Victory! To the large Himalayan dwelling mammals!

November 14th & 15th were marked as two of the best days ever in the history of The Yaks.  It was the week of the bi-annual (i think) Battle of the Bands at Muse Music/Cafe in Provo, Utah.  We played Friday night, won, and got to move on to the final round on Saturday.  And on Saturday we completely kicked some serious butt and went on to win 1st place, which was a prize of $150 and 10 hours of recording studio time (which we are going to find out if we can sell, because we do our own recording stuff...).  But don't get me wrong, the other bands were excellent.  I, personally, was a big fan of the Mckay Stevens Project.  Anyway, here are some photos of the band:

This is our first CD's front cover picture.

These were all from Saturday night, but i'll get some from friday because we had some crazy costumes :)

This is Tagg.  This is also my favorite face on Tagg.

mmmm, Sky bringin up the low end.

Here are the Brown Brothers. Joey and Tagg.

And here is the whole gang chillin out in the hall before the show.  And you can definitely see our southern rose, Hillary Gallup, whom is one of our best fans ever, dressed in the crazy green suit thingy. Awesome!

A Monkey Grinder Halloween

So, Halloween rolls around this year, and the question is again raised; What to do. Trick-or-treating as a 19 year old is a frowned upon nowadays. And my friends thought that sitting around watching movies was cool somehow. But I needed something to stir the thick dark, smokey night that is the real Halloween.  So I decided to go to the one and only Monkey Grinder show that's held every year on Halloween night at Velour in Provo. Monkey Grinder

is a wicked awesome circus band. This concert made for an extremely entertaining and creepy night.

This was the opening act. Puppet Grinder they call themselves. That big rack thing in this picture is one giant noise maker. Pretty awesome. 

This is Monkey Grinder. I took guitar lessons from Collin Botts who is there with the guitar. They have an accordionist, some vibrophones (sp?) which are in the very back. And they even have a real one-legged pirate who hits things, off to the left.  

Collin and the clarinetist.

There's the pirate hosting the costume contest at half-time. It was against 'Frank' the creepy bunny from Donny Darko, and a homemade robot costume. 

And Collin again with my favorite guitar, his old Gibson. He also plays a baritone acoustic and a Yamaha SG nock-off. He broke 3 guitar strings within two songs (which sparked the halftime contest) : two on his acoustic and one on this one. 

Pumpkin Heads

Around mid-October I visited my friend's family's cabin, along with my friend's whole family. It was quite the enjoyable trip. And there we carved up some seriously big orange fruits. Or rather large berries. Or Cucurbitaceae. Take a look:

Here we all are ^

This is Carly's boyfriend's pumpkin ^

This is Carly's Pumpkin ^  (yeah, she did that face for a reason, wink* wink*)

This is Isac's pumpkin ^ (i think, could be josh's)

This beauty would be mine ^

And the winner: Pat's Pumpkin ^  This is actually a special tribute to our now new president, Barack Obama. This is a very detailed piece which even includes a gaping hole in the side of his head from which gushes very few innards. 

Streching your imagination

Another Studio update. 

Just about a week ago i received a phone call from my good friend Kami, who is currently attending BYU. She was wondering if i had time to record a friend of her's band in the next little while. I said i'd be glad to and asked what kind of stuff they wanted to record. She replied that it was just acoustic stuff. And considering the ease of just recording a couple guys singing and playing acoustic guitars, i said i could probably do it all in a day. 

10:45PM rolls around and the band walks in the back door. Yes, all of their instruments have to do with acoustics, but they were not quite what i would label 'acoustic'. Turns out, they were a full band. Guitars, bass, drums, piano, and my favorite part, violin. My palms began to sweat and my stomach began to ache with hunger, for the 5 song load of this band could only mean one thing: one heck of an all-nighter. With a Beto's burrito in one hand, and a 2-liter of Vault by my side..... i set off into the audio. 

They are: Imagine Dragons, and you can see their webpages HERE(site) or HERE(mypsace) - Turns out, that this is probably the most talented group of kids i've seen around in awhile. I wish i could have had more time recording and mixing them because the work we did in about 14-15 hours on 5 whole songs doesn't quite do them justice, in my opinion. Or else i hope that the demo they recorded with me can get them into a real recording studio or something. Anyway, definitely check out their 5 newly recorded songs on their myspace (the ones with DEMO on them are those 5). 

And thats the latest on the studio. Stay tuned for more information on a possible upcoming collaborative project involving the Yaks and a distant friend Willy Yummy. 

DIY Acoustic Panel Build!!!

Here is the biggest studio update. I'm beginning to hear that the room we record in is really starting to stand out in our recordings and im not a fan of it. But the room is too large to treat acoustically with the amount of money we have/would want to sanely spend. Not to mention its oddly shaped. We would try to solve this problem by hanging large blankets on mike stands and other such things to create a booth-like recording space for vocals, guitars, and the biggest one, drums. It helped a bit, but it was extremely time consuming, very unstable, and i'm sure the blankets did not have a very good absorption coefficient. 

So I went on a deep internet search for some answers. I found a ton of material. But most of it was on treating an entire room, which i would like to do, but couldn't for several reasons. Anyway, I discovered a very helpful site; Ethan's information was plenty and good. 

I decided that i would take a little different approach to the fiberglass insulation panels. I wanted to combine these panels with the mechanical setup and size of drum shields/baffles. I wanted them mobile, so i could move them around the room, i wanted them to be free standing, and i wanted them to be able encircle an area big enough for the drumset.

This is what i came up with (the project is not complete yet, still have a few more to go before it is) :

4'x8' Sound board from Home Depot: $10. Rigid, yet soft enough for some high and low absorption. We cut it down to a 4'x6 because 8' is pretty dang big. And we also have an extra 2'x4', which i plan on make a couple diffusors/bass traps with.

3 yards of some nice polka dot fabric from Walmart: about $10. We folded it in half, cut it and sowed the side so it made one big piece that would fit over the board.

1 roll of thick fiberglass insulation from Lowes: $10. This is probably not as absorptive as the Owens Corning 703 but this was our Mark I so we'll see how things pan out. Not to mention 703 is very difficult to get a hold of (ive checked a ton of places) and its much more expensive than this stuff, especially if you gotta ship it.

Then we pulled the fabric over the insulation and stapled it onto the back of the board.

And there you have it. Now i haven't done the last steps, but they are pretty much to build two more of these. and attach them to each other with hinges, making them able to stand up on there own, be folded up and put away, and (with another set) can encircle the drums. I'll get some photos of when we are finished with them. 

Money Spent: about $30-35 for one big panel +extra materials

...more

Random other things of my life:

This is the park in West Jordan that I used to work at once a week at Farmer's Markets. But it has since ended as it is much to cold.

This handsome young bloke is Ted. Hailing from the far land of Pittsburgh, he is a very old friend of Patricks. And a new friend of mine.

These two beautiful girls are my good friends Tina and Christine. They hadn't seen each other in like 7 months or something. It was a hello/goodbye though because they were both leaving for college again. 

This was quite the night. Two miles or so from our original parking place we come upon this Express Auto sign. Why? Well, two or so miles away Pat's truck got towed. He didn't have any $$$ so i ended up paying for it temporarily.

It's been awhile

So I have not posted in quite some time and so i decided that this lazy monday morning was a good opportunity to catch all you followers... (2) up on what wicked waves creed's been riding lately. I'll actually probably make a few different posts considering the number of things goin on. 

Recent thingy #1)

 

Me and couple of my good friends (Mr. Joey Brown, and Mr. Taggart Coppins) took a tasty trip to the provo scene's finest dining: Sammy's.

Joey got a bit of action while we were there. Turns out she's been in a few movies.

I too got a bit. Then i realized he was a guy.