Tracking 'live' music is Something Beautiful.
Report and Photos by Cathy "Nightcatt" Palmer.
Back in early summer I was invited out to meet friends for Scary Larry from Rebel Radio’s Birthday Bash; -of course, live bands played. One of my friends who works for the band Something Beautiful, instructed me to, “check out the drummer,” in the band, as I’m a big fan of rhythm sections. As the night progressed, bands played and left the stage. I was in deep conversation with my friend [and] my back toward the stage when he said Something Beautiful was on stage now. Part way through the second song on their play list, I turned around to see them as I said, “Hey, these guys are good!” Although I clearly heard the music of an entire band playing, there were only two guys on the stage, and no drummer! Inmediately, I suspected that my friend was playing a joke on me, -as many of them do-, so I did a quick glance around the place to see if anybody was playing remotely, or wireless, and just not up on the stage. Nope, just Dale Tippett Jr. on guitar/vocals, and Justin Smith, bass/vocals. Something Beautiful, “tracks” their music.
Tracking, is a music industry term for using music software programs to compose, arrange, mix and master their music. The band Something Beautiful does not use preprogrammed beats that are available in some software programs. They compose all of their music, note by note and play live with their music accompanying them. Since this hard rockin’, Gothic-style metal band won me over with their music in a club, I decided to see them at a larger venue, The Pear Room, in Mokena, IL., where they played with internationally acclaimed bands Ed Guy and Kamelot.
I was so proud of our homeboys, as they took the stage and immediately started to rock the crowd. The crowd, which had quite the mix of cross over music fans from all ages and all music genres, welcomed and cheered on Something Beautiful as if they were the headliner band for the show! Since their show went off without a glitch, I had a few questions to ask the band, especially since it takes some serious guts to go on a big stage and deliver the type of show they do. I do feel that a lot of bands would not succeed.
So I asked the band members:
CATT: “What was the deciding factor to play live as just a two-piece?”
JUSTIN: ”We were originally in a band called Dark Ritual, which when we were at our best we performed as a three piece (guitar, bass, drums). Then we decided it would be neat to have another guitarist so, we put out an ad for a second guitarist to join the band. We went through countless auditions of terrible guitarist after terrible guitarist. Eventually we found a guitarist who we thought would work out alright. He spent one year with us and it turned out to be the longest, most painful year we have ever had. Toward the end of the year we wouldn’t talk to each other, we would literally just walk in the rehearsal space pick up our instruments, play, and put the instruments back and leave. We would hardly look at each other. This situation is what eventually caused our drummer to quit and join the Air Force. Dale and I didn’t want to continue on the way we were so we fired the second guitarist and then we sat around for a while wondering “What are we going to do now?” Dale had been using Cakewalk for a while at that point, to arrange music, which gave us a crazy idea. Just play as a two-piece. So we spent the next year or so trying to find drums that sounded good. After much experimentation, we finally found an adequate sound, recorded a demo and booked a gig. We played our first show as a two-piece on February 3, 2004 at Elbo Room.”
DALE: “Yeah, we killed like seven computers in the process! I remember we still had to do Dark Ritual material to fill out the set, too...”
CATT: “Since you track your music, do you have an audio tech to assist you while you're playing onstage? If not, do you control your tracking yourselves from onstage?”
JUSTIN: “No, we don’t have an audio tech to assist us. Dale usually has control over the iPod.”
DALE: “We set a play list before each show, then, we go straight through. It puts a lot of pressure on us, to know the song order and remember the cues, but I think it helps keep us focused on the performance.”
CATT: “Are you afraid of a software crash while you're performing?
It's happened to some of the best of national acts and performers and they have audio specialists running their programs.”
JUSTIN: “Sure we are worried about software crashes. When we started playing out as a two-piece we used to take a CD player along. We would then borrow a drum throne from one of the other bands and bungee cord the CD player to the throne. But the CD would still skip. So we then moved on to minidisc that worked well until the minidisk player just couldn’t handle life on the road, so to speak. That is when we first started using iPods. So far that has been the most stable and to date has only skipped once. And that skip is because somebody spilled water where the iPod was laying. The only thing we are really afraid of is when we cannot hear the drums through the monitor. But we have done this enough times to be able to work with the sound guy so that we don’t have that problem.”
DALE: “J's right, the biggest thing to worry about is that the sound guys understand what we need in the monitors. I usually prime the guy, and tell him that all we need is the track and vocals, but every so often we end up playing with our heads aimed at the floor wedges to try to hear the snare drum through the guitar!”
CATT: “A lot of bands like to play their music, "Unplugged," playing acoustic guitars. Knowing that you're tracking, do you write any of your music so that if you did have a software crash you can continue your show, ‘Unplugged?’”
DALE: “That's something that I frankly have not put too mush thought into... I actually do most of the writing on acoustic guitar, and the upcoming record, "Songs About Angels" was written primarily on acoustic guitar. But as far as the show goes, if we have a hardware issue, we got a backup iPod. Most venues cancel shows if they're having electrical problems, and if we're going somewhere that doesn't have a PA or just has a really lousy one, we'll just bring our own - Jon (a DJ from WHPK) has a 3,000 watt system that we end up using quite a bit.”
CATT: “A lot of people think that tracking is cheating. Do you play all of the instruments on your tracks or is it all selecting and arranging from programs?”
DALE: “It's a pretty common misconception is that we are taking some kind of "easy" way out. What folks don't know is that all of the tracks exist in an orchestral-style score in my room somewhere. Each note of every track - drum fills, organ arpeggios, string bits - they were all composed by hand. There's not a single sample of another person's work in any SoB (Short for Something Beautiful) track. In that respect, I view it as being the furthest thing from cheating. If anything, it tends to be a much more involved process for us, since we need to know the mechanics of drum parts, the ranges of stringed instruments, and the mathematical details of every time signature change.
As far as performance goes, if one of us misses a beat, or forgets to complete a phrase, the track will NEVER wait for us to catch up. We don't have the luxury of taking an easier tempo to give ourselves a break. We're locked in, and that forces us to know our parts inside and out before we even think of doing a new song live.
I admit that it may seem odd - two guys onstage doing metal... I've even joked about renaming the band "Gimme a Funny Look", but the best compliment i ever got after a show was when this guy walked up to me, shook my hand and said, " I was trying really hard to NOT like you, but I couldn't help it! You guys ROCKED!"
Something Beautiful is a band worth checking out. If not for their music, for any musicians who considered playing tracked music live and want to see it performed properly.
Visit SoB at www.denythepain.com or http://www.myspace.com/sobmusic where you can hear their music and link to purchase it as well. It is also available on CD Baby, and i-tunes.
Catch their next show on November 7th, 2008 at Nite Cap. (5007 W. Irving Park Rd., Chicago, IL).
Also, Watch for the new movie release, Humboldt Park, where Dale Tippett Jr. has a part playing a guitarist, of course!
Photo by Nightcatt Photography.