Wednesday, November 30, 2011

That's Enough

We've got two songs in the fight this week:

Martin, Sam, and Ken as BSS and Glen and Ken as Semolina Pilchards.

Check it out!

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

We're on the Facebook!!!

Hey All,

Sam made us a great Facebook band page, so you can now like us on Facebook.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

new song - "the last afternoon of a woman he only thought he knew"

Song Fight! entry #59 for us is up now in current fight! This time the title is "the last afternoon of a woman he only thought he knew". Wow, that's long! Anyway we wound up going through a very atypical process to create this song. Ken and Martin couldn't make it to our Tuesday night jam, so Glen and I wrote the music. Ken wrote the lyrics bu wasn't able to play the drums and mix the song, so I wound up mixing the song and using some drums I recorded Tuesday night. I also played bass and added some synth tracks and sang. So if you don't like something in this song it's probably my fault! Anyway, here's the link: "the last afternoon of a woman he only thought he knew" - Berkeley Social Scene

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Occupy My Heart

Hey All,

We're in this week's fight, Occupy My Heart.

We had two jams to put this together. The song started with a keyboard riff in 7/8 that we decided would sound cool if it phased over a regular 4/4 song. We started there and quickly wrote the rest of the song. It took a while to track, but we got the music down. The rest of the week was spent editing and adding more keys. This week we got together to track the vocals and mix. Everything was going well until Cubase decided it didn't want to export the keyboard parts with the rest of the track. Somehow we got everything working and our complete song is available for your enjoyment.

Video coming soon!

Be well,
Ken

Friday, October 14, 2011

Out of a Hat

Hey All,

The BSS crew was busy this week and we actually took part in 3 different songs in the current Songfight.

1. Berkelyn Social Scene - Our good friend Roymond was in Oakland for business and we were able to collaborate with him again. We put together a fun song with Glen and Roy on guitar, Martyr on bass, Ken on drums, Sam on rhodes, and Erin singing.

2. Merijamby - JB, the Fightmaster Jr. himself, was also in town on business and stopped by Erin and Sam's house for a visit. They put together this song in a night which also features Amy.

3. Zinkline - Power trio action at it's best with Glen, Martyr, and Ken writing a recording this quick song in a few hours the night before the deadline.

Thanks for listening, and if you are so inclined to vote, do it!

Next week... Has Been For Years

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Thretening to Some

Hey All,

We are in this week's fight Threatening to Some. Our song is about Martin's views on Veganism.

This track came together in less than a week. Glen, Martin, and Ken wrote and recorded the main bulk of the song on Tuesday. Glen and Martin finished up vocals and solos on their own. Ken added the rhodes riff and mixed it all together into what you hear now.

If you have the time to listen, I hope you will.

One change at Songfight this week. You now have to vote for at least two songs when you vote. This is to avoid people going to the site and just voting for their friends. You probably weren't doing that anyway.

On to the next song...

Be well,
Ken

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Only French I Know

Hey All,

We are in this week's fight The Only French I Know.

This is a one Tuesday song. Glen came up with the chord pattern while waiting for the rest of the guys to show up. This time we had Berminator X on lead guitar. Glen played his 11 string guitar (the 2nd G always breaks) through his amp even though he kinda hates that sound and intended to redo the 11 string straight to a mic, but ran out of time. Berminator has some sweet guitar parts on this guy. Ken steals the show with the synth lead. It was Sunday night before the deadline when Glen finally had time (not without marital bargaining) to lay down some vocals. This was particularly tough since we had no lyrics in this 11th hour. So he made them up as he was recording. That was kind of fun for him, because he didn’t know where the song was going. Anyway, we love the song. Glen wishes the vocals and lyrics were stronger, and he could re-record the rhythm guitar, but all the other guys did awesome stuff, especially Ken! Martin played some sweet bass too, and he championed my weird time changes. Hopefully you all will like the way it came to together as well.

BSS

Thursday, August 18, 2011

We moved!

We moved to a nice clean well appointed rehearsal room at a professional facility in Oakland. It's awesome! Pictures coming soon. Over the months we have still been entering Song Fight! pretty regularly, though we haven't been updating this blog. You can find all our entries here:

http://sfjukebox.org/artists/Berkeley+Social+Scene

We're climbing our way up the chart of most entries for a single band name. We also had a win recently under the name "Yardley Social Scene" collaborating with the guy that joined us for our "Monkeys On My Back".

Monday, February 28, 2011

FAWM we are WINNERS

Hey All,

Glen posted our current progress for fawm.org. You can hear all our current demo tracks for the album in reverse order if you are interested. Stay tuned for the final album in a few weeks.

http://fawm.org/fawmers/zinkline/

Be well,
Ken

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

FAWM

Hey All,

We haven't post much lately. Probably because it's been the usual around here, writing songs and recording them.

We are currently working on 14 songs to satisfy the www.fawm.org challenge to write 14 songs during the 28 days of February. We're pretty much done at this point. We've got all the songs written and most of them recorded. We'll be finishing up the recordings in the next few weeks and then posting the album we will probably call, "Suntory Time."

You can hear one of the tracks currently titled "Boron Rod" at www.songfight.org.

Be well,
Ken