Cilikis4 - Songwriting with an electric kit!

February 25, 2023

Well this is a new!! Normally when we write music or rehearse, we do so by making a hell of a racket at Rock City Studios in Upper Coomera for about a year which eventually leads to an album of music to be recorded.  But this time, the writing process is much different.  Our drummer Ty is using an electric drum kit and we are using our practice amps to handle the writing.  I'm using a Fender FM65r solid state amp (12inch speaker) while Frank is using his Spark amp for bass work.  Once we have all the tracks written and pre-prod work done, we will all trundle off to Rock City or even the Belmont Basement to rehearse the material at stage volume and tweak and change it from there until its ready to be recorded!

Already we have noticed a remarkable difference in performance.  The electric kit obviously behaves way different to an acoustic kit so Ty is tweaking the kits parameters like curve and thresholds etc..  The performing using quieter amps requires a cleaner performance for myself and Franks bass, even playing old songs that we only played a month ago with no real issues, playing them much quieter proved to be quite the challenge!

Here's some photos and video of last nights quiet writing session and rehearsals.  Note how we cocked up the song Station 13 as we've never played it this way before! It is insane the way the mind works by telling you "hang on! this is not right, why is the volume so low?" as you proceed to forget how everything seems to go! hah! Sorry for the low quality video, something went funny with the camera focus for some reason, it gets a little better in the middle!

I know it sounds loud in the video but in the room is was no louder than 90db! Normally our rehearsals are about 110 to 118 dB in volume! So this is really different for us and going to take some getting used to that's for sure!