Blood Apple live in the Brewery Bar, McKennas, Monaghan celebrating the Best Pub in Ulster award! This was broadcasted live across todayfm! Stay tuned for some more videos from The Dominican Affair.
Filmed by Dara Mc Cluskey.
I think we stared advertising for this album about 3 years ago, and you may still see it spray-painted around certain parts of Monaghan Town or engraved on the footpath! Well, a few years in the making, this short, 7-track, album is finally being released by ‘The Dominican Affair’.
Readers of my blog are going to be privileged enough to get a sneak preview of the finished product before it is officially released next month. We haven’t decided if we are going to release the album for free download yet; I’m all for it but the others aren’t buying it. But I have provided 30-sec exclusive clips of all of the tracks below. The line-up is as follows; although the CD might not be in this order:
I think that there are wide variety of genres in this album, I couldn’t really hold it to any one particularly but I’m open to suggestions! We got a good deal considering what we paid for I think, and I have to give a big thanks to both Tommy Flack, who recorded the album, and Keith Corbet who mixed the album with Tommy free of charge. I am very happy with the result, although there are some things I would pay more attention to if I was to do it again! We hope to have the albums on sale in the next three weeks or so and they will be available here on my blog from that point on. Without further hesitation h, here are the tracks:
Feedback welcome! If you are interested in seeing us perform we are playing on Allison Curtis Today fm at 11pm Wednesday 21st October 2009, and we are also appearing in Whelans, Dublin on 5th December 2009.
Would you believe it? It’s the first anniversary of my Blog! I have officially been ranting about shite for a whole year!
Anyway to celebrate the birthday of my Blog I decided to do it up a wee bit. I added a nice wee sidebar to my theme, which I am actually thinking of releasing at some stage in the near future. Also I added a new download manager to http://files.macaoidh.name . It is very useful; it keeps track of how many people are downloading what. Hopefully in the future it will give me an idea of what people that view my blog like and don’t like. I will actually have to go over all my previous posts and make sure that the download links are correct considering there was a big change in the link format.
The only real reason I wrote the thing is because someone has commissioned me to do something similar, starting next week. But the commissioned work will be a bit more complete and stuff. So feel free to try and hack my system. I don’t want to find faults when I’m finished writing it and then have to go back… The manager also serves as a very useful tool for me. I have included an admin area in which I can log in, upload files and choose to store them, make them available for download or even to download + password protect them! This feature will no doubt come in handy, I like to think of it as my personal, non-user-information-gathering, version of Google Docs!
What else has been happening recently… ooh I am in the process of making/releasing an album with The Dominican Affair. It is called Stealing the Ceiling. We have our last mixing session this weekend and hope to have it available on piratebay towards the end of October! It will also be available to purchase or download at http://www.holygrailrecords.com
Just thought I’d mention that 6th year is terribly shit. I can manage to squeze about 2 hours of programing in thrice a week. Also I am doing an Introduction to Computer Science Programing course in UCD over the next few months just to prepare me for college and to make sure that I actually want to study Computer Science! It will be good craic to learn Java at that course; I plan to make a facebook application/game when I have learned Java and base it in Monaghan.
Oghgbjkc damn! I just realised that I still haven’t renewed my macaoidh.name subscription! Better get to it… three days left…..
The Dominican Affair recorded for the first time ever on Saturday. What can I say – it was an experience! It was not a professional recording and therefore the sound quality is not perfect. Over all I think that it is a reasonable first attempt for us.
I really didn’t expect that it would be as hard as it was. It took us eight hours to record one song! Never mind the mixing the sound engineer had to do afterwards! We started with the guitar, then he put a computerised drum loop in along with it – which can still be heard sometimes in the finished version! Then the bass, then the vocals and then the drums. Christina was the only one to get it right on the first attempt. The guitar took ages. One thing that I don’t think the engineer understood was that the guitar in this song is supposed to be discrete and very low. Background music nearly. He actually put two guitar tracks over each other and put distortion on one of them which was a bit of an overkill I think.
The bass went smoothly aswell but it took a few attempts to get it right. I don’t think that the bass is loud enough in the finished version either. We like it very loud in this song! Then came my turn. Absolutely terrible. It was so damn hard. I was playing with a metronome and the rest of the band in my ear. But as soon as I started playing I couldn’t hear anything through my ear. And they kept telling me to hit the drums as hard as I would playing live but when I did that I could hear even less. Vicious circle really because I kept going out of time. Eventually I had to simplify the drums, take out some of the breaks and try my best to hear what was coming in my ear. In the end we got an ok recording, though the sound quality wasn’t that good. We didn’t have the best equipment…
I should also mention that this is a greatly shortened version of this song. The full version hits seven minutes. We recorded it minus one verse and a chorus. Then the engineer digitally removed a few bits including the guitar solo. That’s why you might hear a not perfect transition between the drum roll and the last chorus.
There are a few things that made it hard for me. The tempo of the song is slow in the verse and a bit quicker in the chorus, but the computerised metronome cannot change tempo so I had to re-learn the song with this standardised tempo! The other thing is that I am a drummer and as a drummer I don’t keep in time. I set the fucking time man! I was trying to stay in time with everyone else where as usually everyone else is staying in time with me. I can set the time and keep to it but I just found it really hard to follow everyone else! Also the drums drive the song. I am responsible for making the song exciting to the other musicians and to really hammer it in when it should be hammered in. But when we recorded we did not have each other there to guide and inspire.
Taking all that into consideration and not being too harsh since the people who recorded us did it for free I do not think that this is an example of The Dominican Affair experience. It’s too not us. It’s too steady and conformist and the same. There is no great display of talent here because we just werent all that inspired. There is no atmosphere. I hope that this does not mean that we are destined to be a “live band”. Anyway I know that this post has been all negative but I really do have to thank the people that helped us make this recording happen. It was a great learning experience and it lets us know that if you think your tight then your not tight enough, you must know that your tight! That’s enough moaning it’s time to let you decide for yourself what the song is like!
Download the single for free here.
Listen to the single on our Bebo page.
Let me know what you think of it now. I know I’m just being critical because I have played this thing a million times and this time I could not get it right!