The Official Blog Of THE ELMS.

RE:ITERATE v2.0

ATTENTION: If you're here for a studio re-cap, please click on "The Great American Midrange" over there in the list of Categories to the left. Should return you all of the pertinent recording blog entries.

-------

I keep my word.

Nathan Walker from North Carolina (currently attending Appalachian State in Boone, NC) sent this video of him taking a crack at BMYT, sort of.  Not exactly a full version, but I'm impressed that he even gave it a shot.

I consider Nathan my honorary little brother, so maybe this video is way more hilarious to me than it will be to you.

Enjoy 'er.

-- Thom

MASTERIN'...

A quick word: the record has been sent off to the mastering lab, and should be tackled on Thursday.  I've been waiting on the official word before revealing who's doing it, but for now, I'll only let out two things:

1) Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd get to have something I've played on mastered by this guy.
...and...
2) If you like anagrams, try this one:  Bub Old Wig.

There you go.

Rehearsals resume this weekend.  We gotta figure out how to translate the stuff live, you know?

My car's transmission blew up this past week, so I'm a-hoofin' it until I can find something else to drive.  Been doing my research, trying to figure out what I need/want.  I think I'm zeroing in, but if you've got any suggestions/testimonies, feel free to leave a comment.  The most important thing is fuel mileage in the high 30s / low 40s.  Avoiding Ground FX this time around.  Probably staying away from rims and rubber-band tires, too.

-- Thom

RE:ITERATE

Alright... in the BMYT Tab blog, I made a subtle suggestion that some of you should take a crack at it, record it, and upload it to YouTube.  None of you jokers have taken me on yet.  What gives? 

Let's give credit to this girl though - somebody alerted me to this.  I would fully support her going on American Idol and showing all of those chumps what the score is. 

Social Justice has never sounded so sexy.

If you've covered a song of ours, shoot an e-mail to thomas[AT]theelms[DOT]net with the YouTube link and (maybe) I'll post the sucker here.

Owen promises pictures from Seattle.  We'll put them up here, too.  Stay tuned...

-- Thom

RTMFM

Owen is in Seattle for two weeks with mix engineer Adam Kasper.  Kasper is my favorite mixer, and a hero, so to know that he's the one tweaking my guitar tracks is a huge honor.  He's worked with a lot of my favorite bands including Pearl Jam, Queens Of The Stone Age, Foo Fighters, and R.E.M. 

I believe Owen will be shooting us an MP3 tonight of whichever song they decided to tackle first.  I'm always nervous about the mix phase, because what you spent weeks crafting in a studio can come back sounding completely different than how you thought it would, but again... having Adam onboard makes this quite a bit less unnerving.  I've always felt that there's a real sense of purity and danger in the work of those Seattle types.  I know we're Midwestern, but sonically, I've a feeling that Kasper rides a similar philosophical bent.

If you want to stay abreast (heh) on how things are going there on the NW coast, Owen's twittering quite a bit about it.  Follow his updates at Twitter.com/TheElmsOfficial.  It's funny to me that I'm watching my own band's Twitter like a London CCTV camera.  I'm excited!

Let it rock.  Let it roll.  You can't stop a fire burnin' out of control.

-- Thom