Mistakes not to make while recording… and the benefits of listening to your brother.
So for the past 18 months we’ve been recording the new t.o.t.s. album. I don’t like to play live or practice while I’m recording… it’s hard enough for me to focus on recording t.o.t.s. and playing with two other acts to have it all happening at once. That’s me though… and it was a totally fucked decision. Turns out the rest of the band HAS wanted to play and practice while working on the recording… my brother in particular expressed this to me and honestly, I felt like a real asshole. As a result, we’ve moved into record/practice mode right now and I have to admit, I couldn’t be happier. The current line up of Blight, Lars, Ericah and myself is EPIC. Without ANY reservations I can safely say that this is the absolute strongest lineup that t.o.t.s. has ever had. This hasn’t been really evident to me up until now.. we usually record in pairs or individually so all four of us aren’t ever present while in the studio recording (another mistake but with a decent chunk of material left to record this will be changed). Anyway… the practice sessions have been amazing. The combination of personality types in the same room working on these songs has taken them all to new heights, old tracks and new. There’s no way I could possibly convey my enthusiasm adequately in this post, but I promise promise PROMISE you, you will see it on the stage and on the new release (whenever we’re done!).

A follow up on the mobile blogging dealio I mentioned in the previous post… I built a new site www.chvad.com that is loosely based around the ideas mentioned above. It’s structured around utterz, wordpress, blip and flickr. The site isn’t really band related… more of a personal site for me and updated via mobile almost 90% of the time. Experiences, images, videos, whatever.. sometimes art related sometimes just shit with friends. It’s got information about all the other stuff I’m into and will eventually get a little more filled up and organized. I’m slowly noodling with it so we’ll see what happens.

Lights lights lights…
I am considering moving my current lighting platform over to a PC based solution to consolidate what we have to deal with live a little better. I’ve always been into lighting but this could potentially be a pretty costly endeavor so I’m moving slow…

In other non-t.o.t.s. news:
We’ve finally found a drummer for The Qualia (Chvad on synths) and we’ve bumped up the practice time a lot for this act so The Qualia should be performing live pretty soon in NYC and surrounding areas. More on this and shows dates when they happen…
Mr. 1234 (formally The 1234, Chvad on guitar) has booked a couple of private shows to test out our new lineup. Of the three acts, Mr. 1234 will probably be the first out of the gate to resume playing live.

When the doors open it’s going to be a floodgate of live shows around the east coast for all three acts.

That’s it for now.. I’m sure there’s lots of other shit to mentioned but there’s always another post.

Rock!
Chvad

PS… you punks better be reading Blight’s bizarro clown comic!!!!
http://blightproductions.wordpress.com