De-effect/Diminished

[Rocco]

Holy shit, I love this song. I mean, all of SFTTC is really good but this last song just really does it for me. The unearthly chords that are being played when Damon starts singing "give take away" are just incredibly cool.

I need more Speaking Canaries.

[Tetragrammatn]

I just got the long version of Get Out Alive myself. Personally though I never really make it through listening to the entirety of SFTTC... I think it's because there's a high pitched buzz throughout some parts of the album that gives me a headache. Does anybody else notice this? I'm pretty sure it's there.

[Rocco]

It's not just you. I notice the sound, too. It's only mildly painful at first for me, though, and after a little while I can pretty much ignore it.

[swax]

That feedback-like squeal was supposed to be removed at mastering time, but whatever went wrong in the studio was more permanent than the engineer thought. My suggestion is to have a couple of coctails so the guitar tones overwhelm the problem.
cheers.

[ShawnPhase]

i have nothing to say about this tone.

phase

[xtrizeme]

I haven't been able to copy the opening chords of Houses and Houses of Perfectness even though I've heard the song 5,000 times. It's really hard to even mentally hear the chords in your head without hearing the record playing along. Probably most guitarists here are aware of this but Damon doesn't tune his guitars to a proper note. The strange pulling sound Damon gets is due a lot to tuning. Standard tuning is EADGBE. Most guitarists that use alternate tunings tend to either use different intervals or just tune down 1/2 or whole steps. But what Damon does is kind of tune down to a color(not any kind of standardized frequency) and tune his guitar accordingly. It's pretty much the same concept as a painter painting the yellow he wants to see versus what the color yellow would be in a Crayola box. It's a pretty basic concept, but I've been amazed at the amount of musician friends I have who have never even thought of it, and honestly I myself had'nt until trying to figure out how the fuck Damon was tuning his guitar.

[swax]

Hey. Actually Damon's tunings are all quite mapped-out and exacted for each song. That is why he used to have about 5 guitars on stage at any show. He tunes to either a disonant chord or a major one and then that is what the guitar parts come out of. My favorite "tone" he got back in the day was the intro of "any 3 days" where he was kind of massaging the chords with a triangle. Yes, a triangle.
I'm not sure, but I doubt that the tuning for "houses and houses" is too far from standard 4/40 tuning.
-cheers.

[xtrizeme]

That's pretty interesting, and I don't doubt that you're right. I got a sound pretty similar to the Last-side of Town song utilizing what I was talking about, but the shit on sfttc is truly bizarre sounding. I think I'm gonna be a tuning monkey for the next few days. You seem pretty tuned into the Canaries, do you have any idea what's going on with the band? I talked a little bit with the guitarist from the new Don Cab incarnation (the one that doesn't look like Otho from Beetlejuice) He said that they were practicing and that he was the new drummer, which bummed me out because I think Noah Leger is the best rock drummer I've ever seen. That was like 6 months ago. Nice to see some activity on this thread. I saw the Canaries play once, and I've never seen a band, even Don Cab, just absolutely blow away a room. Amazing.
Thanks.

[swax]

Yeah, the new-caballero guitarist is the new drummer for the band. He's guite good and his name is Gene. There is an awesome guy named Sean who does a radio show on WRCT in Pittsburgh, he recorded them recently at the station and I have only heard 2 songs from that session but it sounded great.

And just to be a total geek:
For the SFTTC album damon was using mostly yamaha pacifica guitars, including one with custom pickup built into the middle of the neck to crank-up his tapping parts, and was running 2 4X12 cabinets with a newer orange head on one and an older fender head on the other. It was as loud as a fucking airplane even though he used one of those marshall "power brake" things to take some of the load off.

[njm]

Nice to see some activity on this thread.

Yeah, thanks for posting the interesting info swax and xtrizeme.

[xtrizeme]

I checked out the wfmu thing yesterday and was pretty stoked. Does swax or anyone know if their are plans to record or tour. I mean that's a whole new album of material. Sweet stuff. Damon needs to get out there and rock the world, cuz I think I'll be too busy to do it.

[swax]

I heard something about a plan for an April east-coast tour, but I'm not sure really. I hope they make it over to the mid-west so I can get a fix too.....