din within | Digital Din

Secret Stash Volume I

July 15, 200807/15/08

Occasionally I will roll out a cool demo track, archive or other interesting tidbit from my musical past. Here’s #1 in the series.

This could have made a very cool bonus track on the Din Within CD, for sure – wish I’d thought of it at the time. It’s an early demo of the song “The Bottom/Between Two Lives” that I put together to show Josh my early concepts. Some of those concepts made it into the final song, some didn’t. And of course, this track is before Josh got all his gooey guitar goodness into the track.

The demo clip (and the “Between Two Lives” part of the song) is based on “Thru the Haze,” a song I actually wrote for a songwriting contest when I was in High School. You can read the “Din Diary” (blog) at DinWithin.com for more details on the song’s creation, but the condensed version of it is this: I radically re-arranged parts of that song, and Josh and I re-orchestrated it and combined it with a song he wrote called “The Bottom” to create the song that made it onto the album.

So, the lyrics used in this demo are the original “Thru the Haze” chorus, which we scrapped and completely re-wrote for “The Bottom/Between Two Lives.” The drums on the clip are my programmed sample drums, and the instruments and vocals are all me. The synth solo was replaced with an amazing guitar solo (by Josh) in the final song. And of course, the song’s overall layout was changed substantially, with new parts that Josh and I composed and produced together, etc.

But you can hear the beginnings of some of the textures we used, and I always find it quite interesting to compare songs with their early demos; you can hear my stamp on the song by listening to the demo, and you can hear Josh’s by comparing it to the released version.

So without further ado: the early demo (circa Feb. 2005) of “The Bottom/Between Two Lives”!

din within, mp3, music

An introduction

July 5, 200807/05/08

1 Responses

So here I go, I guess it’s time to start blogging. All the cool kids are doing it, so maybe I should too. I’ve always been a sucker for peer pressure.

Seriously, though – here’s the gist of it; lots of musicians are on the web, hawking their band, selling their album, talking about gear, etc. So I thought that this would be a nice way for me to do that and more – share experiences with musical oddities like modifying guitars (I do that a lot), circuit-bending (I just started playing with that), and creating insane guitar or bass rigs with all sorts of bells and whistles (I’ve done that for myself as well as helped others with it). So I’ll be talking about a lot of that sort of stuff as it occurs to me to do so. I’ll probably ramble on about old musical projects, neat toys, long lost instruments I never should have sold, etc. Hope that interests you.

Who I am is a lifelong musician; son of a vocal/general music teacher (Mom) and a former music major/club musician/music store owner – and now, boss (Dad). My primary instruments are voice and bass (bass guitar and upright bass), but I’m a multi-instrumentalist and therefore own a large collection of other stuff – keyboards, drums, guitars, mandolins, didgeridoos, trumpets, and much more. I have my own studio, which I call Digital Din; my training is purely “on-the-job” as far as engineering goes, but last November my group Din Within released our debut album; it’s an album that (with writing partner Josh’s help) I recorded, engineered, mixed and mastered myself. Of course, I was also responsible for much of the performance. It’s done quite well worldwide; it’s available for sale at Amazon.com, CDBaby.com, iTunes, Napster, and many more (check out the Digital Din Homepage for a list of many of the retailers at which it can be purchased.)

So that’s about it for now. I think my first post of real content will probably be about my “new” bass – actually a 4-banger from the 80’s that I bought to recreate my first bass – one I wish I still had (for sentimental reasons only) but don’t because I sold it to a former co-worker (Tom Wetzel – you still have my bass, man?)

Anyway, tune in soon for that post. Thanks for reading!

bass, din within, musical instruments, studio