BACKMASK Album Finished!

Thanks! We're not as big as a press release makes us sound. We're trying really hard to get the word out there right now and I'm stoked any time we get publicity like this.

My dad's an amazing musician and he also plays on our song "Prisoner of Mind," the second electric guitar solo and also all the mandolin!

shane, the cd came out awesome. i bought it today and i am super stoked on it. i wish you guys the best:headbang: . i would love to be on the west coast right about now to try out for that empty drummer position. oh well, im sure it wont be empty long. by the way, is that your old man on the intro to china grove? that riff kicks so much ass :kickass: . good luck man.
 
shane, the cd came out awesome. i bought it today and i am super stoked on it. i wish you guys the best:headbang: . i would love to be on the west coast right about now to try out for that empty drummer position. oh well, im sure it wont be empty long. by the way, is that your old man on the intro to china grove? that riff kicks so much ass :kickass: . good luck man.

My dad was in a band called Clover at that point. He didn't join the Doobies until 1978, so his playing can be heard on their late 70s and early 80s material with Michael McDonald on lead vocals. He can also be heard on the 2001 Doobies studio album "Sibling Rivalry."

My dad has a lot of other credits under his belt, including Elvis Costello's "My Aim Is True," Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey," Steve Miller's "Fly Like An Eagle," and a lot of session work as a guitarist and pedal steel player (yes, he's an awesome pedal steel player as well!)

While it has some inaccuracies (I should see if I can get this corrected), his Wikipedia entry has some more info:

John McFee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Congrats Shane, sounds cool. :headbang:
I have to agree about the snare though, sounds a bit wierd. Or maybe it's the reverb that's on the snare.
I dig the Soilwork influence and cool vocals. :kickass:
 
Damn man, that stuff is KILLER!!!

The guitarsound is awesome (and the rest of the production too)!

Therefore I'd like to hear if there's any chance you'd upload a completely dry guitarclip - I'm on my third year with mics on cabinets and I'm not even halfway there - a short clip would make my day! Just a 10 sec clip or something would be extremely cool!

Did you boost the signal before it hit the amp?

Congrats!! :kickass:
 
Damn man, that stuff is KILLER!!!

The guitarsound is awesome (and the rest of the production too)!

Therefore I'd like to hear if there's any chance you'd upload a completely dry guitarclip - I'm on my third year with mics on cabinets and I'm not even halfway there - a short clip would make my day! Just a 10 sec clip or something would be extremely cool!

Did you boost the signal before it hit the amp?

Congrats!! :kickass:

Thanks! If you check out the intro to "New Revelation" that's basically a dry guitar track. We're not running much processing on the guitars at all. I use a Maxon OD820 to boost. EMG 85 pickup in the bridge. 6505+ and a Mesa cabinet.
 
Thanks! If you check out the intro to "New Revelation" that's basically a dry guitar track. We're not running much processing on the guitars at all. I use a Maxon OD820 to boost. EMG 85 pickup in the bridge. 6505+ and a Mesa cabinet.

Cool - can't believe it's a dry track... WOW..! Sorry for bombarding you with questions about this - I'm really stuck and dying to getting a kick in the right direction guitar sound wise - and you got a #¤%& awesome thing going there! The intro riff is quadtracked too isn't it? How did you go about creating this sound? Are the four gits equally distorted or do you have two with very little distortion and two with some more? I figure you panned it L100 R100 L80 R80 - did you use different eq-settings for each guitar / different setups?

I'm happy to hear you're using an EMG85 at the bridge cuz that what I use and all I hear is people telling me to get an 81 instead... Now I definately wont.

One last question (at least for now... can't help it, sorry) what mics and mic-placement did you use? 57s the Fredrik Nordstroem way or..?

Just bought the album. Downloading right now. Cant wait :kickass:

:worship:
 
Cool - can't believe it's a dry track... WOW..!

It's quad tracked, and I ran the Audix i5 mic into a Neve 1073 EQ preamp. Just one mic positioned well is all I needed. The Nordstrom technique has gotten great results for him and others, but that would have stressed me out - way too many tracks to mess with! I used both channels on the 6505+ head, and the usual panning you described. Two tracks of crunch channel, two tracks of lead channel. They're equally distorted but with some slightly different EQ on each channel.

I prefer the sound of the EMG 85 in the bridge, I've been using it in the bridge ever since James Murphy recommended it to me a couple of years ago. Joel from KsE as well as Peter from Soilwork both use 85s in the bridge too! I think that if I was using an 81, I would probably be more inclined to use the Nordstrom mic technique to make up for lacking low end coming from the guitar itself. The 85 has lows that the 81 is simply missing, and it sounds fuller all around as well!

Thanks so much for buying our album!! :headbang::kickass:
 
Thx man! That should motivate me for some more years messing around with mics and cabs. Damn man that album rocks! :headbang:
 
shane,
great stuff! "Dark Fiber" is my first impulse buy in quite a while. The snare does sound weird sometimes, but by far not as distracting as the kick on the last into eternity album :)
Anyway, thanks for making it available as non-DRMed files! The price difference between mp3 and lossless files is justified, but the prices itself seem a bit high for a download only product.
Unfortunately the link for the booklet failed on the mp3 purchase page. I dropped you an email with the php error.
Gonna listen to your stuff some more now.
best,
k
 
Yo Shane, Congrats on the album! Hey, I want to buy the album. I'm a material guy. I need to smell the aroma of freshly printed liner notes and shit.:heh: I also have dial up at the moment so...Can you mail me a copy? Thanks, Shane
 
shane,
great stuff! "Dark Fiber" is my first impulse buy in quite a while. The snare does sound weird sometimes, but by far not as distracting as the kick on the last into eternity album :)
Anyway, thanks for making it available as non-DRMed files! The price difference between mp3 and lossless files is justified, but the prices itself seem a bit high for a download only product.
Unfortunately the link for the booklet failed on the mp3 purchase page. I dropped you an email with the php error.
Gonna listen to your stuff some more now.
best,
k

Thanks man! I just emailed you a direct link to the packaging, weird that you got that error!

Thanks for the feedback on price, etc., and we are considering offering physical CDs in the future. Our prices are comparable to iTunes, and in any case we are offering better-quality downloads than they do. So if we're expensive, then they're cost-prohibitive, yet they have the largest market share.

Not being defensive, as I think online music sales are still in their infancy. We decided to take the sales into our own hands b/c we don't like the silly DRM and other restrictions imposed by the RIAA and other powers that be.
 
Yo Shane, Congrats on the album! Hey, I want to buy the album. I'm a material guy. I need to smell the aroma of freshly printed liner notes and shit.:heh: I also have dial up at the moment so...Can you mail me a copy? Thanks, Shane

We got a short run of physical CDs made, mainly for press local shows, but we are going to set up larger-scale online sales of our CDs with CDBaby at some point in the near future. Sign up for our email list on backmask.com and you will know as soon as they're available.
 
We got a short run of physical CDs made, mainly for press local shows, but we are going to set up larger-scale online sales of our CDs with CDBaby at some point in the near future. Sign up for our email list on backmask.com and you will know as soon as they're available.

have you looked into tunecore.com. it sounds pretty cool and it is owned by fletcher from mercenary audio. it seems way better than the other services at the moment. look into it at least. let me know what you think about it.
 
have you looked into tunecore.com. it sounds pretty cool and it is owned by fletcher from mercenary audio. it seems way better than the other services at the moment. look into it at least. let me know what you think about it.

funny that you mention this. we were looking at the tunecore site the other day and are still debating which way to go. the prices and services seem to be about the same, so i think brand recognition might be the deciding factor. we still have some other aspects to think about, but we'll let everyone know via our email list.

cheers,
Richard
 
Sorry for the thread ressurection but i missed this thread because I was on holidays, but fukk me man your shit sound awesome!! Real heavy but really clear at the same time. You also have a really great voice by the way.

What did you use on the clean vocals? I'm trying to go for that kind of sound in my bands next recording. I love that kind of clear and cold tone to it.

P.S. If your ever willing to come to here I could maybe get you a gig or two in western Germany