[Music] Five Iron Frenzy Drum Cover and the Story Behind It

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmaJfOInM3I&feature=channel_video_title] I recently recorded a drum cover of Five Iron Frenzy's newest song from the grave, "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night." If you do not know, Five Iron Frenzy is one of the greatest ska bands to grace the world. Maybe that's an overstatement, but I'll let you be the judge of that. Anyway, they broke up in 2003 to the dismay of fans everywhere. In November of last year, they announced that they are coming back from the dead with an uber successful Kickstarter campaign that met their goal of $30,000 in about 55 minutes. At the moment, they have $186,363 pledged. They also released this track as a free gift to their faithful fans.

After posting the cover to Youtube, I put a link to the video on Five Iron Frenzy's Facebook page on a whim. I was just hoping to share the video with some fellow fans, but what I least expected happened... Five Iron Frenzy liked the post. I stopped for a while and thought, "Wow, the band, or at least someone in the band/affiliated with the band saw it and liked it enough to click 'Like'!" If that wasn't cool enough, I noticed that my view counter started to jump and I started getting comments from random Youtube folk. Sweet, people somehow found my video. It wasn't until user bobbytharabbit told me via comment that the band put my video up on their Facebook page. That just killed me.

I was honored, humbled, and dumbfounded as it all happened. There I was, just another Asian kid on Youtube (there's a ton) posting content for fun, and one of my favorite bands notices! That's the power of social media, I tell ya. I hope all of you enjoy the video.

Technical Info Video was shot on a Canon 7D and Nikon D7000 both with Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lenses and a 35mm f1.8 on the D7000 for a couple shots.

Audio was recorded with some new mics and a new interface. I had a pair of Karma K-Micros as overheads and on both of my toms, an EV N/D 757A on the snare, and an SM58 on the kick. All the mics ran into a Tascam US-800 and into my computer.

[Music] Livingwater Album Recording

Last Thursday I got the opportunity to go into the studio at Expressions College with my church here in Berkeley, Livingwater. Studio time was graciously given to us thanks to our producer, Sean. We were supposed to record chorus vocals for all the tracks, but due to technical difficulties and the need to record instrumentals, we couldn't lay down too many tracks. We did get Mickey Cho's (see my post on Mickey Cho and The Nehemiah Band) 8 bars on "Set a Fire," which was filthy (as in freaking awesome) as always.

When I stepped into the studio, I felt like the cliche kid in a candy store. It was my first time in a real studio, so all the high end mics, preamps, effects, and whatnot made me develop a serious case of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome).

[Edit] I guess I should mention that I also took some video footage. That some of that might go into a behind the scenes DVD that might come out with the album, so look out for that as well!

Click here for more photos in a slideshow!

[slideshow]

[Music] Behringer Tube Ultragain Mic100 Preamp

This will be my first product review. Well, I guess I wouldn't call this a review per se. More like a warning, I'm not even going to take photos. Just don't buy this. Don't. I got the Mic100 because I needed a preamp and this one was cheap, but it made my recordings hard to use. It's full of noise; whenever it's plugged in, you get this horrendous hum. It also didn't warm up my recordings, but gave them a tinny sound instead. I used this preamp on my latest recording, "Rocketeer," which I put up here two posts ago. I had to put some EQ on the tracks to counteract the tinny properties of the preamp and add the shaker to cover up the hum. The recordings were salvageable, but I would not use this box again. I'm returning it.

[Music] "Beamer, Benz, or Bentley" Drum Cover

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zh3OYJFGew] Hey guys, here's my first musical post. This is a little drum cover of "Beamer, Benz, or Bentley" by Lloyd Banks and Juelz Santana. Now, I don't normally enjoy popular songs on the radio because honestly, nearly all of them suck, but wow, this song was so catchy and I knew that it would be fun to play along with. So I made some time while studying for finals and did the cover.

TECHNICAL INFO: The video was shot on a Nikon D7000 with a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 lens at 1/30 second, f/2.8, and ISO 3200. Yep, that video was shot at ISO 3200, pretty clean, eh? The video and audio were synced together in iMovie.

The audio signal was something like this: Shure SM58 over snare, EV N/D 757A over the floor tom and ride pointed towards the snare as well to cut down on phasing issues. The mics ran into a Mackie mixer (with slight EQ and a tad bit of reverb), which ran into a Behringer UCA 222 interface, into my MacBook Pro, and into Audacity. I'm personally not a big fan of Garage Band only because I'm not that used to it quite yet. I plan on messing around with it in the future.