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

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

]]> http://dearacetate.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/a-rob-blog/feed/ 0 dearacetate http://dearacetate.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/the-album-is-finishedhear-an-exclusive-new-track-from-the-album/ http://dearacetate.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/the-album-is-finishedhear-an-exclusive-new-track-from-the-album/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:08:47 +0000 dearacetate http://dearacetate.wordpress.com/?p=301 ]]>

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

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

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

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

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 .

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

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

It’s been a few weeks since the last update, and things are progressing nicely.  We’ve had a couple more weekends in the studio, jam sessions round mine mostly working on keys ideas, plus Shane’s been busy working on the production side of things.  The first weekend we’d decided to tackle Out of Spite, and the vocals for Dark Ideas and Tied to Shadows.

Out of Spite was the only album track that we hadn’t already made a start on, as we were recording just vocals and guitar for it; rather than as a full band recording with drums etc. like for the other album tracks.  I headed down to the studio Friday evening, joining Marc and Shane who were already down there.  We’d discussed how we were going to approach the performance, opting for a more laid back approach, free-time paced by the flow of the vocal, rather than to an instrumental rhythmic pulse or click.  It consequently meant that we had to get a simultaneous take of both the guitar and vocal in one go.

As well as the Neumann U87 mic that we’d been using in previous vocal recordings, we had a couple of Gefell mics, plus a Brauner Phantera, which I was interested in trying out with a view to perhaps adding to my home studio set-up at a later date.  Unfortunately one of the Gefell mics had a technical fault, and the other Gefell positioned off-axis wasn’t really picking up much of a signal, and at the very low sound volumes I was singing at, had too much self-noise in its signal chain to be useable.  When we’d played the song live at a few acoustic shows it was a more powerful vocal sound, partly through necessity, as the vocal could easily be lost behind the volume of the guitar in such an environment.  In the studio we were able to take a different approach, almost whispering the vocal to the point of break-up, which gave a very different, up front personal sound.  For guitar Marc started off with his acoustic guitar DI’d like we would live, however it wasn’t really the sound we were after, and decided to use the 335 once again.  We put several takes down, happy with the general vibe of what we’d recorded, leaving it for another day for Shane to pick out the best takes.

Saturday we’d opted for another evening session, giving me chance to watch Blackpool away at Crystal Palace that afternoon.  I met up with friends in a pub before the game, sticking to soft drinks, and vowing not to shout, chant and cheer during the match.  Dark Ideas was probably the most melancholic track we had to record, and two minutes in to the game, and Blackpool already down to ten men I was starting to wish I’d gone straight to the studio, the slight upside being I’d be in the right frame of mind to sing like I was feeling miserable.  The dark clouds weren’t to last though.  Against the odds, the ‘pool battled their way to a one nil victory, playing some great football at times.  I managed only one slight lapse in not shouting, but that was the ref’s fault, failing to award an early pen much to the disdain of the travelling tangerine faithful.  I made do instead with some vociferous clapping and miming that would’ve done Mr. Chaplin proud.

I left the ground feeling jubilant, managed to catch the next direct train back to Watford, and stuck Radiohead on my iPod in the vain hope that it’d wipe the beaming grin off my face, and get me in the right frame of mind for sticking the vocals down.  I didn’t succeed in making myself feel suitably miserable, but it turned out not to be a problem.  We got the main vocal takes down that we needed, returning in the morning to add the last of the chorus harmony parts.

Sunday we had planned to record the vocals for Tied To Shadows.  We spent quite a bit of time trying out different techniques to get the sound and vibe that we were after, such as getting close up on the mic for certain sections, and singing the track with different levels of aggression and despondency; this was after all a song about being tied to an addiction.  We got some reasonable takes down, but we weren’t entirely happy with the vocals in the chorus.  I was starting to get a little tired vocally, and as happens after singing for a while, was losing some of the richness to my vocal tone.  Although what we had was ok, we decided that we could probably get a better take another day, so left it there for vocals, having had a pretty productive weekend.

On the Monday the following week Shane and I were back in the studio to put vocals down for Coked Up.  We had a listen through, and were pretty happy with the guide vocal from a previous session, that was already down.  We put down a few more takes, paying particular attention to the chorus section, which we thought may benefit from the layering of vocals takes, ready for the rest of the band to put down their backing vocals for that section at a later date.  We also rang Marc from the studio to discuss ideas to rework his vocal in the breakdown section, which I’m looking forward to hearing.

That completed my band involvement for the week, with no Wednesday jam session as I was away in Seville to watch Spain v England.  It was nice to escape the weather back home, swapping the snow and ice which was just about resisting melting away, for a few rays of sunshine, a game of football, and the chance to relax for a few days away from it all. I returned on the Sunday, a marginally rosier shade of place, with some new song ideas scribbled down, and some pictures of chalices and clocks on the camera that I thought might possibly be of interest for future artwork ideas.

The following week we were back to our usual Wednesday jam session, which we used to go through some more ideas for keyboard parts for the album tracks, sorting through Tamma Connection and Alarm.  Friday night we were back in the studio, to revisit the vocals for Tied To Shadows, which we recorded down without too many problems.

Saturday morning we were back in the studio to look at the vocals for When The Karma Falls.  We put down a few takes then decided to try out some
production ideas, adding effects on the verse and bridge vocals.  We re-recorded those sections again to get a performance that made the most of the accentuation of the breathiness.  Having experimented singing the chorus with different amounts of attack, and mindful that we wanted to add some additional harmony parts to it, we decided to move on to recording keyboards, and come back to that section on another day; hopefully with the added benefit of getting a richer vocal sound from the start of a new session.

Marc and Rob had arrived down the studio after lunch, and Rob was ready to put down the first of his keyboard parts for the album.  First up was The Chalice.  Rob spent a little time playing along to the track, tweaking the synth sounds out of the JD8000.  With the sound sorted he put down a few takes, with him and Shane taking turns controlling the speed of the arpegiator.  Leaving that one to edit another day, we moved on to Alarm, for which we already had some keys ideas down in the chorus.  Rob had however come up with some really cool spacey sounds for the track when we’d jammed it round at mine during the week; adding what I could best describe as the final layer of icing to the track.  That was soon sorted, and the recording completed for yet another album track, with just the mixing and finals production steps to be done.

There was one remaining recording task to complete that day, which was to re-amp and effect the last note of the chorus in Dark Ideas.  It also proved an opportune time to discuss renaming tracks.  Dark Ideas had been a working title, which we’d never got round to changing, after a fair amount of brain-storming between us we came up with a new title of Apperception, which I think nicely suits the meaning of the song.  We also had a bit of a think about renaming Out Of Spite, but didn’t stumble upon the right title straight away.  Shane had been busy during the week mixing Apperception (Dark Ideas), and we had one effect left to add, which involved feeding the held note at the end of the last chorus in to the memory man pedal and Fender reverb, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place as a special-fx sound in Doctor Who.  We listened back and all agreed that adding an extra layer of sound to the end of the track worked.  Leaving another finished track for Shane to finish mixing.

Wednesday saw another session round mine with Marc and Rob, with Shane joining us a little later having finished work down the studio.  We’d tried several ideas for adding keyboard parts for Perfect Soldier and No Easy Target, but were coming to the conclusion that they probably didn’t need keyboard parts, and that Rob would probably be better off playing one of Marc’s recorded guitar parts when we play it out live.  The other track we looked at was Tied To Shadows, where Rob already had some cool progressions, but we were trying to get an idea of what sort of sounds would best fit with the track, ready for recording it down in the studio at a later date.

On Thursday Marc, Sonny and I headed down to the Function Rooms in Hemel Hempstead for the regular Juicebox night, this time in association with BBC Introducing.  It was a good line-up with bands from across the 3 counties area, and also chance to catch up on a few band bits with Sonny too.  It was a fairly late finish, the last band The Raid, having a number of issues which dragged their set out a bit.  Having dropped Marc back, I had a song idea wriggling around in my head (BPYBBO) as I was driving home. I noted down the idea when I got back, switched the lights out and went to bed.  My brain had other ideas though, thinking up new permutations of the ideas for the song, forcing me to scribble them down before finally getting some sleep.

We’d discussed the idea the night before of having a bit of a jam Friday evening.  Marc came over and we worked through some ideas for new songs, some that we’d already worked on previously, a new idea of Marc’s, plus a brief look at BPYBBO, for which I had rough lyrics and melody ideas for, plus a beat in my head.  The time went quickly and it was soon gone midnight.  Saturday evening Marc was over again, this time armed with a drum machine.  We began the session programming in some rough drum patterns for Apparition and NWBGLDTU, a couple of new tracks we’d jammed through as a band, and are likely to be amongst the first of a growing list of new songs to come in to our live set.  With that done we moved on to BPYBBO, starting with programming the drum machine with the rhythmic pattern I had in my head.  I sang my melody to Marc, and having established the key, worked out chord progressions for the bridge and verse sections of the song.  We jammed out a rough structure for the track, and were pretty pleased with the way it was turning out, with what we thought was a nice hook in the bridge.  We still had the chorus section to determine, and Marc came up with a couple of different ideas which worked with the verses, for which I still needed to work out vocals for.  It was again well gone midnight, and we called it a day.  I woke up in the morning and finished off the lyrics for the verses, and continued sketching out lyrical ideas for the chorus.  Meanwhile Marc recorded down an instrumental demo of what we had so far, and I was able to work out a chorus melody and begin piecing the lyrics together.  All in all a productive songwriting weekend.

We’ve made quite a bit of progress with the album during February.  Tomorrow evening is our first recording session of March, which sees me back in the studio to do the vocals for When The Karma Falls.  With that done that just leaves us to have a look at the vocals for Tamma Connection (yes we’ve renamed that one slightly too), which would then only leave us with backing vocals and keyboard parts to record, plus any additional production tasks before working towards the final mixes.  It’s been a long journey to get this far, there’s still quite a bit of production work left to do, but it’s getting pretty close now.   So there endeth another long blog.  I really should get round to them more often, but things have been so incredibly busy the last month it’s been tricky making time.

Stee J