How we came up with our bands name

Hey guys

Quite a few people have been asking how we came up with our bands name, and I thought it was high time we gave you all the definitive answer.
When me and Shane started the band I was heavily into a band called Rival Schools and they have a track called High Acetate which I thought would be a cool band name.

Shane liked the Acetate part of the name but not the High part so one afternoon while fitting insulation in the boiling hot attic of Shane’s studio and while probably hallucinating from the heat we settled on Dear Acetate. Acetate has loads of different meanings and our music has many different styles so we thought it was a good fit. The Dear part of the name is taken from the idea of addressing someone in a letter and we thought next to each other the 2 words sounded good and had the right meanings to be the final band name.

Hope this clears up any confusion

Have a good week
Marc x

a Rob blog

Hello you sexy starfish, Rob here admitting that we have been truly awful at writing blogs recently.  I’d love to pretend that it’s been because we’ve been busy endlessly touring the world, but I’m not going to lie to you.  Instead, here is a list of some of the things that have happened in our lives recently:

• I went to see Pearl Jam in London, which was literally the best show of all time.  The Beatles at Shea Stadium has been deleted from the world’s memory as it was simply rubbish in comparison.
• Stee J schmoozed his way backstage at Reading Festival.  We’re now booked to headline in 2056.  We’ll try to be as good as Radiohead were this year.
• Shane got all his new shiny tattoos finished off.  None of us thought they were rubbish, which must have been nice for him.
• Marc and I lost Sonny, and so set up a detective agency.  We found him chasing spiders in a snooker club.
• Shane had his name changed to Mel…..by us……just to annoy him.

That’s been about it really.  On the musical side of things, many copies of our debut album, ‘Lost Days & Nights’, are about to be born in a big CD factory.  Hooray, it’s about time, I know!  What’s that?  Where can you buy a copy of this incredible album with its 11 amazing songs, its equally stunning artwork and lyrics?  Well I’m telling you now that we are in the process of building a glittering new DA website with a glimmering shop within.  ITunes will probably be a good bet too.  We’ll let you know.

OR, if you really want to get into our good books, you will come to a live show, have your face melted by our guitar-driven dance rock, then buy a copy afterwards.  I will hand it over to you personally, and personally worship you for a few moments for being so kind.  Please do this.  Shows will be arranged very shortly – we’re currently dedicating 100% of our time rehearsing so we can get out there and rock out.

All in all, it’s exciting times for the boys of Dear Acetate.  We’re jazzed about it all.  I don’t have a picture of us all looking deliriously stoked, but this is probably an accurate depiction of how we’re feeling currently.

Take it easy, more news soon.  Much band love

Rob and Dear Acetate xx

The album is finished/Hear an exclusive new track from the album!

Dear Acetate (minus Sonny) at Air Studios for the mastering of 'Lost Days & Nights'

Hey people, we’re all really buzzing right now.  After many months of hard work, the audio for the album is finally complete! Over recent weeks Shane has been locked away in the studio busily mixing the tracks that we’d recorded over the past year, and on Friday we headed to the mastering suite at Air Studios in London, to apply the finishing touches.

Ray Staff, the guy behind the controls is something of a guru in the mastering world, having worked on albums by the likes of Muse, The Libertines and Pearl Jam, and legends such as Led Zeppelin and The Clash.  Not only is he a great professional, but a true gentleman, and a pleasure to work with.

The finished audio sounds phenomenal.  We’ll be spending time over the coming weeks sorting out the artwork, and the logistics of getting it pressed to cd and released.  Come find us on Facebook if you haven’t already for an exclusive limited time preview of a new track from the album.  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dear-Acetate/7544908125

Have a great week

Marc & Stee J

Album artwork 2nd design idea

Hey all

Above is my 2nd design idea for the album front and back cover, there are 2 variations, 1 with the logo on the cover and one without which is below. Let us know what you think either here on wordpress or on our myspace and facebook profiles

http://www.myspace.com/dearacetate

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dear-Acetate/7544908125

Have a good week

Marc xx

A week of new songs and cool gigs

Hello lovely readers, Rob here updating you on another week in the life of Dear Acetate.

Where to start?!  The past week has been pretty darn sweet.  We allowed Shane the deserved luxury of a breather from mixing the debut album, so off he went back to the land of his fathers for the Oxygen Festival, where he rocked out to The Mars Volta, Blur and many more.  Do not fear, he’s back in the studio slogging away to get the final mixes for all the songs in order, and has got it all sounding immense!

Jealous of his festival-going antics, Stee J, Marc and myself took matters into our own hands and set about seeing as many top bands as we could in a few days.  Monday 13^th saw us at Somerset House to see The Mars Volta who blew us away with 2 hours of amazing prog rock.  I think we are all in agreement that Thomas Pridgen is the best drummer we’ve ever seen (aside from Shane of course), so it really was a breath-taking performance.

And as if that was not enough, we went to see Jane’s Addiction AND Nine Inch Nails at the O2 Arena on Wednesday.  It was supposedly NIN’s last ever headline UK show, so we simply had to be there and got lucky on ebay.  Stee J is a massive Jane’s Addiction fan so that was top for him, but Marc and I could not get enough of NIN – a massive musical assault on our eyes and ears.  They even got Gary Numan on stage for a couple of songs, including his smash hit Cars, which ensured that the crowd went absolutely friggin’ mental.  Amazing show, can’t believe we might never see them live again.

Marc and I have been working on demos for a few new songs and previewing them to the other guys.  These are songs that hopefully the others will like and we can start incorporating them into our live sets, and maybe they’ll eventually get recorded for the 2^nd album (we’re trying not to get too ahead of ourselves!).  We thought it might be cool for you to see how we go about the songwriting process, so have uploaded one of the demos, Heads Will Roll, onto YouTube for you to listen to. Simply visit www.youtube.com/dearacetate to see the demo, and a load of other stuff!  Do let us know what you think.  Basically, we spend a few hours in Marc’s bedroom recording this kind of thing, then will get together with Stee J to work through ideas for the vocals.  If we think it’s good enough, the track will then be brought to a full band rehearsal, where we can thrash it out.  We’re quite excited about this one though.

So that is it for another week.  If you haven’t already, do please check out the photos on the MySpace from our recent photo shoot, we’d love to know your thoughts.  We’re thinking of using a few for the album artwork, so let us know if you think it works!

Much love from the band.

Rob x

Photo Shoot at Little Hay Golf Course

Rob, Sonny, Jack, Stee and Shane check out some of the shots taken

Hey Friends

We had a photo shoot this week at a golf course of all places, though we were in the woods just behind the golf course. The shoot was a lot of fun and we ended up getting some really cool shots.

Rob and Sonny in the woods

The photos were taken by our mate Jack Watts who use to be in a band with our bassist Sonny. We will be posting the photos once we have selected which ones we like and jack has edited them. In the meantime I have uploaded a few photos of us goofing around between having our pictures taken.

Take care

Marc

Designing the album artwork (let us know what you think)

Marc's first draft design of the 'Lost Days And Nights' album cover.

Hello all

The pic above is a rough draft for the ‘Lost Days And Nights’ album cover, we’re still sifting through the artwork  ideas and should hopefully make a final decision in a couple of weeks.

Originally the artwork was going to be handled by a local photographer/cartoonist called Alistair Murphy and our meetings with him were very fruitful with many ideas brainstormed, unfortunately other commitments got in the way and Alistair had to back down which was disappointing but we all understood he’s predicament.

With Alistair leaving  the project I (Marc) decided to take a crack at the artwork. I wanted to create an interesting theme where the design could look edgy yet simple. I had recently seen a film called a ‘Scanner Darkly’ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/ and loved the dark gritty comic book effect and felt some of our songs especially Coked Up Russians, Tied To Shadows and Apperception really identified with themes explored in the film. I decided to take pictures of the band and edit them to create a similar effect to the film. For the name of the band and the album title I decided to keep with the comic book theme and used speech boxes that should hopefully capture peoples eyes.

All comments and thoughts are very welcome

Have a good week

Marc (D.A)

Marc's first draft design of the 'Lost Days And Nights' album back cover .

Watford live gig/Album progress

DA Playing Watford Live 13th June 2009

As you’re probably aware by now, we have spent the best part of a year recording our debut album.   Because of the recording we’ve had to put gigs on hold to put the time into the album to make it as good as possible.

During the past twelve months we’ve been restricted to just a handful of unplugged gigs, and haven’t played live since recruiting Rob at the start of the year.  On Saturday we finally got back to doing what we love doing best, which is playing live. The gig was an acoustic set for the Watford Live! Festival, which is a series of events across Watford during June.  This is a great showcase of the best talent in music and the arts from the region, and we were very pleased to be asked to play. Interspersed between album preparations, we spent several weeks rehearsing and getting all the songs tight, and took the opportunity to play a few new songs in the set that we had been itching to play for a long time.

The sun was shining on the day and the crowd were enjoying both the music and the brilliant weather from the surrounds of the square.  Pete, who was doing a fine job of compering the St. Mary’s stage, was slightly surprised and impressed that Stee had driven down from the Download festival especially to play the show, and announced to the crowd the commitment to playing live. Having not played live for several months, it took us a few songs to get into our stride but once we rolled out crowd favourites Old Street and Alarm, there were a few who couldn’t help but move to the beat. We were also really happy with the crowds positive reaction to a new song called ‘On’, and hope those of you who haven’t heard it get to once we announce some live dates.

We’re happy to report that the album is 95% complete and that Shane is finishing off the last few mixes and then it’s off to the mastering engineer to make it sound even better. We hope to have the album available as a download via our website which is currently being developed and should be up in the next few months. The physical release of the album will be announced in the coming weeks so make sure you keep an eye on this blog and our myspace site: www.myspace.com/dearacetate

Thanks to those of you that came to the gig, have a great week.

Marc

Diary of an Album (Part 9)- The final pieces of the jigsaw

Hey all

DA hard at work recording keyboard parts

It’s been a while since I last posted, so to stop Stee hogging the blog I’m gonna update you all on what the bands been up to. I’ll try and keep it short and sweet

Well I guess I better start by saying we have Acquired a new band member in the form of Rob Northcott, he’s our new keys man and has really bought some fresh exciting ideas to the songs.

Shane and Rob try and get some interesting sounds using Stee's Roland jp-8000

So the album……

It seems like we’ve been working on our debut forever but in truth it’s probably the best part of a year and a half as the recording sessions have been scattered throughout the months. We have everything recorded down and are happy with all of the recorded takes of each instrument. We’re at the mixing stage now which entails Shane working his ass off to do justice to the recordings and retain the energy and raw sound of our live shows on the record. This week Shane has been tidying up each songs session by cutting out unwanted audio, colour coding recorded instruments, setting volume levels on the mixing desk and labeling channels so everything in the session is easier to work with.

As those of you who follow our twitter will have noticed Shane has been mixing one track each day, this takes him an average of 8 hours a day and even then the mixes won’t be finished as he will revisit them just before we get to the mastering stage.

We are getting our album mastered by a top mastering engineer who has worked with the Who and Led Zeppelin! So we’re all really excited about hearing the final results. There will be more detail on the mixing and mastering of our debut album in the next blog.

Cheers for reading

Marc

Diary of an album (Part 7) we’re getting there, Electronic Rehearsals

Hey all

Just a quick update

Having got down the lead vocals for No Easy Target the week before, Stee and Shane returned to the studio last Friday to record the vocals for our re-recorded super charged version of Old Street.  They started out the night using the Neumann U87 and Shure SM7 microphones together with Shane’s recently aquired Neve 4081 pre-amp.  Although that same set-up had worked well for the No Easy Target vocals, they couldn’t quite get the right vocal sound to suit Old Street.  Having spent most of the evening auditioning a number of combinations of different microphones and pre-amps, they found that the sound of Stee’s newly acquired Neve Portico pre-amp, with the U87 fitted best in the mix.  With time ticking on, they decided it would be better to come back  another day with with fresh ears and a rested voice.

On Saturday Marc, Sonny and Rob headed to Stee’s place to work on the new tunes we’ve been brewing up recently. As Shane was taking a breather from spending way too much of his time in the studio we decided to use my Korg ER1 drum machine to jam out some rhythms and we’re pretty pleased with the results, so much so that we are definitely thinking about heading out and doing a few gigs with our electronic set-up (more of that later). We have just started jamming with a keyboard player called Rob and some of the ideas he has bought to the table have blown me away, he’s also pretty useful on the guitar so a versatile guy to have in the band. Rob played my Novation synth and Stee’s newly acquired Roland JP8000 synth and the sounds he made with them were mind blowingly brilliant. Sonny has bought lots of new effects pedals and is making some really interesting bass lines that are unlike anything I’ve heard recently in popular music. Anyway if you want to hear these new creations keep a look out for upcoming gigs on our myspace page myspace.com/dearacetate

Sunday morning Stee, Shane, Sonny and myself returned to the studio to nail the lead vocals for Old Street, I think it was good to have the 4 of us in the studio as we could all listen to the different takes and put forward our thoughts which is better than the recent method whereby Shane would call us on the phone and play the track down the phone which is not ideal due to sound quality. After getting a great take and agreeing we had the lead vocal down Sonny and myself headed home and to the pub respectively. Later that evening Shane sent out a new mix of Old Street and I was quite surprised as Stee and Shane  had recorded a plethora of backing vocals which makes Stee sound like a small choir in the chorus. I am now confident re-recording this track due to the hard-drive failure is the best thing that could have happened, yes the album has been delayed but it will definitely be worth it for that shift in quality and how much better the playing is which far usurps the original version we recorded 2 or so years ago.

Have a great week and let us know what you think of the blog

Marc