Hot Tracks, System of a Down Violin Cover Band and Much More!

Spring Time is upon us, and its time to share some new tracks that have been holding down my Ipod as of late.

First Track is catchy, upbeat, and the perfect way to get you psyched about Summer!

Lions In Cages – Wolf Gang

Another Upbeat track by a band that is quickly becoming one of my favorites

Live Those Days Tonight – Friendly Fires

There’s something about the juxtaposition between the sweet vocals and trashy lo-fi drums that makes this track eerily soothing…Enjoy!

White Nights (Twin Shadow Remix) – Oh Land

A classic track with countless remixes……Here’s a new look for an old favorite

Bang Bang (White Noise Dubstep Remix) – Nancy Sinatra

Just Damn Good……

Lights (Bassnectar Remix) – Ellie Goulding

And last but not least……This totally blew me away when I heard it!  It’s a 3 piece group consisting of a drummer and 2 violinists covering System of a Down’s Toxicity and it is awesome!

I’ve got a few more tracks up my sleeve, including some Mashups that are going to Rock Your World……stay Tuned!

Dandy Warhols Throwback, While my Ukulele Gentle Weeps, Katy Perry Like You’ve Never Heard her before and More!

So, considering the end of summer is right around the bend, I thought I’d throw up some new tracks I’ve come across and let you enjoy them as much as I do.

First up is an AMAZING Ukulele guy playing in Central Park.  He’s covering ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and is EXCEPTIONAL!  Give it a listen, you won’t be disappointed….

Next up is a song that’s been all over my ipod and even cd player this summer.  It’s by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a band out of Cali with a good 500 members or so.  Good summer track to sit back and enjoy with the windows open and air blowing in your face.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Home

Every good post needs a couple throwbacks to get that summertime nostalgia going. Here’s one that I hadn’t heard in a while; its called She Sells Sanctuary by the Cult.

The Cult – She Sells Sanctuary

This tracks has been EVERYWHERE this summer.  Every bar, every beach, every radio station…….So I want to spice it up by giving you a tight remix of it.  Its called California Gurls by Katy Perry and this is the MSTRKRFT remix.  Finally new life for a catchy song thats been SOOOOOO played out!!!

KatyPerry-California Gurls (MSTRKRFT Remix)

And a cover of Electric Feel by the lovely Katy Perry….to cool you off after that last track….This track is beautiful, and worth a listen

Katy Perry – Electric Feel (MGMT Cover)

Lily Allen is definitely one of my favorite artists these days.  She’s got a sweet and innocent voice, has a GREAT production staff, and is guaranteed to put you in a good mood.  This track is a perfect example of that; Kaiser Chiefs cover, but she does and exceptional cover of it…enjoy!

Lily Allen – Oh My God (Kaiser Chiefs Cover)

Last but certainly not least, one more catchy throwback I think you’ll appreciate…..Lets see if you remember this gem

Throwback time……Bohemian Like You – Dandy Warhols

That’s all for now; have some new tracks up shortly….Enjoy!!!!

-Fuzzy

Andddd….We’re Back!

After a brief excursion to europe and a heavy work schedule, I’ve got finally got some new material for you!

After a 4 year ‘break’, I recently started played guitar with my old band again, and even performing a few local shows.  The latest track is called “dreamer of dreams’ and we just finished writing it.  The video below was recorded at Pianos, in Bloomfield New Jersey last wednesday evening.  Take a gander and let me know what you think.

If you live around Northern New Jersey, and haven’t yet checked out ‘Pianos Bar and Grill’, you are definitely missing out.  The have live music of one sort of another every night of the week, open mic on Wednesdays (with a musician ‘open jam’ in the back room), standup comedy, dueling piano nights and much more!  If you’re looking for a hole-in-the-wall place, with a great atmosphere, and cheep beer….look no further.  I love playing here!

http://www.pianosbarandgrill.com

I’ve been digitizing some of my old vinyl lately, so be on the lookout for some vintage tracks, that fell through the cracks soon! That’s all for now. Happy Holidays!

-Fuzzy

Burning Spear…EXCLUSIVE Live Video!

Reggae Legend Drops By To Play A Couple Tracks

A few weeks ago, Grammy Award Winning artist Burning Spear came into the WERS studios to perform live on the air, and I quickly volunteered to be the Engineer for the session.  A couple quick notes, the audio includes all of the on-air compression that an average listener would have heard, and is uber-compressed even more in order to make it available online, but overall I dig it, and thought you would too!  What I find especially interesting about this performance is that they’ve got their 2nd guitarist playing drums, and opted to use our piano instead of the usual digital keyboard/organs.  I saw them later that evening at The Paradise in Boston, and though some of the songs were the same, the vibe was VERY different.  When I tracked them, it had more of an acoustic, chilled out kind of feel, where as when they played later that evening it was a lot more intense and had more of a traditional reggae feel.

A special thanks to WERS Rockers DJ B-rok for shooting the video and meticulously editing it down, great work dude!

Enough talk…..ENJOY!

For the full writeup on the in-studio, pictures, and much more…visit:  www.wers.org/music/artists/interviews/Burning_Spear.cfm#

As for Tech Talk, I used a spaced pair of U87s on the piano through a TLA Tube Pre, 414s as Drum OH, 81′s on the Bongos, Beta 87A for lead vox, baby bottle on sax, 421 on trumpet, Mouse on trombone, DI for the Bass, and a 57 and 193 on the gtr amp (A Fender twin).

That’s All I’ve got for now!.  Any questions, feel free to post below.

Grammy Award Winning Artist Burning Spear with yours truely

-Fuzz

Some Good Summertime Tunes and Free SSL Plugins!

Classic Summertime Driving Playlist

Summertime is coming to a close, but before you take out the ac, and put away the beach towels, I’ve got a great summer playlist for you to enjoy.

Here’s the situation, you’ve been working all week and NEED to enjoy this weekend, since winter is just around the bend.  You grab some friends, jump in the car, roll down the windows (ac is nice, but when you’re cruisin doin 90 down to the beach….windows open is the only way to go), crank your car stereo to 11, grab some cold beer for when you arrive, and you’re off!  Now……what are you listening to on your way?

BTW, all the tracks below I’ve found online so you can can download them, simply by clicking on them.  ENJOY!

Fuzz Mix -The Summertime edition

1.  A\’int No Rest for the wicked – Cage The Elephant

• First things first, you need to get a mood going on.  This is a great relaxing, bluesy rock straight ahead rock song.  PERFECT for kicking off a road trip.

2.  Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival

• Time to go old school with some Creedence.  Do I really need to give a reason?

3.  1901 – Phoenix

• Fat synths, upbeat vibe, and catchier than swine flu!

4.  All Along The Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix

• One of the classic tracks of all time….No explanation Necessary.

5.  Doin\’ Time – Sublime

• Bring down the energy a bit, and do your best James Dean Impersonation.  This track is great for cruisin, and enjoying the wind blowing through your hair.

6.  Cissy Strut – the Meters (or the Butch Cassidy Sound System version)

• Keep the cool going, and enjoy the warm weather.

7.  Long Time – Boston

• Time to Bring things up a notch, and what better way than this epic intro to Long Time!  Not to mention how ridiculously catchy it is!

8.  Magick – Ryan Adams

• Simple, to the point and catchy as hell.  Guaranteed to have you singing along by the 2nd chorus!

9.  Take A Walk On The Wild Side – Lou Reed

• Bring back the cool, and relax things a bit.  Honestly, who doesn’t know ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side’?

10. Girlfriend is Better – Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense Version) – **Note I could only find an mp3 of the studio version, check out stop making sense for the real amazing version!

• Get things a little funky and weird…why not?  David Byrne and company have so much spunk, it makes you wonder how they don’t spontaneously combust!  Not to mention, the stop making sense live version blows away any studio version I’ve ever heard of this song (and there’s some sick cowbell)

11. Princes of the Universe – Queen

• This song is so fucking epic, you should probably take a pit stop afterwards.  Pickup some cold beers for later, maybe a bathroom break, considering you’ll probably be going 120 by the end of this one!

Nothing Like A Good Old Fashion Pit Stop

12.  Up From The South – The Budos Band

• Time to reestablish the cool, and get back on the road.  Budos Band always makes me feel like I’m living in a Quentin Tarantino Movie (in a good way)

13.  Gimme Shelter – The Rolling Stones

• Keep Cruisin……

14.  The Weight – The Band

• A little more on the relaxing side, but always a nice surprise

15. Smoke On The Water – Deep Purple

• Kick things up a bit, and let the rocking begin

16.  One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer – George Thorogood & The Destroyers

• You’re almost at your destination (beach maybe?), put this on, and get ready for a long night of partying!

17.  The Boys are back in town – Bad Company

• You throw this on, right as you pull up to the beach.  Yea, now you’ve arrived.

Free SSL Plugins anyone?

For part II of this post, I found some awesome FREE SSL plugins I wanted to post.

The first one is the SSL X-ISM – A Plugin designed for metering your mix’s output and peaks

The second is the LMC-1 -  Originally a TB mic limiter on SSLs in the 80s, it quickly became one of the most infamous Drum Sounds of the 1980s. Here’s a summary of it’s history from the SSL Website:

“The SSL Listen Mic Compressor was the secret weapon in many producers sonic arsenal of recording techniques. Originally designed to prevent overloading the return feed from a studio communications mic, its fixed attack and release curves were eminently suitable for use on ambient drums mics. Of course, we’d like to take all the credit for this great sound, but as usual, it was the creativity of SSL users that led to the idea.

Long-time SSL user Hugh Padgham was one of the first to capture this new drum sound on tape,while working with Steve Lilywhite on Peter Gabriel’s ‘Intruder’, he told Mix magazine:* “On a normal console, you have a button to press to talk to the musicians in the headphones, but you did not have a button to press for us to listen to the musicians. To do that, you’d plug a microphone into a spare channel on the desk and listen to your musicians through that. But the SSL had a reverse talkback button and there was a microphone hanging up in the studio already, a dedicated input into the reverse mic input on the console. And on this microphone, they had the most unbelievably heavy compressor, so you could hear somebody who was over in the corner.

“One day, Phil (Collins) was playing the drums,” Hugh recalls, “and I had the reverse talkback on because he was speaking, and then he started playing the drums. The most unbelievable sound came out because of the heavy compressor. I said, ‘My God, this is the most amazing sound! Steve, listen to this.’ But the way the reverse talkback was setup, you couldn’t record it. So I had the desk modified that night. I got one of the maintenance guys to take the desk apart and get a split output of this compressor and feed it into a patch point on the jack field so I could then patch it into a channel on the board. From there, we were able to route that to the tape recorder.”

And Last but not least, the SSL X-Orcism – This is a Halloween themed plugin that autowarps your voice into “the sound of halloween itself”.  Good for when you’re in the studio at 4am, you’re ears are fried and you want to have a good laugh.

I’m going to Europe for a little while, so I won’t be updating this for a couple weeks.  In the meantime, enjoy the rest of summer, the summer playlist and the treats from SSL.  I’ll try to sneak one more quick post before I depart.  Cheers!

-Fuzzy

“Using the Power of the crowd, big speakers and beer” to bring you a taste of Swedish Electro pop. AND an EXCLUSIVE Video of them performing live on the radio!

From Stockholm With Love.....Peter Bjorn and John with Me and My Assistants outside the Studio

I’m sure many of you are still whistling along to their singalong summer anthem \”Young Folks\”, but with Peter Bjorn and John’s latest release, “Living Thing”, the Swedish trio have gone on to redefine the term quirky, and our mainstream definition of what “pop” is.  They still have that european pop flare that produced a UK Top 20 Hit, but have experimented with a few other various styles on their latest album; now you can hear Depeche Mode influence, Stone Roses, and even an occasional hip-hop flavor.

If you get a chance, check out the new album, or check them out on tour……They’re opening for Depeche Mode all summer!!!

And now, the inspiration for this post….

Peter Bjorn and John came into a radio station I work at as an audio engineer and on-air jock, and decided to play a few tracks for us live on the air!  Once I discovered the mix was confirmed, I immediately volunteered to engineer the mix, grabbed some assistants from the Live Mix Department, and began preparing.  The A&R guy drove PB and J up to our station (WERS 88.9 Fm in Boston), introduced us, and the band began to setup their equipment while I worked on an input list.

WARNING, some of the next paragraph is audio-lingo…Feel free to skip it and jump to the video!

The guys brought 2 small tube guitar amps (from some custom company I’d never heard of), one for acoustic gtr, and one for their tiny 80s-esqu keyboard, and used our Fender Twin Verb amp to add flavor to their electronic drum machine.  We mic-ed all of the amps, ran a DI on the Drum Machine, mic-ed up the two singers, and put additional microphones up on the acoustic (to blend with the distorted amp sound).  After 40 mins of setup time, we went through a quick soundcheck, and seeing the kick drum we’d left in the studio, John decided to use it along side his drum machine.  We positioned it more as a large tom than kick, as he wanted to use it both for rimshots (like a snare) and as a tribal floor tom (you can really hear it on the third track they perform).

The below video was recorded inside the studio, while I mixing, live on the radio (and is synced with my mix that aired).  They play 3 full length songs, with an interview portion in between each track.  The first track is a a broken down blues version of their latest hit single, Nothing To Worry About, followed by the electro-Pop “It Don’t Move Me”,  and closed out with the title track “Living Thing” from their latest album.

The guys were a lot of fun to work with, and have a great dry humor (as is displayed in the interview).

Enough talk….ENJOY!!!

more about “WERS 88.9 FM – Artist Interview: Pete…“, posted with vodpod

Like what you hear? Check out their myspace @ http://www.myspace.com/peterbjornandjohn

AND their upcoming tour with Depeche Mode This Summer!

Coming Soon:

Reviews of Phoenix’s brand New Album, some Summer Driving Mixes, a Video of Reggae Legend Burning Spear recorded LIVE on the radio, Boston natives Boston Molasses Disaster, and maybe even some Easy Star Allstars, Jesse Dee, or Sara Watkins.

Until then, here’s some more Peter Bjorn and John to tide you over

Peter Bjorn and John\’s Latest Single – Nothing To Worry About (Album Version)

Peter Bjorn and John – Young Folks (Album Version)

Peter Bjorn and John – Young Folks (Kanye West Remix)

Peter Bjorn and John – Nothing To Worry About (Leht Mojoe Remix)

-Sean

*Special Thanks to WERS 88.9 FM for the video

http://www.wers.org/music/artists/interviews/PeterBjornJohn.cfm#

For the full article about the performance*

Placebo’s Back, And This Time They Mean Business!

The boys of Britain, getting ready to finally colonize the US

The Brits are back, and angrier than ever!

The British alternative rockers ‘Placebo’ just released their brand new album ‘Battle for the Sun’, and its not what you’d expect from the boys.  Deciding to move in a slightly different direction after parting ways with their long time drummer Steve Hewitt, the group enlisted the help of  Steve Forrest (Formerly of Evaline) to hold down the beat, and power through the new album.

This album is strange, in that the first time you listen through from beginning to end, its good, but you don’t know what to think of it.  Its the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time through that tracks like ‘For What It’s Worth’ (see video below), and my personal favorite ‘Breathe Underwater’ (see below for audio sample) really shine and begin to grow on you.   When I first picked up Battle for the Sun, I thought it was good….when I put it down today to read the album tracks, I realized it was something special.

The band has noticeably changed route from their more simplistic sing-a-long stylings of Meds, and synth-scape driven sounds of Sleeping With Ghosts, as ‘Battle for the Sun’ hits hard and often. Punchy, aggressive, dissonant with a twist of pop, ‘Battle for the Sun’ is the type of album that makes you WANT to hear the songs live….Just to see how hard they can rock!

On that note, Placebo are coming to the US soon, with a decent sized tour scheduled for this fall.  My recommendation….see them live just to experience the potential that ‘Battle for the sun’ hints at.

Placebo US Tour Dates:

12th Sep – Roseland Theatre, Portland OR – ON SALE July 17th
13th Sep – The Show Box at Market, Seattle WA – ON SALE July 11th
14th Sep – Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver BC – ON SALE July 17th
16th Sep – Murray Theatre, Murray UT – ON SALE July 11th
17th Sep – House Of Blues, Las Vegas NV – ON SALE July 18th
20th Sep – Club Nokia, Los Angeles CA – ON SALE July 11th
21st Sep – SOMA, San Diego CA – ON SALE July 10th
23rd Sep – Gothic Theatre, Denver CO – ON SALE July 11th
25th Sep – La Zona Rosa, Austin TX – ON SALE July 11th
26th Sep – House Of Blues, Dallas TX – ON SALE July 17th
27th Sep – Beaumont Club, Kansas City MO – ON SALE July 25th
2nd Oct – House Of Blues, Chicago IL – ON SALE July 25th
3rd Oct – Newport Music Hall, Columbus OH – ON SALE July 11th
4th Oct – Sonar, Baltimore MD – ON SALE July 10th
6th Oct – The Sound Academy, Toronto ON- ON SALE July 10th
7th Oct – Metropolis, Montreal QU – ON SALE July 10th
10th Oct – Northern Lights, Clifton Park NY – ON SALE July 18th
11th Oct – Terminal 5, New York City NY – ON SALE July 10th

For A Sneak Peak at the Brand New Placebo, before you buy the album, give these tracks a listen!

Here’s the Brand New Single…For What It’s Worth

And the title track…Battle for the Sun

One of my favorite Placebo tracks of all time…Breathe Underwater

Cheers!

-Sean

MJ Remixes – To Remember the King of Pop and Keep You Dancing!

The King Of Pop - Casual and smiling

As we all know by now (unless yr living under a rock, or in Ohio), Michael Jackson, the King of Pop is dead.  I’d rather not talk about his legal woes, child abuse allegations, and personal life over the years, but rather stick to his music.  Thriller is the greatest selling album of all time, like it or not, and Michael Jackson was one of the most celebrated pop stars in American history.  Instead of mourning his loss, I think it would be more of a tribute to just enjoy his music, and celebrate what an amazing performer, songwriter and singer he was.  As far as I can tell, Michael loved music; it was his life, so here are a couple awesome MJ remixes I’ve found.  Dance, Party, and Enjoy!

Don Diablo – “Song for MJ (Remember the Time)

Smooth Criminal (LAZRtag remix)

Bad (Mowgli is Bad Remix)

Thriller (Laidback Luke Remix)

If you want more MJ remixes…. check out http://blog.welikeitindie.com/2009/06/michael-jackson-1958-2009/

More Tunes soon!

-Sean

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