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Alright so as many of you saw here: http://www.halforums.com/forum/show...racks-(Music-Soundcloud-Halforum-Integration) Ame worked out the code to use the Soundcloud player my band (among many others) uses to share music online.
So here's my thread I said I would get around to.
The band is called Fallen Empire.
Our EP is called The World Glow and it's going to be up on iTunes/Amazon, etc within the next week or so.
Here's a few tracks that I have uploaded:

The World Glow
[sc]http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/the-world-glow[/sc]

A Fly to Honey (an instrumental track)
[sc]http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/a-fly-to-honey[/sc]

It Takes Away
[sc]http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/it-takes-away[/sc]

So, there you have it, it's hard rock so I know it's not for everyone, but it's what we do so... hope you enjoy it.
I'll put up the art I'm working on for the cd/digital release soon, I think it's pretty rad.
Oh and here is our soundcloud page: http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire

"It Takes Away" reminds me of how I remember older NIN stuff in my head. I never got a lot of exposure to that band, but that's the first thing that came to mind, though with different vocals. This is my favorite song of the three you posted. I'm listening to more on the site now. One good thing about "The World Glow" was that it took me until the second verse to realize the verse mainly consisted of one chord. If you actually played that instead of cutting/pasting, it was very consistent...something I envy.

Now that I think about it, with the programmed drums, it also brings to mind Filter, but more along the lines of "Hey Man, Nice Shot" era Filter. It's been ages since I've listened to that CD. It's the electronic drums that does it. You guys seem to embrace them for what they are, whereas I try to make them sound like real drums and fail.

I like the vocals for the music. I think that the first thing that turns me off to music produced by amateur bands is the vocals...which is why I am so self conscious of my own. I like the use of harmonies and echos. When you described it as hard rock, I was expecting something more cookie cutter and it definitely isn't that.

I like the guitar at the end of "The Devil in You", and then it cut off.

Pretty cool stuff man. It really makes me want to get back into more electric recording, but that will likely have to wait until we get a house sometime this year.

Thanks man, I was hoping to hear from you.

Re: It Takes Away: Definitely my real tribute to older NIN. I can't deny the influence on me and I wanted to embrace that but yet make it mine.

The World Glow guitar: Josh Ans is actually our guitar player and yes, he plays every single note and he plays like a beast.

Drums: While I would love to have more live drums I love older NIN/Filter/Ministry/Jesus and Mary Chain/The Cure etc and one of the things I love most about them is the programmed drums. Live it will be a totally different beast. Probably a mix of live and programmed, but thats something for our future drummer to figure out. It's really freaking hard to find hard rock drummers in Minneapolis. Ugh.

Devil in You guitar... yeah... we cut it off early on purpose to be honest, kind of a sharp drop off a cliff was Josh's idea... maybe it didn't work? Either way though, they are pretty sweet aren't they? Some of my favorites he did.

I spend a LOT of time on the vocals. It's really draining and a ton of work. I use a pretty good condenser mic and I think I end up with a pretty good sound that doesn't scream "amateur" recording to the average joe/joe-ette.

As to the hard rock label, honestly it's probably not perfect since we delve so much into industrial and electronic corners but the average person seems really confused when I say we are an industrial rock band so I just go with hard rock, because in the end it's the most generic term for us.

The vocals didn't sound amateur at all. A good condenser mic goes a long way. In fact, from what I read online, if you're going to invest money into two things for your home recording studio, it's a GOOD condenser mic and an interface or input device with good pre amps. If you go new, just at a basic level, you're looking at 700-900 alone at Guitar Center. I had a friend that worked in pro-audio and he detailed the condenser mics.

Just for the record, when I said amateur, I didn't mean it as an insult. I didn't want to use the word "indie" as that's almost more of a genre now. I assume you did it on a home studio of some kind. I have a friend who's recording in a studio and it sounds like a pretty polished home demo. To get the professional sound, you need a lot of money, whether you buy the equipment yourself or go into a studio. If you engineered it yourself, I think you did a pretty kick ass job at it. That's the hardest part. In fact, I don't even mess with it...I just record tracks, level out the parts as best as I can using a blanket decibel boost, and mix the tracks together. Maybe when I have the tracks together and enough money to make it worth your while, I can talk you into working your magic on a few of my songs.

I record with the condensor mic (300 bucks) and a m-audio fast track pro (can't remember... 200? maybe?). I record and mix in Logic then master in Waveburner.

For having no training I feel like I did pretty damn good
Thanks for the kind words. I'd love to chat about your stuff and hear it!

I really really like the instrumental track. listened to it 4 or 5 times today. I'll get the EP from Itunes.

Industrial rock > *

Math242 said:

I really really like the instrumental track. listened to it 4 or 5 times today. I'll get the EP from Itunes.

Industrial rock > *

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Thanks man! I had hoped you and the other NIN fans here would enjoy it. It's really encouraging to hear that people into that sort of music like it.
I think I have 3 instrumental tracks posted on the site, here's my current favorite, it will be the album opener when we get all the songs together.
[sc]http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/the-echo[/sc]

Regarding the EP, it's going to be 6 songs and it's going to be super cheap since most of the songs will be on the eventual album. I'm thinking maybe a buck or two tops. There will be a CD option for those who want since CDBABY seems to have a pretty good purchase as you go thing for CD's.

I am really digging it Espy. Do you have a website or myspace music page?

I have a few things yeah, I'll post them in a little bit when I have time.

And thanks!

Nice job Espy! I like it. I've heard some of your stuff in the past. Let us know when it's up on iTunes!

You have? I didn't think I had shared any on here before... Either way thanks!

I'll have the myspace and facebook info up soon for peeps who want to check that out. I'm having issues with soundcloud and facebook. It publishes the songs to my profile which is nice but I want them to go to my band page and I'm not sure how to direct it there...

Working in Motion on a little promo video for the EP.
View attachment 215

I kind of got an early Maralyn Manson vibe from the first song. I'll have to give the other songs a listen later on.

Yeah, drum machines are ok, but I think they require a lot of work to get the right sound. I like what I hear so far though.

Thanks Krisken, I was wondering what you would think of the stuff. I know we have similar tastes.

Espy, I don't know much on the technical side of music, but I have to say I'm really enjoying it. I would not be shocked to buy a CD and find this stuff on it. I've listened a few times over the last few days. I'll definitely be looking into it once you release an album/ep.

Thanks Rob! When you say "find this stuff on a cd" that you buy do you mean the sound quality or the type of music (if you don't mind me asking)?

Heres' a little motion graphics video I made to start promoting tracks on youtube:

awesome

Thanks math. I wanted something fun to look at while people listen on YouTube and I figured that was more interesting than a still image.

Espy said:

Thanks Rob! When you say "find this stuff on a cd" that you buy do you mean the sound quality or the type of music (if you don't mind me asking)?

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Bit of both, but I was mostly talking about the quality. I'm sure technically there is room for improvement (there always is) but it sounds great from here!

Cool, yeah, I've gotten a pretty good response from people on the quality of the sound. I think I took rather naturally to mixing (I'm still super amateur but for never having taken a class or anything I'm happy with how fast I picked it up.)

Here's the last two tracks from the EP:
Desperate Horses - One of the harder tracks on the EP
[sc]http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/desperate-horses[/sc]

and the obligatory remix (kind of) track, a strings version of It Takes Away:
[sc]http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/it-takes-away-strings-version[/sc]

I've listened to some of these tracks and I must say I like them a lot. Sometimes I have trouble understanding what the lyrics are, but I guess that's my "foreigness" acting up.

Silver Jelly said:

I've listened to some of these tracks and I must say I like them a lot. Sometimes I have trouble understanding what the lyrics are, but I guess that's my \"foreigness\" acting up.

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LOL. Thanks SJ. I think in heavier music it can generally take a few listens to get the lyrics of stuff, but I try not to mumble to badly...

Also: we have a facebook page now: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fallen-Empire/226016821784

BUMPITY BUMP!

I'm making some individual art for each song to promote the upcoming release, did this one today:

View attachment 259

Espy said:

You have? I didn't think I had shared any on here before... Either way thanks!

I'll have the myspace and facebook info up soon for peeps who want to check that out. I'm having issues with soundcloud and facebook. It publishes the songs to my profile which is nice but I want them to go to my band page and I'm not sure how to direct it there...

Click to expand...

Yeah, I remember when you changed the name from Halcyon, or something like that. We had a thread at one point, in which, musical folks posted stuff.

I likes, I just think actual drums would sound a lot better than the keyboard.

Thanks Chaz! Yeah, I'd love to have a live drummer... we have been searching for one and it turns out if there is a hard rock drummer in Minneapolis they are already in 4 bands. Bleh. So far we have found a bass player though so we have 3 out of 5. Just need a drummer and a violin player and we are ready to start playing live.

So anyone know a great drummer who lives in the Twin Cities? Yeah... I didn't think so...

I listened to the first. I liked it. The one thing that did bother me was the repetitiveness of the guitar in the first half of the song.

New bit of song art as the release draws near:
View attachment 285

Meeting with a potential drummer this week, aside from having the actual EP release I'm pretty excited about that.

I heard it's possible to have your songs on spotify, even if you are just a "starting" band? That would be some great exposure, at least in countries where spotify is avaliable. (now that I mention it, I don't even know if it is in the US! I think it probably is, but who knows...)

It's not, much to our dismay. Also, some places in Europe I've heard are blocking it because of the high bandwidth usage. I know Oxford doesn't allow it on campus now.

I'm actually going through "CDBaby" for distrobution. This is their list of partners:
iTunes, including:
iTunes
iTunes-UK
iTunes-Europe
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
iTunes-Japan
iTunes-Canada
iTunes-Australia
iTunes-New Zealand
Amazon MP3
eMusic
Rhapsody
Napster
Spotify
Liquid Digital
Verizon V-Cast
Lala
Shockhound
Nokia
Amie Street
last.fm
Zune
MediaNet (formerly MusicNet)
Didiom
Tradebit
inProdicon
GreatIndieMusic

Since this is just a little sampler EP I'm pricing it dirt, dirt, dirt cheap (like .99cents) and allowing them to distribute it to everybody even the free places and streaming sites.
My only real goal is to get our stuff out there and available. My next step is to get stuff out to college radio (which I would have avoided thinking our sound doesn't fit, but I was told to go for it anyway) and I have a name of a place that supposedly for a small fee gets your stuff out to pretty much every college radio station in the states.
As for Europe... not sure. CDBaby hits Europe but I'll look into spotify.

And another piece of song art:
View attachment 291

So, when is this release?

Tomorrow! 2.2.10.

EP art:
View attachment 292

it's not available yet (4:35 PM), i'll get it tonight

No, I still haven't gotten the confirmation email... I'll post as soon as I get it.

i see it on Itunes but it won't let me buy it because it's "not available in the belgian store".

motherfuckers.

Same here. There it is in the Canadian store, but when I click it, it's not available in the Canadain store

I'll try again this evening when I get home from work.

Yeah, it's like that for the US store too. However it did let me buy it if I clicked the buy button, it just won't let me go to the artist page. When I spoke with the distobutioj folks earlier yesterday they said I could take up to a month before iTunes even has it so hopefully later today it will be all good this afternoon. I'm gonna fall them and let you guys know when I get off work.

got it. I'm proud to know that i'll be among the first that helped send you on a path of sex, drugs and rock and roll. or something.

LOL, thanks man. So here's the deal: Looks like the CDBaby folks and itunes people messed up and it's more expensive than I wanted it to be. So if you download it via iTunes shoot me a message on here or Facebook or Myspace and I am putting together a little digital package of art and an extra song as a thank you.
You hear that people??? FREE STUFF!

the price is not a big deal

you can find me on facebook, i'm the dude with gigantic loudspeakers in his profile picture

Here is the full post from the AOTM thread:
BUMP! Just wanted to let everyone know that the EP is now LIVE!

You can buy it here at iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-world-glow-ep/id353730689
Or here at CDBaby: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/FallenEmpire

Now here is the deal. It's dirt cheap at CDBaby, .99 cents for the whole thing (how awesomely cheap is that?), however, they aren't as sophisticated as iTunes so you have to add the artwork that comes in the zip file yourself once you have added it to your music player.

So, as a little bonus for those who choose to use iTunes, since they priced it higher than I had intended (.99 per song instead of 69 per song, the cheapest it will allow), Fallen Empire is putting together a thank you gift of digital art and a bonus track! Which track? Well, I ain't saying but theres a good chance by giving it away I'm gonna make a Monkee out of myself...
Just send us a message here or on Facebook or Myspace so we can send you a link to download the gift!

---------- Post added at 02:56 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:55 PM ----------

Math242 said:

the price is not a big deal

you can find me on facebook, i'm the dude with gigantic loudspeakers in his profile picture

Click to expand...

I'm gonna put you on the list for the gift download. Thanks man, I'm super excited about this, especially since we finally found a drummer and are going to start practicing as a full band soon!

Just bought the album off iTunes. Congrats, Espy! I hope this really takes off for you guys.

P.S. If you ever do a show in St. John's, Newfoundland durr I promise you that I will guilt twenty of my closest friends into coming.

Rob King said:

Just bought the album off iTunes. Congrats, Espy! I hope this really takes off for you guys.

P.S. If you ever do a show in St. John's, Newfoundland durr I promise you that I will guilt twenty of my closest friends into coming.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I'll add your name to people who are getting the digital download. If you guys can pm me your email addresses thats how I'm going to deliver it.

Aaaaand.....bought.

Email addresses people! The digital gift should be ready to go by this weekend!

If you need my email address there's something wrong with you.

So how are sales? Better or worse than expected?

Dave said:

If you need my email address there's something wrong with you.

So how are sales? Better or worse than expected?

Click to expand...

Do I have it? I guess I might on facebooker or something. I need it so I can sen that cool digital gift (extra song and stuff man!)
I won't really know much about sales for awhile. I don't know when they send me tracking report. To be honest, I'm not really concerned with the sales right now, although I appreciate them and think you guys are super cool for being so supportive, but really it's more about creating that web presence, you know? Especially when we start playing live we can have people go right to iTunes and get the cd, etc. I'm setting up a cafe press shop right now for merch. Youve been happy with there stuff right?

Just Tweeted you and will put it on my Facebook page where my 250+ Mafia can see it.

Damn, you guys are way to nice. Also, I do wanna hear your thoughts on Cafe Press... are they worth going through?

Shit's expensive to buy through there and if you set even a modest profit it gets ridiculous.

But they are easy to use.

Dave said:

Shit's expensive to buy through there and if you set even a modest profit it gets ridiculous.

But they are easy to use.

Click to expand...

Hmmm. Maybe tomorrow I'll ask around on here and see if people have any better suggestions.

So we had our first practice tonight, got our gear set up in our new space, and then we jammed to NIN's The Hand that Feeds.

Whoa.

It was awesome. The guys were really tight for never having played together. They really tore the song up. We were all surprised and really happy with how quickly we gelled. Big things to come.

glad to hear it. Can't wait to see what comes of it.

so, the ipod is connected to my car and last night in a random playlist, a fly to honey comes up... there were 2 friends of mine in the car who went something like that: Dude, what's this, is it another of your NiN bootlegs or something?

Ha! Awesome. I had someone I don't know post on our facebook page that "Desperate Horses is like Alice in Chains and early Marilyn Manson had a demon baby" How cool is that?

Purchased via iTunes. I'm a bit behind the game. Listening here at work as I download.

Thanks for the purchases from all of you! Couple quick updates here:
First: Believer: We are waiting to send it out to folks, mainly because, as of right now I am finally in contact with Sony and looks like we will have the rights VERY SOON.
Second: We are playing our first live show in 2 weeks. Here is the little promo I made for it:

New promo for the upcoming show, thought it was a fun little thing:

I don't believe you have to install anything for CDBaby, at least when I test bought our album I didn't have too. I believe you just give them your 99cents and then they give you a download link. The album is also on Amazon.com and it should be on most other websites you can buy and download music.

If you go here: https://members.cdbaby.com/digitaldistributionpartners.aspx they say where they sell albums digitally. We should be on all of them according to our contract I believe.
If you can't find it let me know and I'll make sure you get a copy

Stolen from the Epic Win Thread:

So the show was a big success!
Even though we were the first band to play the place had already packed out pretty good, I'd say about a 1/3 there for us, 1/3 there for the second band and a 1/3 their for the last band, which for our first show is a pretty damn good turn out.

So we start with an instrumental number, "The Echo" and as we finished it up I turned around to look at the drummer, and he's making a giant "OH SHIT" face. I mouth "what happened?" and he points at the top of his high hat, which has totally split and inverted itself! So, the music is still going and one of the guys in the later bands runs over and asks whats up (later he said he saw our drummers face and knew something was wrong). I tell him and he grabs his high hat and throws it to me and I pass it back to the drummer.
We forge on and no one notices since the song bled right into the long guitar intro for the next song.

Right about the time we hit our third song the floor, already crowded, is just packed almost right up to the stage, and we start to hear lots of clapping and yelling during the breaks between songs. After we wrap up the World Glow people are starting to move and we get a couple "Fuck yeah!"s, which just feels great.
So we storm into our last song, "I'm a Believer" and when we hit that dance beat on the chorus people are really starting to move, so it's a real shame that it's our last tune but we sure as hell left them wanting more.

Some of the feedback we got that was really great to hear:
The other bands had no idea this was our first show, they were stunned when they found out.
A guy told one of my friends "Man, usually the first band really sucks but these guys are REALLY good!"
and lots of other nice stuff was said to us, etc. Got some good critical feedback as well, which is really helpful, but all in all it was a really, really damn good night.

So glad the show went well! And I loved that promotion--cracked me up!

Man, I just wanted to compliment your sound quality... the mix sounds really tight and your vocals are really really nice sounding. I do agree with Chaz in that real drums would sound better on some songs (though the tracked drums sound perfect in others).

I'm more into metal myself but I think I may pick your album up just for your sweet instrumentals. Seriously dude... keep up the good work!

Thanks Azure and Ame! I wish we had had the resources (and at the time a real drummer) to do live drum recording, even though it still would have probably been about 50/50 live/generated beats. If anyone is on the fence about buying it from iTunes remember it's only 99cents for the whole damn EP on cdbaby! We like cheap around here.
A Fly to Honey is still one of my top faves Ame, although it's proving to be the hardest to reproduce live. We are opening our shows with The Echo (http://soundcloud.com/fallenempire/the-echo), which is turning out to be quite a crowd pleaser.

I just bought it through iTunes... now to drive around in my supercharged Prelude blasting it loud as hell pretending I'm young again .

If I were closer I'd play the drums for you! Good luck with everything though... I'll keep following your progress with great interest.

Well at the time we recorded we didn't have a drummer, but more importantly we didn't have a way to mic a drummer even if we had had one. We have a drummer now, but we will have to pay to get a mic rig to record anything and that costs moola. Our live drummer is great, but dude needs a better drum set, thats for sure. It's not that bad but he really wants something bigger and better.

I hear ya... mic'ing a drum kit sucks and takes a lot of specialized high quality microphones to produce a good end result. This thread is totally making me wish I still had a band to play with... I miss playing.

What software do you do your recording and tracking in?

I record and mix everything in Logic Pro then master it in Waveburner. We use Mainstage to play live. It's all part of Logic Studio.

Damn, I just had "The World Glow" come up on full random on my 14 gigs of music on my iPhone. Damn I love that song!

MOAR!!!!

lol, thanks man! I gotta tell you, the live stuff is really evolving. We are playing Desperate Horses for the first time at our next show (Saturday the 17th of July), and it's honestly probably our best song. I can't wait to record with these guys and do some new material.

Azurephoenix said:

Damn, I just had "The World Glow" come up on full random on my 14 gigs of music on my iPhone. Damn I love that song!

MOAR!!!!

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I still say that this song would make a killer track in a movie as either an action sequence or the ending credits.

So we got our Halloween show booked, which is awesome, I really wanted to do a Halloween show this year.
Line up is still being figured out, the one band that we all didn't want on there cancelled and we got a band we are good friends with on the set.
I did this little poster for it which will be modified once we get the final line up done:



We are playing our full set now:

The Echo
Desperate Horses
Creeper
It Takes Away
A Fly to Honey
The Devil in You
The World Glow
Believer

Which ends up being about 45 minutes total. Our Bass player and I are going to work out some creepy opening bit before The Echo that will start us off right.
Just though I'd shoot an update out here for those interested.

I wish I could be there! Is there going to be anyone recording this on video?

We are gonna try again (I think I mentioned that we recorded the first one BUT the audio out from the board was just my vocals, keyboards and drums? WTF soundguy...) and see if we can make it work. We really want to get some live stuff recorded.

Also: We need costumes. I am totally drawing a blank on what would be a good stage costume that won't be to annoying to have on when all hot and sweaty.

Have you posted all of these songs? There are three I don't recognize:

The Echo
Creeper
Believer

iTunes?

I think they are all in this thread, except maybe Creeper, it's a pretty straightforward rock song and the recording is still very, very rough.

As a note for recording drums...

Consider looking into the Glyn Johns method. He's a dude that engineered some Led Zepplin albums. If you , it will take you a you tube clip I found that, while claiming to be the GL method, does a good of approximating it using three relatively cheap mics. In that clip, the guy uses an MXL 991, Sterling Audio ST55, and what looks like a Blue Microphones Ball (similar to the snowball USB mic I use for acoustic recording).

You can find the MXL mic in a set with a large diaphragm condenser mic for around $60. You can get them new for $100 at Guitar Center.

I recently bought one of the Sterling Audio ST55s used in that video and have been really happy with it for electric guitar and vocals. Granted, I've only used it for scratch vocal takes, but I really dig it. I found mine used for $90, but they normally go for a little more than that.

I have no experience with the Blue Microphone Ball mic, but they are relatively cheap new, so I imagine they are quite affordable used. The standard mic used for bass drums runs $250, and as I don't have regular access to drums, I won't be buying one any time soon.

An SM57 is a good snare mic and can be had for $60-$80 used.

So, you don't need to spend a TON of money on mics. More than likely, you could get the same mics he used in that video for around $300 ($75 for the MXL set, $75 for an SM57, $100-$150 for the ST55. Is it top of the line? No. But, it will get the job done and, based on that video and other recordings I've heard, will get it done well. The real question is whether or not that drum sound would work for your music.

Thankfully our new drummer actually records his drums quite a bit and he has a super nice set of mics so when we do get around to doing some new recordings he's gonna knock it out of the park.

Cool deal. A prepared drummer? Whodathunkit.

lol, no shit huh?