Nothing new to report on the band front, but there is stuff to report, so here it is (Probably the most boring blog post i’ll every write, but I wanna get back in the swing of writing these things).

Well, I no longer work at a school but I am now an employee for a church that I attend. I help do media junk and take notes during meetings; I also get ridiculous props for  demonstrations during the service. It is a really awesome laid back job, I really love it and everyone that works there is super awesome! my office (if you want to call it an office) is in the recording studio they’re building (heathrowe studios).

I also got a brand new snare!! which brings my new total to 6! the new addition is the Anton Fig signature model snare which Chee named “hoop there it is” because of the wood hoops. It is probably my best sounding snare! I love it, it sounds great live and it sounds amazing recorded! also, it looks really pretty.

These are all six of my snares!

My new snare!!

Other than that, everything is the same with me. Still playing at churches on the weekends…that’s about it.

Chee has been out on the road touring with this awesome local act, Austin Gibbs. He got to tour with him on the most recent, “an evening with the Maine” tour. I’m super happy for the kid, he should of been doing this a long time ago! so he’s basically been playing for Austin and that’s great!

Josh, finally got a job! he works as a janitor at the same church I work at. Although we both work in the same place, I hardly ever see him. It’s cool though, he’s finally making some income and he’s almost fully paid on his amp (which i bought and he’s been making payments for).

basically it, not a lot happening in the music realm of things, but hopefully that changes soon!

word.

The local music scene isn’t what it used to be. I remember going to shows on friday nights and listening to these great local bands play; musically, they were phenomenal and you could totally see the passion in the music they were playing, which isn’t the case now-a-days.  Unfortunately, I have noticed that musicianship takes a back seat to performance and that’s a real shame. Seems like being in a band is more of a fad or a product that you are trying to get people to buy. It may be that i’m older and a square, but I can’t get myself to see music that way, I respect it and take it too serious to that, but that’s where the local music scene is at now.

I begin to wonder to myself when do i give up on my dreams to be a musician and begin to try and getting myself ready to be an actual adult? I mean i’m still pretty young (23) but it seems to me that as time passes by so do my dreams. I’m not saying im ready to hang up the towel, but I have invested a lot of time and money into music and drums to see other people do what i want to be doing; it’s really unfair.

to be continued and junk.

With the band name now official it was time to start the ever important myspace page and facebook page. It has been a long time since i have operated a myspace page, it was fun remembering what did what; I think that’s the kind of stuff i missed about being in a band. Some stuff has changed as far as promoting bands, for instance when i was doing it back in the day (which was 3 years ago) it was mostly Myspace and Purevolume. Now people are using Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube; The times, they’re a changing. Once of the sites i found and enjoyed using was ilike. ilike is awesome because it’s a one stop shop for editing and update information on other sites like facebook, myspace, youtube, and twitter. This feature makes life soo much easier for people who are in bands and are lazy to go to 4 different websites to update content. With all that we have set up, Now all we need is to pay to get our myspace layout finished and we’ll feel like a real band!

This week we have gone into the studio with Dan Parker (engineer extrodanaire!) and recorded three songs (I’ll have video posted of this shortly, i just have to edit it and make it look nice for everyone!). I have to say that the songs are sounding really really good! and im not just saying that cuz im in the band. They sound like songs that I would listen to on my own which is a good sign. We should have the mixed product on monday and as soon as we get the final cut it will posted on the internets for you all to hear!

Our recent show went pretty well aside from a couple of hiccups but overall pretty good night. One of those hiccups was Josh’s guitar for the whole show. So What had happened was that he had just changed his guitar strings and i guess he forgot to stretch them out. After every single song the guitar would go out of tune, sometimes during the song. It didn’t just end there, on one song he forgot to change his capo so the guitars all sounded out of tune, luckily for us we caught it stopped playing to let him adjust and make a joke then get back in the song; Live and learn I guess, haha. You better believe we give josh a hard time about this as much as we can.

We played with a couple of awesome bands from out of town, one of them was Settle who are on epitaph records and the other are Friday Night Fever. Both bands were amazing and were extremely fun to watch. They were very professional and were all pretty nice and humble, which is nice to see in touring bands.

Shortly after our show we had found out about a band competition that would allow us to play in the Tempe Music Festival (which is a big outdoors music fest with huge bands headlining, sort of a poor man’s bamboozle). So we entered, not expecting much from it, we later find out that it was cancelled until next year, so we emailed the lady from the college times (a college newspaper) putting the competition on letting her know that we wanted out. We emailed her on three seperate occasions but we were still in so we just let it go and forgot about it. A couple of weeks later we get a message from Josh’s sister saying that the voting was ending and that we were winning. This confused us because we hadn’t told anyone about being in the competition so we were wondering how we were in the lead. Seeing that we were winning we decided to tell our friends about it to make sure that we won for sure and we did. I have to say we were pretty confused and thrilled about winning, especially considering how good the bands were that we were up against, especially boys and frogs, i rather enjoyed them! When the College times found out that we had won without hardly any promoting they decided to put us in article about the Tempe Music Fest being cancelled.

Since we won the first heat, we get to play a free show at the Tempe Marketplace (it’s kinda like downtown Disney) we are all pretty excited to play for our friends for free! if we win this we are a step closer to playing the Tempe Music Fest next year and get free money for school!

Alright that was a recap of the last 2 months, it’s a lot of writing but a lot of stuff has been going on, I couldn’t ask for more and im greatful for the stuff that is happening and the stuff that will happen.

Thank you all who read and follow my blog, I really appreciate it! follow me on twitter!

also add my band on facebook and myspace,

myspace.com/culturechemistry

facebook.com/culturechemistry

Now we are at a stand still, just us three once again trying to figure out what we want to do. It’s funny to think that us three click very well musically and all we thought was, “all we need is a singer and BAM! we’re set!!” well the singer came and it just didn’t work. We still intend to play music with each other though but as of now, its more of us exploring our options and see what works out best for us personally and the band.

That being said, our friend Josh David finally got his solo project off the ground and needed musicians so he called up Chee (the bass player) to play with him at his first show, which he agreed to do. Chee then suggested he call me to play drums because Josh still needed a drummer, so i got the call and i agreed to play (just want to point out that evan was asked to play lead but he wasn’t able to do it). The music was totally different from what we were used to playing, it was all straight up pop which is pretty fun to play and really easy too.

We practiced pretty much everyday for the next two weeks, working on vocal harmonies, getting the transitions between the songs perfect, making sure we were all on a click, i mean the whole nine yards. We wanted to come out as professional as we could, our mission was to impress.

*Our friend Ken (Chee’s bro) took video of the night. Thanks KEN!

After the show we felt really good about how well the set went and how we sounded, it was a great night!. Josh seemed happy with everything that he asked us to play another show with him in february, we agreed but this time we’re gonna bring Evan along to play lead so it looks we’re all going to play together again but not with our own stuff but someone else’s and you know what, that’s totally fine with me. After playing that night it reminded me how much i missed playing shows, all my nervousness went away it was straight up adrenaline it was such a rush!

*on a personal drum gear note.

i recently purchased a stainless steel dunnett snare from ebay. it is by far the best sounding snare i own, and i’d like to thank my friend Josh Niles for recommending it to me. it looks pretty and it sounds amazing, if you are a drummer i HIGHLY recommend this snare!!

my snare's name is "maddow"

**on a seperate note, i would really like to thank everyone who actually reads my little blog, it means a lot to me and i appreciate everyone taking time out of their day to hear me ramble on about my life, THANK YOU!

in-ear’s have always been a huge dream for me but what had always kept me back was the huge price tag for them. recently though the headphones i was using were beginning to crap out on me so i decided to go for broke and upgrade to the real deal. What makes in-ears different from any other headphones is that there is a cast made of your ear canal so you can be sure that the pair of “ears” you’re rocking are specifically for your own ear and no one else, this creates a perfect seal inside your ear helping you hear the music clearer and help it helps your hearing in the long run as well. after weeks of research my friend and i decided to go with the brand known as westone. Reading up on different forums and comparing them to different companies, it just felt right going to them.

i made my molds about four weeks ago and the ears finally came in. they would come in a lot sooner but the audiologist made the wrong kind of molds and i had to go back to get another mold made, so for my inconvinience they gave me a pair of custom molded ear plugs as well, so go me!

the type of westones i ordered were the elite series es2 dual drivers. dual drivers mean that basically it has 2 speakers inside them, so like a sub and a regular speaker…at least that’s what i think or that’s how i can best explain it. the color i got are candy blue. it’s safe to say im super stoked to use them this weekend for church and this friday for the show im playing at!

on my travel to get my in-ear’s i decided to visually document the occasion so i took my flip cam with me. yes the video is in hd. i also left the banter between the receptionist and i, it has nothing to do with me picking up the ears, its more to inflate my ego i guess. haha, jk.

Now we have become frustrated about the band and the music. it got me thinking, at what point does frustration outweigh potential? The kid has a phenomenal voice but we dont get anything done when we just wait for him. it’s not his fault though, he is younger than all of us and although he wants everything we want it’s harder for him to achieve it because he can’t control his own circumstances any more than he can now. He lives about an hour away from where we practice and can’t get up and move out to where we live for the band. I understand his position but we all are trying to make music our life, which is a very tough goal to reach already and it doesn’t help that no progress is being made. I just want to make it clear though that it’s not his fault, it’s just a combination of different things that are making things so difficult.

So now we are all now at a standstill wondering what we want to do. It’s funny what a huge difference a week makes; from being all smiles and feeling like we were making strides to being upset and frustrated about having to wait around for no reason.

We have decided to be a little more patient with everything though because we know that this isn’t a race it’s a marathon. We have communicated with our singer to try and work this whole situation out. We all feel the potential is there for us to be an awesome band but we know that not everything comes easy. So patience is key for us for now. Which for me doesn’t come easy, because i am already a very impatient person so i have to tough it out. wish us luck. ha.

All of the songs we have written have come from emails, we do about 95% of our song writing that way. With Garage band it allows us to think of a cool riff or cool idea for a song then send it off to everyone else so we can all pass judgement upon it. Personally I enjoy doing things this way, i can see how that is very different from how things are usually done but i see it as us taking advantage of the technology available to us. Emailing songs and ideas back and forth allows us to show up to an actual rehearsal ready to hammer out a song without spending hours trying to figure out what we like or don’t like; no one likes 5 hour practices, especially If we only 4 songs.

Communication at its best.

Another habit we have is we like to record our rehearsals, We usually record all of them. Recording our practices allows us to go back with a fresh ear and listen to the structure of the song to pick out what we like or dislike about any particular song. Doing this let’s us figure out if that melody line really fits the song or if the song doesn’t have a good flow.  We have found that listening to our practices has helped us immensly, it really gives us another perspective of what the songs sound like. Music sounds different while practicing because most of the focus is towards our own instrument instead of the songs as a whole.

With all of our busy schedules we find that this method works best for us as a band. When we do practice though we make a lot of progress and feel accomplished when we’re done.

The sound guy setting up and Chee tuning or atleast trying to, God bless him.

In total we played 3 songs and the comment we got from everyone was, “the music was good, we couldn’t hear the vocals though”. Hearing that we felt it was a success mostly because neither Evan or Chee are great at singing so the less they were heard the better . Of course there were some screw ups from all of us but over all we thought the night was a success, but there is definitely room for improvement. A funny little side note of the night was in between songs, Chee let everyone know that we didn’t have a band name and one of the ladies in the audience asked if she could name us, we said sure so she suggested we be called “sound”…not too sure if it was a legit suggestion or a burn on the music… but Chee came back with a witty remark saying, “Oh, you mean Noise… yes we are called Noise.”

Playing live for the first time!

One thing we know for sure now is that we definitely would love to play more actual shows, tonight wasn’t perfect but it was a ton of fun! The first performance is never going to blow anyone’s mind but at least it’s a start; playing out more would also get us more comfortable on stage and be able to perform like we know we can. Also, we really need a good singer to take the pressure off of Evan and Chee, poor dudes i can’t even imagine singing in front of people so props to them for doing such a good job!

Now we get to go to practice and hopefully write some more songs and perfect the ones we have. Personally i wish we could write some good melodies for the songs from the demo’s we recorded because they are killer songs.

*This is a quick summary of the last year and a half*

My friend Jevons (aka chee) have been trying to start a band for the better part of a year and a half. He and I were in a band in high school (check it out here) i’ve known the guy for a long time, we argue a lot, i dont know why. We have gone through 3 different guitar players, 2 bass players and 3 singers. For whatever reason none of those guys worked out, needless to say it has been a very frustrating year and a half. Discouraged with our luck Chee suggested we try his friend Evan, i agreed; within the first 10 minutes we all felt real comfortable with each other and at last we were all making music we enjoyed.

So a band was now in place and the songs we were churning out were pretty good (if i do say so myself) we had everything except a lead singer because none of us were blessed with good singing voices. After months of looking for a singer, we decided to take a different route in our search and decided to record a 3 song demo of songs we had written.

We recorded all 3 songs at a studio in Tempe, Az called Uranus studios which is owned by the singer from the Gin Blossoms (no we didn’t meet him). From 8am to 9pm, we sat and recorded everything and were extremely happy with the outcome of the project.

With a demo recorded we set up a myspace page (like every other band) to aid us in out search of a singer. We received a quite a few inquiries about the open position (felt like we were hiring) but none of those people worked out. Seemed like we were stuck in quite a rut, but then out of nowhere we find this kid with endless potential; This guy had such a pretty voice, we were impressed and were on our way to writing new material and excited about the endless possibilities of our band!

Our excitement quickly began to dwindle to frustration as we later realized that he lived so far from us that it made it super difficult to practice. We were at a stand still because we loved his voice and the potential it had but couldn’t figure out how to get over the lack of practicing with him. We didn’t want to let the lack of him being there slow down the band so we decided to keep practicing and try to work out kinks in the songs.

This situation made us realize why we started a band in the first place, we all love making music and performing it. We had been looking at it the wrong way; Don’t play music for the sole reason of making money, but play music because it’s something you love to do, that is something that we sorta lost sight of.

As of two days ago we have decided to play an open mic night on monday. the three of us. What about a singer!?!?!?!? you ask? well, Jevons (aka Chee) and Evan will be singing, not the ideal situation but the music is pretty solid and we just want to do what we love.

so that’s it, you’re all caught up for the first year and a half. i jumped around a lot but i got all the important stuff in there. i’ll hopefully have pics and maybe some video of our show on monday and let everyone know how it went.

“Never tell me the odds.”

The odds of “making it” in the music biz are one million to one; daunting odds, but not impossible. I hope to one day be one of those people who can say that making music is their career.

My name is Alan Lopez, i am a musician (well drummer) from Phoenix, Az. I have been playing drums for about 8 years, played in my first band when i was 16 and went on my first ever tour (nothing major) when i was 20. drumming has allowed me to drum all over the U.S. and play in different countries (Jamaica, Scotland, Mexico…).

Currently i just play at churches around the valley and trying to start a band from scratch. In this blog i will give a glimpse of my life as a musician and what it’s like to start a band.