we aspire to gig all over. Also please be under the age of 35, so that there isn’t too huge of an age gap (Brian and I are 25). Check out our music on this site, or on our Bandcamp store… and if you think you have the technical chops to play for us and you dig the music, just e-mail us at band@wrongsideofdawn.com or call Nelson at 703-942-9378.

In our efforts to bring back the best features of classic rock, Brian’s lead guitar has been our secret weapon. We think that the emotive, virtuoso guitar solo is an important part of rock music that has been neglected for far too long, and we’re trying to fix that. Brian is a bit of a perfectionist, and that can be frustrating when we are paying for studio time by the hour, but his attention to detail really shines through on this album in every note the lead guitar plays. Sharing the studio with him has been a joy, an honor, and a learning experience.

Choosing an electric guitar

Brian used three electric guitars on this album: a “Slash” Les Paul, an American Stratocaster, and a Mexican Stratocaster.

The “Slash” Les Paul has a very raw, hot, unforgiving sound. Brian used it for the lead parts on Out of Time, Running Scared, Flight III, and Last Warning (you can hear semi-final versions of those songs from The Grinder’s Tale 3P right now!). I was a bit surprised that we didn’t use the “Slash” Les Paul more, it can sound really mean when you play it right and I was very impressed by it in rehearsal. It turned out, however, that we didn’t want the lead guitar to sound quite so mean and in your face all the time. If we didn’t want a guitar part to cut right through the music and slice open your eardrums, we had to pick a different guitar instead of the “Slash” guitar, because that guitar really demands attention.

The American Stratocaster is the smoothest-sounding of the three guitars, but it still has a thin, jazzy sound. It is very versatile, you can make a very wide range of different tones depending on which pickups you select or pedals you use. We used it for the lead guitar part on The Grinder’s Tale, Flight II, My Private Asylum, Break Free, and Contained.

(If I recall correctly, the picture to the right also features Brian experimenting with his effects pedals in order to get the several layers of feedback right that appear at the very end of Out of Time. We left the door to the amp closet open so that the guitar would feedback, and we played with delay pedals that gave us some rhythmic patterns, as well as producing some bizarre results that reminded me of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. This was one of the few times we used multiple pedals, as I’ll discuss later.)

Finally, we used an inexpensive Mexican Stratocaster for rhythm guitar. (We didn’t use it for lead guitar at all.) Brian likes it for rhythm because it has a little bit of a wobbly, unstable sound that gives more flavor to the rhythm parts. We used it for the rhythm on Last Warning, Running Scared, and the electric guitar at the end of Bobby McGee.

Pedals, or lack thereof

Back in the day when we were in Nuzzo’s basement studio recording our old EP, Brian used to use lots of pedals at once in his pursuit of the ultimate electric guitar sound. The photo to the left shows a typical pedal setup from the Nuzzo sessions. We’ve learned since then that sometimes less is more. If you have a good guitar and a good amp+preamp, and you’ve got a good sound, throwing lots of pedals on top of that will just screw it up. On the “Stay Awake” album, Brian mostly used only one pedal, a distortion pedal. We’re keeping it simple and raw.

The “Out of Time” solo

The guitar solo that closes “Out of Time” just might be the crowning moment of awesome for this album. It’s the solo that made me say “we need to get this into Rock Band” (stay tuned for more on that). The interesting thing to me is that the most emotionally powerful part of the solo, the climactic 20 seconds, is the only part that is simple enough for me to play (although Brian plays it much better, of course). Van Halen-esque theatrics are impressive, but sometimes what you need for a great solo is to play just a couple notes very passionately, and I think that’s what Brian did. Which is not to say that Brian doesn’t also have amazing technique.

One technique that Brian used in this solo that I had never seen before is a pinch harmonic or a “squealie”. Pinch harmonics are quite common in heavy metal and ZZ Top songs, all heavy metal solos are full of pinch harmonics, but I don’t listen to heavy metal much. Neither does Brian, I understand, but he learned the technique from his friend Christan who is into heavy metal giutar. To play a pinch harmonic you pluck the string with a pick, and then immediately after you hit it you barely scrape the string with your thumb. Thumb it too hard and you kill the note, thumb it too lightly and it doesn’t have the desired effect. You’ll be able to hear a pinch harmonic in “Out of Time” at around 3:27, it’s the 3rd note that Brian plays after the background vocals come in, and it is an extremely distinctive sound. I can’t wait for you to hear it

Brian’s interview

N: You’ve just finished a long day of recording electric guitars, how are you feeling?
B: I’m feeling tired, I’ve been tired for a like few hours now. I’m definitely like several hours, um, steps behind where I should be going to sleep…
N: That’s what our band is about, right?
B: Actually yeah, that’s right, I kind of forgot about that part, the whole Wrong Side of Dawn thing… I mean, I would be staying up until morning if that were true.
N: That’s true, thank god we are not there yet.
B: Yeah, I mean, I feel really good with what I recorded, I’m kind of disappointed we didn’t get through every single song today. But that might have been a little overambitious.
N: What was the favorite thing you recorded today?
B: Definitely the ending solo for Out of Time. We spent a lot of time on the feedback afterwards, which actually I think we need to kind of hold back on that with the mixing so that it doesn’t overshadow the song or anything like that. It’s supposed to be that it comes in for 10 seconds and then goes away. The actual solo itself, I was really glad how that went. I basically got it in one take, had to punch in just a couple of parts. I’m really glad I got the “Slash” Les Paul, it worked really well for that solo. I think it sounds really intense, and once we get other things like the vocal harmonies and stuff in there, that’s going to be a good climax to that song. I’ve definitely really been looking forward to that particular one minute of this album, and it’s gone well so far.

N: What was your least favorite thing about today?
B: Definitely Vulture [now called My Private Asylum], it’s weird how pretty much the solos were the easiest thing to record. It’s something like Vulture that doesn’t have any solos that needs to be exactly right. Definitely the solos were, ironically enough, the easiest thing to do, everything else is hard.
N: How do you think the album is coming along?
B: I think it’s coming along really good. I really feel like these songs are better than good. It’s disappointing when I show people what I’m writing and they say it’s good. People always say it’s good, and it really frustrates me. Your 3rd grade class project that you did the night before is good. I really think our songs are better than good…. so I sometimes wonder if I’m like the only real believer in some of these songs, but I think they’re going really well. Better than well.

We are sad to announce that the extremely talented Andrew Angelin, who has played bass on everything that we’ve recorded up to this point, is moving to Florida and will be unable to provide us with wicked bass grooves in the future. This leaves us in dire need of a new bass player who can play live shows with us to support the album when it comes out, and perhaps help us record our next album.

Do you have the technical chops to play Andrew’s basslines? Do you use slap bass, harmonics, bass chords and other fancy techniques when you play bass? Do you have the killer rock instincts necessary to perform with Wrong Side of Dawn? If you think you do, and you want to play bass for us, then send us an e-mail at band@wrongsideofdawn.com and we’ll be in touch!

Please be under 35 years of age (otherwise our age gap may be too weird) and please live somewhere in the Philadelphia-NJ-NYC area. We think our headquarters for the near future will be in Philadelphia, but it’s up in the air at this time.

I just want to make it clear that since “The Grinder’s Tale” 3P is “pay what you want”, you really can choose whatever price you want, including zero. Naturally we hope that if you like our music you’ll help support our efforts to finish our full-length album and play some live shows, and that’s why the recommended price is $3. Our top priority, however, is making sure that everyone can hear our music. If you’re broke and you just want to hear some awesome tunes from Wrong Side of Dawn on your iPod whenever you need a pick-me-up, go download them from our Bandcamp store and don’t worry about the money.

If you do decide to download our 3P for free, our site asks you for your e-mail address. We will not give or sell your e-mail address to third parties. We will only use it to let you know about future Wrong Side of Dawn releases, and possibly live shows. You’ll hear from us maybe once a month (maybe even less frequently), we promise not to spam you. We just think that your e-mail address is a decent trade for some free music When you enter in your e-mail address, a download code will be e-mailed to you and you’ll be able to download whatever songs you asked for, in whatever quality/format you want.

I hope this clears up any confusion, and I hope you enjoy our music! Stay tuned for the release of our full-length album “Stay Awake” sometime this fall.

We’ve been making slow but steady progress on our upcoming full-length studio album, “Stay Awake,” and we’re excited about how great the songs have been coming out. We’ve been sad, however, that our fans haven’t been able to hear the new tracks, which are so much better than our old basement recordings. That ends now! Today we announce the official release of “The Grinder’s Tale” 3P.

“What is a 3P?” you may ask. Well, it’s longer than a single, which is usually two songs, and it’s shorter than an EP, which is usually 4-5 songs. We understand that it is the hip new way to release music — the recently released book The New Rockstar Philosophy dedicates an entire chapter to the concept — and it fits in well with the fast pace of the modern internet-driven music industry. “Release early, release often” is the mantra, and that’s one bandwagon I’m happy to jump on because it means our fans get to hear awesome new music sooner rather than later. I’ll be honest, the three songs that we chose to release simply happen to be the songs that are the closest to being finished with the whole recording and mixing process. )The other 9 songs on the “Stay Awake” album still need some tweaking before we’ll be ready to release them.) I think you’ll find they fit extremely well together, however, and I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do.

If you like the songs, please buy them, we are offering them under a “pay what you want” program on our Bandcamp store with a suggested price of $3. All profits go towards making the upcoming “Stay Awake” album awesome and fronting the costs for live shows to support the album. If you choose to buy the old EP at a live show or from CD Baby, we’ll throw in a download code for “The Grinder’s Tale” 3P for free!

We’ll be blogging more in the days to come about the 3 songs on the 3P: Flight III, The Grinder’s Tale, and Last Warning. In the meantime, just relax and enjoy the tunes

A couple months ago we went to Atlantic City with the amazing Rob Scheuerman as our photographer to do a photoshoot for the upcoming “Stay Awake” album, hoping to get some cover art. I don’t think we were successful, unfortunately, but we did get a lot of pretty pictures.

We had a very specific vision for our cover art, involving a road sign on the Atlantic City Expressway. Along the sleep zone where drivers tend to drift off with fatal results, sometime in the late 80s highway officials placed a series of signs reading “Stay alert”, “stay awake”, “stay alive”. We wanted to take a picture under the “stay awake” sign and make that the title of our album. Now, keep in mind that the signs have been there for decades. Two weeks before the photoshoot, Brian drove by them to check that they were still there, and they were in fact still there. He programmed the location into his GPS to make sure that we couldn’t miss it, and we intended to return to that spot just as dawn was breaking so that we could get a sunrise. However, the day of the photoshoot when we arrived at the spot, the signs were gone, leaving only the posts that they had been standing on. It was pretty ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense. Or perhaps just unfortunate, as Ed Byrne would call it.

Since we couldn’t take the picture we wanted for the cover art, the secondary objective of just taking cool photos around Atlantic City for publicity purposes became the main point of the day. One goal was to take some pictures that vaguely corresponded to the various songs on the album, such as a picture of us playing poker for “The Grinder’s Tale”.

Check. Another important goal was to get a picture of us with a sunrise or sunset behind us. Since we spent sunrise in a futile search for the missing road signs, we had to make do with sunset. However, the sky was becoming overcast and we were concerned that we would not be able to see the sunset from where we were in Atlantic City. We checked the weather forecast for the area, and it appeared that there might be a break in the clouds over Philadelphia. So we drove hell for leather to the west to get to Philadelphia in time for sunset, in hopes that we would actually be able to see the sun. I think it paid off.

If you want to see the rest of the photos, they’re up on Flickr, just click the picture below:

And here is a beautiful animated gif that is too large for the front page:

Choosing a guitar

Unfortunately, choosing which guitar to record with wasn’t as easy as I hoped. All of our acoustic guitars developed problems during the record sessions, but fortunately they were different problems so we could choose which guitar to use based on which problem would affect the album the least. Now I understand why professional musicians own so many instruments: redundancy! Sure, having a selection of guitars with different properties allows you to produce a wider range of sounds, and having multiple guitars lets you quickly switch tunings while playing live, but I think the most important reason to have a lot of instruments is so you can switch when one instrument breaks down or starts sounding funny.

I am in love with my green Takamine acoustic-electric, named “Kermit”, and I would generally want to use it in any situation. However, recently Kermit has started going out of tune if I play high on the fretboard, and unfortunately many of our songs require me to do that. I didn’t have a chance to get Kermit’s problems checked out at the guitar store before recording started, so I had to use other guitars that were more in tune.

We used Brian’s black Martin acoustic-electric for a couple tracks, most notably “Running Scared”, but for some reason the low E string was sounding much louder and rattle-y than the other strings, which sounded strange. Much of “Running Scared” doesn’t use the low E string and we thought the guitar sounded fine with the parts that do, but this problem mostly eliminated the Martin from the album.

We ultimately used Brian’s Ovation acoustic-electric for most of the tracks, even though something was very wrong with the line out. I thought the line out would be important, but it turned out it wasn’t, we were able to record great-sounding acoustic guitars without it.

Recording acoustic-electric guitars without line-out

For our EP we had two tracks for each acoustic/electric guitar: a microphone in front of the sound hole, and directly plugging it into the guitar’s line out, and that delivered a decent sound. By having multiple tracks for the acoustic guitars, we can mix them together and better control the sound. For example, if the line out has more bass, and the mike over the sound hole has more treble, you can turn up the volume on the line out if you want a more bassy sound. For this album we were hoping to have three tracks for the acoustic/electrics, by adding a third track from a microphone over the fretboard. However, since the line out on the Ovation was oddly quiet and full of static, we didn’t end up using that track, so we just had two tracks, the fretboard mike and the sound hole mike. I think this gave us a deep, rich, and very acoustic sound… the line out would have made the acoustic guitars sound a bit more electric, and I’m not sure I miss it.

Surviving without heat

We could not use the central air in the building while recording anything with microphones, because the fans made noise. It was the middle of winter in New Jersey, it was pretty darn cold outside and, without heat, inside. This problem affected recording the drums, acoustic guitars, and vocals. This may have been less of a problem for Santoro because drumming is a very physically intense activity, but playing guitar really was only exercising one or maybe two arms, there was no way I would break a sweat recording guitar. I compensated by wearing lots of layers, sometimes even wearing my winter coat indoors, and bringing a thermos of hot tea and a thermos of hot rice with me to the studio. It would have been hopeless without space heaters such as the one pictured to the left, and the little faux fireplace in the drum room, which we used to warm our fingers and maintain manual dexterity. It was still pretty miserable, but that’s the cost of the pursuing your musical dreams. If I ever get to build my own studio, I will do my best to make sure it has silent heating and cooling, so that we can keep the studio at a comfortable temperature no matter what we are recording.

My Interview

Transcript:
Brian: Um, this is the end of acoustic day… being our primary acoustic guitarist and our primary interviewer, would you like to ask yourself some questions?
Nelson: [laughter] Well, Nelson, how do you feel about being done with acoustic guitar? Well, me, I feel pretty frickin’ good. I’m sad that Kermit didn’t make it onto this album because I never got him tuned up at the shop, so Kermit is unfortunately absent. But I did enjoy the Ovation and the Martin guitars, they were good.
Brian: Did you enjoy freezing your ass off in that room over there?
Nelson: I did not enjoy freezing my ass off! Funny you should ask. But I had some hot tea and stuff, and I’m all good. I wore my orange hoodie over my headphones, so I was nice and cozy. It’s an accomplishment! I am happy.
Brian: One of your standard questions has been your favorite and least favorite songs to record.
Nelson: I think that Flight III / Flight I came out really good, I’m really proud of that. I am not proud of how I couldn’t play the finger-picking to “Out of Time” despite having practiced it for like years on end. But Brian hit it so it’s all good. And you know, I’ll practice it more and someday we’ll play it live, so… I am satisfied.
Brian: Alright, to be continued.
Nelson: Thank me for the interview