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HOW CAN YOU GET IT? "Public Service Announcement" - the new live album by FULL SERVICE, will be available for download RIGHT HERE on 12/20/08, but you'll be able to hear one new track every day from the album on the Full Service Myspace Page, starting with "Trumpets" on December 8, 2008.
On the evening of September 27th, our good friend Bill Smith of Larsen Records brought fifteen microphones to our show at the Flamingo Cantina in Austin, Texas and recorded our set for a live album. We’ve always wanted to record a live album, because live performances have a certain energy that is impossible to capture on a studio album. There’s less sweat in the studio. Less people. Less odors. Less mistakes. Less improvisation. Less grit. Less chaos. In the studio, you have to wear headphones, so you can’t move as much as you’d like. Also, it’s often very cold in studios, because the air conditioning is always on. At a live show, all of this changes. There’s no AC, it gets real hot, there’s tons of people around, it usually smells strongly of something, there’s a trippy light show going on, you try certain fills or vocal nuances that you never have tried before, and best of all—you don’t have to wear headphones, meaning your band-mates, Twinky-P and Bonesaw, can head-bang and stomp around and miss lots of notes while they’re busy rocking out. But the missing of notes is ok, because we never let the music get in the way of the experience of playing it. Playing one’s instrument physically is just another way to dig deeper into the music and the changes and the grooves. Of course, the price of very physical playing is often sloppiness. But it’s not the kind of sloppiness that detracts from the music; somehow it actually enhances it. Anyway, it’s an interesting phenomenon, and every band should have a live album, if only to be honest. To let people hear not what the song sounds like, but what being there actually sounds like, what the band sounds like when it’s bouncing all over the place. Our and Bill’s approach to post-production, mixing, EQ-ing and mastering was pretty minimalist. We didn’t do any overdubs other than, well…all of Twink’s bass parts, and that was not because he played poorly, it was simply because his signal was corrupted on the recording. My vocal signal was also very tricky to mix, because of the difficulties inherent in recording vocals from a drummer (the vocal mic picks up a lot of high-end cymbal sounds), but we ruled out any possibility of doing any vocal overdubbing on my parts. We really wanted what happened that night to be on the record, and Twink’s parts were the only ones that were re-done. In terms of EQ-ing, there were some initial problems. We at first messed with my toms to make them sound very toney, and we messed with my snare to make it more snarey, but we decided that it didn’t sound like my kit. I wanted it to sound like my kit. The toms on my kit sound like paper, or cardboard. They’re completely dead, but that’s the sound I dig, and that’s the sounds I build my playing off of. So we stripped the drums of EQ-ing and left them uber-natural. Bonesaw was actually not using his precious Marshall amp that night. It had busted on him earlier in the week, and he was borrowing our buddy Ken’s amp, a Mesa Boogie (“Ken’s Amp” was an early candidate for the album title, by the way.) The Boogie is a great amp, but it doesn’t quite sound like Bonesaw. And it doesn’t have reverb or as easy of a distortion pedal situation, which threw ole’ Bone for a loop at times (see entrance to solo for “Freezing Dub.”) In the end, Bill did a great job of tweaking things a bit to make it sound more like Bone was playing through his precious Marshall Stack that night. So, ladies and gentleman, our “Public Service Announcement,” from September 27, 2008 at the Flamingo Cantina, available for download RIGHT HERE on December 20, 2008. Track listing follows: |
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