jaco815
Well-Known Member
Hey folks I haven't posted here in a long time, but I thought I'd share my band's tribute album to the great early 2000's central California math/prog rock band Ent. They were an amazing band that ultimately had a huge impact on math rock as a genre and had an enormous impact on me as a musician. The songs feature incredible playing and time signature/tempo changes on a dime, with complex drum and bass arrangements by Ian Hill and Dustin Koupal under layered, complimentary guitar parts by Scott Scheu and the legend himself Carson McWhirter. The band gave us their blessing to release this and they are excited to hear the music they made at 19 and 20 years old still bringing joy and inspiration to people almost 20 years later. Carson messaged our guitarist Nick Spangler and said we need to teach him how to play his songs again lol!
https://spanglersmithkirk.bandcamp.com/album/ent-redux
We are spread across the country (California, Kansas, D.C.) so our "band" is really just a dedicated recording project. As a band that we want every album that we make to be completely different from the last stylistically as a means of not stagnating, so next we are working on a heavy post-rock album led by our guitarist Austin Kirk, then doing a west-coast vibes math-rock album with writing led by Nick, followed by an epic orchestral prog album which I will lead. Recording for this album was pretty interesting because of our geographical separation and also our varying interests in music. We each had a different vision and worked hard on a unifying concept that we felt would best honor the songs in a modern fashion while preserving the original live-band vibe as heard on Ent's few live recordings (literally made with a tape cassette recorder) and home bootleg demos. Our main goal was to give the songs a modern treatment and try to visualize what Ent might sound like if they could record these songs well today.
Recording Process:
I started by time stretching Ent's original recordings to the nearest average bpm per section then rendering off this time stretched audio file as a tempo map. There are various tempos in each song, and a few songs switch time signatures almost every measure or every few measures. Nick and Austin would use these time-stretched songs as reference to learn and track their guitar parts, with Nick tracking all of Scott Scheu's parts and then Austin recording all of Carson McWhirter's parts. I would get their DIs, amp them through various Neural DSP plugins (Plini, Nolly, Abasi, NTS, Nameless) and add bass, drums, and various keyboard instruments (mellotron, organ, electric piano, upright piano, synth, vibraphone) as well as some orchestrations, sax, and horn arrangements on a few songs. The song "Ent vs. PiperCub" was never released by the band as a full song and only existed as a draft midi arrangement by Ian Hill and Scott Scheu on Ian's old Soundcloud page. Because the song was so rough we took a lot of liberties with it and thought it would make a great acoustic closer to the album with acoustic guitar, piano, upright bass, and brushed drums forming of the core of the arrangement. Keeping with the acoustic theme, the instrument that sounds like an electric piano in that song is actually a filtered acoustic grand piano blended with a vibraphone. Carson never wrote any parts for the song, so Austin saved recording his parts for that song until the end of the tracking process - he then wrote parts in Carson's style based on what he had learned about Carson's habits while tracking the other songs. A few of the songs like "Song About ____" and "The Werebear" we left relatively bare with little extra instrumentation other than some buried synth and vibraphone for texture, while others like "Damsel Ipis" we added all kinds of stuff just for fun. My favorite of all of the songs ended up being "Megaman" - I just love the build it has and the dark chord progression, as well as all of the fun drum fills toward the end and then the sudden soft ending.
Please leave comments below. We love to hear stories about how Ent has meant so much to so many people and it's been really cool to connect with fans of this band through our work on this album.
- Jacob Smith
https://spanglersmithkirk.bandcamp.com/album/ent-redux
We are spread across the country (California, Kansas, D.C.) so our "band" is really just a dedicated recording project. As a band that we want every album that we make to be completely different from the last stylistically as a means of not stagnating, so next we are working on a heavy post-rock album led by our guitarist Austin Kirk, then doing a west-coast vibes math-rock album with writing led by Nick, followed by an epic orchestral prog album which I will lead. Recording for this album was pretty interesting because of our geographical separation and also our varying interests in music. We each had a different vision and worked hard on a unifying concept that we felt would best honor the songs in a modern fashion while preserving the original live-band vibe as heard on Ent's few live recordings (literally made with a tape cassette recorder) and home bootleg demos. Our main goal was to give the songs a modern treatment and try to visualize what Ent might sound like if they could record these songs well today.
Recording Process:
I started by time stretching Ent's original recordings to the nearest average bpm per section then rendering off this time stretched audio file as a tempo map. There are various tempos in each song, and a few songs switch time signatures almost every measure or every few measures. Nick and Austin would use these time-stretched songs as reference to learn and track their guitar parts, with Nick tracking all of Scott Scheu's parts and then Austin recording all of Carson McWhirter's parts. I would get their DIs, amp them through various Neural DSP plugins (Plini, Nolly, Abasi, NTS, Nameless) and add bass, drums, and various keyboard instruments (mellotron, organ, electric piano, upright piano, synth, vibraphone) as well as some orchestrations, sax, and horn arrangements on a few songs. The song "Ent vs. PiperCub" was never released by the band as a full song and only existed as a draft midi arrangement by Ian Hill and Scott Scheu on Ian's old Soundcloud page. Because the song was so rough we took a lot of liberties with it and thought it would make a great acoustic closer to the album with acoustic guitar, piano, upright bass, and brushed drums forming of the core of the arrangement. Keeping with the acoustic theme, the instrument that sounds like an electric piano in that song is actually a filtered acoustic grand piano blended with a vibraphone. Carson never wrote any parts for the song, so Austin saved recording his parts for that song until the end of the tracking process - he then wrote parts in Carson's style based on what he had learned about Carson's habits while tracking the other songs. A few of the songs like "Song About ____" and "The Werebear" we left relatively bare with little extra instrumentation other than some buried synth and vibraphone for texture, while others like "Damsel Ipis" we added all kinds of stuff just for fun. My favorite of all of the songs ended up being "Megaman" - I just love the build it has and the dark chord progression, as well as all of the fun drum fills toward the end and then the sudden soft ending.
Please leave comments below. We love to hear stories about how Ent has meant so much to so many people and it's been really cool to connect with fans of this band through our work on this album.
- Jacob Smith
