MoG/music

News

• 2004.06.20: 2004 digital re-remix of "Brain On Drugs" now available – the 2003 remix wasn't quite right. This one probably isn't quite right either, and I'm sure Dan will hate it, but it's better and it's listenable and nothing important is missing.
• 2003.06.04 Bringing this stuff into the digital domain for remix and eventual CD, I hope... First project: 2003 digital remix of "Brain On Drugs" (original mixes all disappeared from my DAT tapes under suspicious circumstances...)
• 1999.05.03 Yes, it's here! Starting today, the long-ignored MoG studio tracks relinquish the obscurity of benign neglect and take their rightful place among the deliberately ignored. All I can offer by way of consolation is to think of these tracks as demos for the recordings we really wanted to do but didn't have the time or equipment for.

The Recordings

These are recordings we made using multitrack analog equipment owned by Dan and/or me.

Electron Emotion

• Type: studio recording
• Time: 5:08
• Writer: Tim
• Downloads: MP3 (160 kb/s, 44.1 kHz, 6MB)

This was probably the first song MoG attempted to put on tape. The compromises that went into this recording are symptomatic of the general tensions in the band -- I don't think any of us were really happy with our own "takes" or those of anybody else, but they were the only ones we could agree on.

Part of the ongoing problem was the equipment we were using at the time -- a 4-track cassette unit. The combination of working with very few tracks (so that often each new take erased the previous one, which might have been better but you never know until you do the next take) and the dreaded "tired fingers" syndrome in which you can never quite seem to recover the quality of an early take, subsequent attempts getting progressively worse and worse, were a recipe for frustration and disagreements.

For example: Tim's vocals. I much preferred the laid-back style of his first take, but later when we were remixing/overdubbing on the 8-track he decided to go for a more dynamic style. Unfortunately, both takes have moments of being annoyingly out of tune, and parts of my preferred take are inaudible in the bounce mix on the master 4-track.

The drums have been time-corrected (by hand) within an inch of their lives -- twice, actually; I ran the original track through a delay with a convenient knob for adjusting the delay in real-time and recorded the results on another track. The best two takes became the left and right drums. Then I did more digital finagling. And I didn't have an S/PDIF port for my PC at the time, so this went out analog from the DAT into the PC at 48KHz and then was resampled to 44.1 when I discovered that RealProducer (RealAudio encoder application) didn't speak 48KHz.

Fix My Car

• Type: studio recording
• Time: 2:34
• Writer: Tim
• Downloads: MP3 (160 kb/s, 48 kHz, 3 MB)
• Lead guitar: Brian Morris

Oy, sorry about the EQ. It sounded passable before encoding. I keep meaning to send this song to The Car Guys to use as interstitial music on their show, but after listening to it closely I think I'll hold off.

This song was actually the proximate cause of MoG's final dissolution. Dan was playing back his mix, Tim thought he heard something funny in the vocals and wanted to hear the vocal track isolated. Dan couldn't deal with rewiring everything to satisfy Tim's curiosity, and Tim couldn't deal with just taking Dan's and my word for it that we hadn't added anything to the vocals. (Why it would have been necessary to rewire everything just to hear a track by itself, I don't know; seems to me Dan could have either unplugged the RCA jacks temporarily, or pushed "record" buttons to disable track playback, or pressed "mute" buttons on the mixer... then again, Tim could have chilled a bit.)

Dysfunctional Family Blues

• Type: studio recording
• Time: 4:37
• Writer: Woozle
• Downloads: MP3 (160 kb/s, 48 kHz, 5 MB)
• Female vocal: Livia

Livia apologizes for the vocals. (I apologize for everything else.) There is a version which I digitally slowed down a bit to get closer to the tempo I had in mind, but it still sounds a bit like someone left it in the driveway all winter... but after checking this, I don't think it is that version, so all that's wrong with this one is that it's a bit fast. (2010: and it needs to be remixed digitally anyway.)

The Cult Song

• Type: rehearsal recording
• Time: 3:49
• Writer: Tim
• Downloads: RM28 (sorry... will re-encode as soon as I can find the original)
• Indian instruments: Woozle on keyboards

This is one of Tim's songs I really wish we'd gotten around to recording properly. This rehearsal version gives a pretty good idea of how it probably would have sounded, though hopefully we would have been able to do better in the vocal department and my e-tabla (etc.) would have been more on time.

This Is Your Brain On Drugs

• Type: studio recording
• Time: 2:19
• Writer: Dan
• Downloads:
  • MP3 vbr-hi, 44.1 kHz, 3 MB
  • OGG OGG Vorbis, q=5, 44.1 kHz, 2.5 MB

2010-03-14: This unexpectedly received a quite positive review by political blogger Dana Hunter. Woot!

Live Performance: Self-Review

For the most part, we sucked on stage. This can be attributed at least in part to the bad mixes we always seemed to get when playing live -- which in turn might be attributed to the engineers being unfamiliar with mixing keyboards in a guitar-centric town, the fact that some of my sounds were louder than others and I didn't have a compressor to even things out, or the engineer just being generally ticked off at us for any number of reasons. It could also have something to do with being overambitious as far as trying to get a different "sound" or "feel" for each song without really having the equipment or personnel to maintain the sound quality overall. There's also always the possibility that it might have something to do with musicianship, but for obvious reasons I can't really be objective about that.