Music Makers

Three Music Thingz with a person named Rose

Ya don't say, it's another rendition of Three Music Thingz, the blogseries where I ask musicians for three thingz that are essential to their music-making.

Today we have a person named Rose! An artist in Glendora, CA who releases music beneath an assortment of umbrellas, including The Everfree Forest ("synth rock") and Peanut, Tree Nut, & Gluten Free ("geeky pop songs"), a person named Rose has a new 6-track EP called August Demo out on Birmingham, Alabama label (^_^) Records.

They described the EP as "a bunch of weirder serious songs that didn't fit in any boxes" recorded on a TASCAM Porta-07; rather than maniacal twee-punk songs about PEZ candy or wonky '80s-style ballads about penguins on Venus, August Demo contains subtle and tuneful bedroom-indie-style tracks that feel charmingly raw. My favorites are the bedraggled, foreboding "Crow Song," if only because I'm always down for a celebration of corvids and their behavior, and the insistently catchy "Rattlesnake." At a time when it's easier than ever to produce slick highly produced music, sometimes with a mere AI prompt, I'm never ever going to get sick of DIY tape recordings—gimme the imperfection, gimme the hiss babe.

A person called Rose was kind enough to provide three thingz for the blog...read 'em now!

COLLABORATION WITH OTHERS

I've been doing solo stuff since 2017-ish, starting off as MIDIs made in an old copy of Mixcraft or crappy guitar demos done on an cheap SG I had as a kid, but I only really hit my stride in 2021 when I started making music with my girlfriend Jay (who is a seriously incredibly talented singer and songwriter) that later transmogrified itself into the bands I'm in now, The Everfree Forest and Peanut, Tree Nut, & Gluten Free. Writing in a band is fairly different than doing stuff on your own as you can probably guess, but it also helps to post solo things into our private Discord channels going like "hey, is there anything I can do better with this song?" and such—sometimes this turns into getting them or other friends on solo recordings, which is very fun!

On my August Demo, most of it is me solo since most of my music friends live in other parts of the country/world and it's a little hard to run a microphone plugged into a 4-track that far, but on "Never A Fantasy" I used my friend Kole's drum set; if I remember correctly, I posted this message on my Instagram story that was like "hey, if there's any people around Glendora that have a drum kit and don't mind me recording it I would greatly appreciate that", and he replied almost instantly which wound up with me at his place recording drums for a few things two weeks later. As a side note, adjusting to using a properly set up drum kit after getting used to Frankenstein-ed junk is very difficult.
CHEAP EQUIPMENT
I won't be the first or the last to say this, but as a broke musician I've learned to enjoy the jankiness of whatever inexpensive/free stuff I can get - the most expensive thing on my demo is probably the Tascam Porta-07 multitracker itself, which was untested on eBay and itself has its own troubles (part of why there are things performed less-than-ideally I would have overdubbed otherwise, like the vocal take in Fantasy) but which was like $75! That's a crazy steal even for a 4-track more basic than it is.

I think now the most expensive music thing I own would be this equally initially-untested Boss DR-110 drum machine I got for $100 that doesn't appear on the album, but will appear on whatever winds up coming next; it's super minimalist even for cheap drum machine standards, it only has like six sounds and two of them are hi-hats, but it does exactly what I need how I want it to and for that I am incredibly grateful. I bought one because Dogbowl used one on his album Fantastic Carburetor Man, but it was only after purchasing it that I found out They Might Be Giants, my favorite band, used it on some of their 1984 demo and some of the super early tracks from around that time. Happenstance is awesome like that.
SONGWRITING CHALLENGES

This one comes with a bit of backstory! I used to hang around a Discord server for this record label that presses a lot of indie stuff which heavily shaped my music taste in my teens—mostly things that fall under the label of "internet music", as shoehornish as that feels. I was going through the musical catalog of one of their founders and stumbled upon a bunch of albums he made during February Album Writing Month (where you write 14 songs in 28/29 days), which immediately made me realize that was a thing I wanted to do, and so since 2022 that's been a thing I've done with Jay and whoever else is around!

It helps me get my musical bearings—a lot of the times I get into songwriting slumps where I don't write new songs for a while, but usually I snap out of it by just kinda... writing more, which is why I like FAWM a lot. A lot of the time I forget I can write whenever I want to, even if it's not super great; I'm into both the Album-a-Day project as initially proposed by Tom 7 and SongFight! as a result of this, I really ought to do the former again soon. I guess this is less so an intentional challenge and more a limitation, but part of why I recorded these songs on a 4-track is that you don't really get much room to fuck around—even if you fill up all four and bounce a mono instrumental mixdown to another tape, you still only get seven total tracks to mess around with, which is precisely one less than what my copy of Ableton Lite lets me use. It helps me get less in my own head about overly complicating the mix on accident, since you can't really do that if all you have is a drum track, a guitar, and two vocals, or two guitars and one vocal, or what have you.