the sound of davis » Astoria

Shifting gears

davis — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:12:33 +0000

The view from our recording space

Changes are rapidly happening in my musical world- Blind Pilot hits the studio Monday morning to begin work on the new record, there are some exciting soon to be announced shows on the horizon, and much of my Portland activity is effectively going on hold. We spent the weekend in the guesthouse of a mansion overlooking Astoria doing some test tracking, and spirits are very high. And man, was it ever incredible to play music as the howling winds and sheets of rain swayed the hundred foot Red Cedars like blades of grass just outside the window!

Liberty Theater, Astoria

davis — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:43:55 +0000

We made another trip out to Astoria to play a concert at the newly renovated Liberty Theater. The band converged at Luke’s Mom’s house on Wednesday afternoon for several hours of photo shoots followed by some rehearsing and some dinner. The next day held more of the same. However, the real accomplishment of our time in Astoria, prior to our actual show, was finally confronting the looming disaster regarding Ian’s Deagan Electravibes. These vibes had never quite worked right since we got them before the Spring Decemberists tour, and at the Outside Lands Festival sound check, the electronics completely stopped working and we had to mic the bars themselves. We could not find any technicians willing to work on such an exotic instrument and with another tour looming, we were dreading the idea of trying to fit Ian’s non-electro vibes into the van with all of our other gear. The answer came when we needed it most: first we decided that with nothing to loose, we would take the instrument apart and try to fix it ourselves. We were able to get good results just by tinkering a bit (the same intermittent functionality as before the failure), but the real solution came with the bold idea to remove all of the built in electronics (this included a preamp, a reverb tank, a vibrato circuit, tone controls, a volume pot, and a power supply). All the bars themselves have electromagnetic pickups attached and these are all wired in series, so we just attached the output from the bars directly to an amplifier and found that the signal was perfectly clean and consistent. By bypassing the electronics module, we greatly simplified the instrument, thereby reducing the future likelihood of malfunction, as well as eliminating all grounding problems. The Electravibes stood up well at the show on Friday night and sounded the best they ever have. This was a huge victory of ingenuity for those of us in the band that care about such things. The Liberty Theater show went well too.

Astoria

davis — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:01:35 +0000

Inside the bus

Astoria practice space

At the photo shoot

We headed out to Astoria on Memorial Day to meet up with the band at Luke’s mom’s house and practice some new arrangements for the week’s upcoming mini-recording session. The weather was beautiful as we drove out on US 30 along the Columbia. As we turned off the highway on the east side of town and headed up the hill and past the Goonies house, we were first greeted by the Blind Pilot bus. It was sitting in a driveway getting its floor ripped out. The bus is a 1971 Crown that will someday, theoretically, act as our tour vehicle. Heading inside Luke’s house for the first time, I was delighted with a whirlwind of books, paintings, instruments, tools, childhood artifacts, and animals- everything that Luke’s place of growing up should have. We practiced for some hours in the dining room, working on some new tunes and cover ideas. The next morning a woman from the Astoria’s HipFish weekly newspaper came to shoot a cover photo for our upcoming feature in that paper. We took some pictures both outside and inside of the bus, and after a few more hours of practice, drove back to Portland.