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.
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!
I got tagged by Kae today. I had actually never herd of the thing before, I just don’t do enough blog reading I guess! Anyway it’s tough to list seven things that people don’t already know. I don’t have much to talk about so don’t be surprised if you know half of these things already!:-)
1. I was sixteen on 19th September > Virgo (What a sign – a fucking mermaid!). I am still in fifth year at school which i absolutely detest. In fact the only thing that is keeping me in there is the promise of College. From my perspective that is heaven! Parties all the time – and when there are no parties I will be studying for tests by Programming! What more could you want? I should probably mention that I have been in an all Irish school for my whole life and that I talk Irish at home. Native language gotta be done. Oh and just for the record my name, Conor Mac Aoidh is pronounced “Mac í” or “Mac e”.
2. I play the Drums in two bands > The Pot Smokin’ Pirates and The Dominican Affair. Guess which one I enjoy more? I started the drums when I was 13. Before that I played the bodhran (What a load of shite). I went to drum lessons for about a year then I tought myself. When I finished teaching myself I moved on to teaching other people. At the moment I am practicing for the local Panto. I have done it three times before, it is good crac on the night. Gotta hate the music though! The Pot Smokin’ Pirates where the first band I joined, or should I say formed! They were a school band but soon enough I discovered that school and rock music don’t go so well together! We used to practice in the lead singers garage. One day his older brother asked me to join his band ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’. Thats when I really got to grips with the drums – I was playing with a band three years older than me! Eventually ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’ got rid of the lead singer, found a new one and formed The Dominican Affair!
3. I am Oifigeach na hAirgeadais for Ógra Shinn Féin Muineacháin. I don’t want to delve to deeply into this because once you start me I can’t stop! Basically I support and am a member of Sinn Féin. I am in favor of a democratic-socialist, anti-neo-libiralist, egalitarian 32 county united Ireland. Make Partition History! 26 + 6 = 1.
4. Oh what else… I am half Scotish, half Irish and was born in England. I used to collect Warhammer! God I have to include that because it was not a minor thing in my life. For those of you who are familiar with the way it works, I had a 3,000 point Empire Army! That is pretty massive for a ten year old in fairness. The strange thing is that I used them for display. I only ever played a couple of times and found the games to complicated. My main concentration was actually painting the things. I used to paint them like a machine. I also had millions of nobles and all that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have enough points to incorporate them! Come to think of it my first army was High Elves. By the end of my Empire collection I had gotten pretty good at painting the models. Then I started with Bretonians. I had just enough of them to play – two core units and a general. I recently got rid of almost everything in my collection. I kept only a few things. My two best painted pieces – ‘The Green Night’ and a Celtos model which I made a cool base for. Also I have an old White Dwarf from the 80’s signed by the Eavy Metal Team. I might Ebay it! I think that I have enough to make a core unit and general army at the moment!
5. PHP. This tagged thing is directed towards the language users so I had better talk about it. I started learning HTML at the end of 2007 as part of a school transition year course. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then by chance I got work expierence with the local web design company, webworks last summer. That is were i learned CSS and began on PHP. Not to soon after that I got hooked on the language and I love it! I am currently writing Furasta CMS, which will be in beta of it’s first “stable” version by the end of next week, hopefully! I am a linux user and have been since November! I started out with Mandriva One 2009 and then recently moved on to Fedora 10. I think that Linux bears a big role in the future of computers in general.
6. I can fight. With a sword I mean! I trained for Medieval Historical Re-enacting for too many years. I did all the shows where you dress up and people stare at you and ask you if they can look at your sword. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be really. It’s like any other physical sport. You do the same thing over and over and over untill you can do it in your sleep! Then finally once you have done it for a few years you dump the wooden swords and go on to metal! I have to say the proper equipment is pretty cool. It’s quite tough to fight with armour actually because it weighs a ton. I learned how to fight with a sword. shield, staff, pike, bow and arrow and claymore. I haven’t really done anything with it in the last year but there is talk of it starting again so you never know!
7. This is tough… Em… I am an atheist. I believe that believing in God is a completely personal thing and that it should have nothing what-so-ever to do with the state and especially the schools! I don’t have a problem with anyone else that believes in god I just hate the fact that so much trouble has been caused in this world because of religion. I was not baptised and brought up to make my own decision – and I have! 
It annoys me that my school gets massive “grants” from Catholic Associations and therefore it is a Catholic School. Not only that but the fact that I have to take time out of classes to go to mass four times a year. Basically I think that religion in schools should be eradicated, but the religion class should be kept. I think it is a good idea to discuss religions and to make people aware that there are much more religions out there than Catholicism and that they should make their own decision rather than blindly following the crowd.
Now onto the tagging. I am bound by the rules to tag seven other people. The problem is that I only know one PHP developer and that is the person who tagged me! So for now I will leave this part. But I will update it once I meet other enthusiasts, so I’m not breaking the rules!
Rules