My Band

[drenrin2120]

I play guitar and and sing. The recordings we got now are bad, in our basement experiments.
We play ska.
If we ever get some decent tracks together, I'll just let you guys download them free, 'cuz I don't expect to ever have the means of selling them to you guys.
So, yeah... ***LINK***

[ZeroKirbyX]

I'm... not digging it. I hate to tell you man. I can't hear the vocals at all, though it sounds like he's trying to do some Johnny Rotten thing. I liked the upbeat parts, but it sounded like generic ska. The pounding parts just sounded like, well, random pounding.

[Meiscool-2]

Hehe, the name makes me feel all jolly.

I'll give ya a listen tomorrow. Right now I should be in bed...

[Ben]

All recording quality aside...
And i am a conneseur of ska music...

You are horribly generic at the points where you are trying to shove the ska down my throat. The horns are terrible.
The Random thrash is poorly constructed.
And the parts where your guitars are trying too hard to sound like a catchy nofx riff, sound like shitty nofx ripoffs.
The vocals might be good for all I know, but the poor quality leaves me wondering. There is no melodics to the vocals, and nothing that really says ska about that.

Sorry to rip you a new one dude, but that really sucked. I can tell by listening that some of you have talent. Its just that youre all too busy trying to sound like some other low grade punk or ska band.

You cant mix goldfinger faux ska riffs, with a reversed riff from a bad leftover crack song, and a linoleum-esque harmonic power chord. It just dosent mix.
Try focusing on the more reggae aspect of ska....save the heavy **** for the heavy songs. Prove that you can write something that sounds nice, instead of earburning.

I like my share of loud and aggressive music. And i like my share of Punk. And I like my ska. I just like em better when things are consitient. And if inconsitency is your thing, try grindcore instead of ska.

Less distortion, better horns, and some variation to the clean tone riffs (ala repeating 2-3 variations of your verse riff in the same melodic scale, rather then repeating the same riff to acheive the same melodic schematic)


Sorry if i sound overly critical. I have nothing but good intentions here. But if you want to get a fanbase of more then 50 people, youre gonna have to clean up the songwriting. The recording quality is not even an issue. A good song is still good in the worst quality recording.

Good luck. Hope you dont take offense. I meant this all in the most constructive way possible. Even if it sounded like i was telling you flat out that you suck.

Even though I did.

But I followed it up with some sagely advice here. Despite what you may think, I have my fair share of musical experience.

[Moosetroop11]

From what I've heard, most of you are pretty talented but the guys on brass are awful. They sound so lazy and barely seem to even be hitting the note.

I reckon you'd probably better off without them... Other than that I've got no problems with what I heard, really. I'd have to hear to something well recorded.

[drenrin2120]

ouch...
>.<
Well, I wasn't expecting an outpouring of love, but I wasn't expecting that either.
Though I do take everything you guys say seriously.

EDIT: For gem, that one song, Flaming Limbs, is pretty much an inside joke. It was written by a friend of ours who is in another band and we covered it because we thought it would be funny. It's easy to tell why people who don't know what's up can hate that song.

Also, the other two songs called "Slayer" and "Don King's Retreat" are totally and completely a joke.
The only song that's semi serious is Book Burning, but we did that one so much worse than we normally do.

Plus we were missing our saxophone player when we tried to record ourselves because he's a bitch and other various things.
For the longest time we haven't had **** to show for all our work. We've been recording with a semi-professional guy for free, but because it's free, it's taking a long time. We got tired of waiting and trying to get in contact with him, so in the meantime we came up with this pile of crap.

We know it sucks, we only did single takes of our songs. But at this point, we figured we don't really care too much. We posted it because we won't be able to do this again live with the full band for weeks, maybe months

I'm not trying to come up with excuses and I do take everything people say into deep consideration. I'm simply saying as a band, it's been rough going for us. We're smack in the middle of a shitty Hardcore scene. Now when I say shitty hard-core scene, I'm not talking hardcore metal, or hardcore punk. I'm talking just straight, Tough guy hardcore bullshit. And the few kids that do like Ska, don't like us because we get a little hardcore sometimes. Have you ever heard of ska-core? (see, I don't mind hardcore, but I prefer it more as a seasoning than as an entree if you know what I mean.)

I've come to realize that ska-core is really tough to pull off, 'cuz if you're gonna play something that ridiculous you have to be really good or else it's gonna sound like ****. Which is probably why a lot of our newer songs are more ska/jazz/punk-ish.

Again, not just trying to make up excuses. I'm just trying to pull some dignity out of this and explain myself a bit.

[Archem]

I can barely hear a thing going on there, but what I do hear is either a little boring, generic, or ska. In my book, those are all bad things. Work to be a bit more catchy, a little more inventive, and a little less ska. If you can't do that, then have the vocal parts be more melodic. That's usually enough to counter mediocre instrumental work.

Oh, and feel free to ignore my ska-related points. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean other people don't either. You should put more emphasis on the horns if you really want to keep that sound. It's so bland as it is.

[ZeroKirbyX]

Dren, if all you're going to do is come up with excuses about why you didn't do things right, why not wait until you can do it all right before you make a thread?

[drenrin2120]

Idk, I guess I was just excited to have a recording of us, it took a while to realize they suck.

[Archem]

Lol. Hey it's no big deal. Just, you know, get better.

[Dragonium]

Criticism on your one "serious" song: everything was pretty good, apart from the vocals, which I couldn't really hear so fair point, and your brass players, who need some serious practice. They were either out-of-tune or out-of-time for nearly the whole thing.

[Meiscool-2]

Well, now that the songs are suddenly jokes I don't really feel like listening to them.