Scott Andrew

Dennis came over last weekend and we recorded this:

Watch it at YouTube

You can find the MP3 for this song here.

Happy 2011!

(Aside: why does YouTube always automatically select the thumbnail that makes me look like a lunatic?)

Posted January 10, 2011

I am just so darn pleased to offer you these acoustic versions of tracks from Look Back On This And Laugh, collected in a handy digital EP format!

Um, it's probably inaccurate to call these "acoustic" since there are still plenty of electric guitars here. Some still have bass lines and drums left in, some have the drums replaced with congas, et al. And some tracks like "We Had A Good Thing" make no sense if you remove all the electric bits. Sort of a mixed bag. So think of them more as stripped-down alternate versions.

The download is a ZIP file of five 320K MP3s, and the whole thing is pay-what-you-like with a minimum of US$1 (that's one US dollar).

Here are the tracks for your listening pleasure:

You Promised

[audio:lbotal-ac/01 - Scott Andrew - You Promised (acoustic 320k).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1|no_dl=1]

Whatever Happened To You

[audio:lbotal-ac/02 - Scott Andrew - Whatever Happened To You (acoustic 320k).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1|no_dl=1]

Gold Star (Feel Like A Ghost)

[audio:lbotal-ac/03 - Scott Andrew - Gold Star (Feel Like A Ghost) (acoustic 320k).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1|no_dl=1]

Love My Way

[audio:lbotal-ac/04 - Scott Andrew - Love My Way (acoustic 320k).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1|no_dl=1]

We Had A Good Thing

[audio:lbotal-ac/05 - Scott Andrew - We Had A Good Thing (acoustic 320k).mp3.mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1|no_dl=1]

Posted December 14, 2010

Is it uncool to admit that I was going for a big, epic Coldplay-esque sound?

[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - We Had A Good Thing (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]

(There's also an an acoustic demo of this song on the Demos page.)

For the remix, I pushed the drums further forward and added some snappy reverb. I also had to create a track just for vocal reverb, because the bit of delay you can hear during the choruses was automated in Cakewalk and I didn't want to have to recreate it again in REAPER. So I ended up exporting just the delay as a separate track, plopping it onto a USB stick and importing it into the new mix.

I dig the guitarsenal sound I managed to get and I'm especially pleased with bass lines. I'm less happy with my vocals -- I was pretty stressed out when it was time to record them and there are a few spots where I wish I would have done just one more take. I generally need to be more choosy with my vocal takes. But now, nah.

Fun fact: the electric guitars in the first verse originally had a reggae arrangement that sounded a lot like Roxanne, but the Police. So much so, so scarily so, that I ditched them and replaced them with the echoey guitars you hear now.

Here's the full track from Look Back On This And Laugh.

Posted December 9, 2010

Here's another instrumental track for you -- this time it's "Gold Star (Feel Like A Ghost)."

[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - Gold Star (Feel Like A Ghost) (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]

Some notes: I love the dry guitar sounds, but I wish they were louder. In retrospect, I think the drums are panned too wide and are getting in the way of those guitars. I was going for a Bob Mould roar, but I think the result was more Interpol.

The eerie swirling synth-like sounds during the third verse and outro are actually made by a FL Studio plugin effect called BeepMap, which generates sound from an image file. I think I used my Gravatar image to create the sound pattern, tuned it to match the song, then stretched it to the tempo. Ain't technology great?

I don't think I've ever played this song live! Too bad, it's a favorite of mine to play solo acoustic.

Below is the full track from Look Back On This And Laugh with vocals:

Posted November 16, 2010

I'm in the studio with Kirby Krackle today laying down some tracks for something we're calling "Project: MOONBASE."

Maybe to launch next week? We'll see.

Posted November 14, 2010

[audio:secret-2010/02.mp3|no_dl=1|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]

The secret songwriting project I announced earlier this year is still rolling. We didn't get around to recording this summer as originally planned, but that's okay because there's still a lot of writing to do.

Sign up for updates as we get closer to our official launch.

(See also.)

Posted November 12, 2010

Every year I brace myself for Daylight Savings Time and every year it's just awful. Especially the first few days when you get home and the day just feels over and it feels like bedtime even though it's only 6pm. Why why WHY.

Right now I've got about an hour to kill before rehearsal with Explone. Lately I've been thinking about songwriting and creative work in general. Have you ever noticed that the creative stuff never gets any easier? If I wrote a thousand songs, I'd guarantee you that number one-thousand-and-one will be just as big a pain in the ass to finish. Or start, for that matter.

The flush of triumph that comes from finishing one song lasts exactly as long the time I waste putting off tackling the next one.

You could be the #1 World Champion Alligator Wrestler Of The Known Universe but you can only pose for photo-ops for so long before you have to get in the pit with another 15-foot monster.

Have you ever seen Dawn Of The Dead, the one with the mall? It feels like that sometimes. Each day that goes by where I decide to punt, to not wrestle that 'gator -- not today, at least, I mean, it's dark outside and I really need to learn HTML5 and this Castlevania demo ain't gonna play itself -- is another day closer to the day the dead shatter the glass doors and find my couch cushion fort in the furniture section.

And they'll get me, eventually. So it's either hurl myself back into the 'gator pit, or wait for the zombies and pretend to be all surprised when they get here. It's more interesting in the pit.

Posted November 10, 2010

I went ahead and made instrumental versions of all the tunes on Look Back On This And Laugh so I'll keep posting them here over the next few weeks. Today's selection is "You Promised."

[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - You Promised (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]

This is probably one of my favorite song arrangements. The feedback-like sounds that open the track are actually done with an ebow I borrowed from Patrick (of Explone). For this new album mix, I brought the guitars up front, added a touch of reverb to the drum track, and threw in a shaker to offset the hi-hat a bit.

Here's the full mix with vocals. Someday soon I'll have to post an acoustic version.

Posted November 4, 2010

Here's an no-vocals version of "Whatever Happened To You." It's amazing how much the instruments pop when I'm not braying all over the place.

[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - Whatever Happened To You (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]

(You can find the full mix with vocals here.)

I mentioned earlier that I really liked the guitars in this mixdown, but now with vocals removed it occurs to me that the drum track is significantly better than what I usually come up with. I recently switched from FL Studio to Toontrack for drums, and the difference in quality is pretty amazing. (I still use FL Studio primarily for editing the MIDI drum track, though -- the pre-cooked Toontrack patterns are nice but just don't do it for me.) I'm not sure how they do their magic, but I like it.

Posted October 26, 2010

Well, new-ish. I included this song on Look Back On This And Laugh but didn't yak about it here yet.

(Hear it at Bandcamp and iTunes.)

This one was especially fun to do. I kept finding myself pushing instruments down instead of up, especially the chorus vocals which seemed so quiet I wasn't sure they were still intelligible. I also used a trick I learned in the studio with Explone: a second lead vocal, run through a distort-y, telephone-style mic and mixed just behind the "clean" vocal track (although in the studio, it was an expensive copper-plated mic thing — mine is just EQ and plug-ins).

Mostly, I'm really happy with the guitars. Just one acoustic and a ton of different electric tracks panned every which way. The mix is a little hissy with room noise but I find myself caring less about stuff like that these days.

I don't want to get into the lyrics too much except to say that everything in the song actually happened at some point, and the "Twin Cinema Plaza" mentioned actually exists, although I'm not sure it's still called that anymore.

It's been years.

Lyrics after the jump...

Whatever Happened To You

75, twin cinema plaza painting lines on the sidewalks in the summer as I recall your pockets were always empty always bumming rides to the old arcade downtown

sometimes I wonder whatever happened to you? sometimes I wonder if you're still out there somewhere yeah I wonder whatever happened to you? whatever happened to you?

summertime sky blazing down on the highway a mile from the curve where your friend took a turn too fast at seventeen years I can leave you behind now and one day we'll all look back on this and laugh

sometimes I wonder whatever happened to you? sometimes I wonder if you're still out there somewhere yeah I wonder whatever happened to you? whatever happened to you?

and you were waiting for me impatiently you couldn't wait for me to get here how did we get here?

sometimes I wonder whatever happened to you? sometimes I wonder if you were ever really me? and I wonder whatever happened to you? whatever happened to you?

Posted October 20, 2010