Nick and I are in a band called The Rails, along with our friend, drummer Chops. Though it’s a pretty big part of our lives, with us performing a live on-line show at least once a week, I haven’t talked about it much on this blog. It’s not that it’s a secret or anything .. it’s more that I understand that musical tastes are very personal and I wouldn’t want to be seen as trying to ‘push’ our music on anyone reading my blog.
I’ll leave some links at the end of this post for those who are interested but please don’t feel obligated. I am happy to keep this blog and my musical life separate, though it would be great if there was eventually some cross over, but only if you like the music, which I realize is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Our music is loud with quite a punky edge and our songs were all written by Nick with some input on arrangement and melody by me. I am the singer in the band and play keyboards (Nord Electro). Nick plays guitar and sings back-up, and Chops plays the drums. We have played many live gigs around town and have 13 songs professionally recorded and produced by Michael Jack. In recent years however, we have really taken to performing on-line for a world-wide audience. We have been doing live audio streams withing SecondLife.com since 2007, which means the audience can hear us live but the visual aspect is in avatar form. You can see my other blog which I will link to below, if you want to see more about our experiences in SecondLife. (Shout out to Krakov Letov of The Notes Shack Pub, who’s virtual club we performed at, and Brucie Lusch our adorable helper / hostess, who has been helping us for years. We’ve not met these them in real life because they live in Europe, but meeting them both in real life is high on our bucket list of life’s hopes and dreams.)
The exciting news for The Rails in 2012 is that we are in the process of adding a live visual element to the show, made possible by Nick’s skills in computer programming and sound and tv studio experience. We tested it yesterday with our regular audience in SecondLife, most of whom are from Europe because they really seem to dig what we’re doing, and we play at 5pm Toronto time, which is 10pm their time. Our test run worked pretty well with a few glitches that need ironing out, so we have more work to do before the ‘official’ launch, but it’s looking good! Unfortunately Chops was sick so he couldn’t participate, so Nick and I used our ancient drum machine (an Oberheim).
A bonus of all this, in addition to the opportunity for reaching a much broader audience on-line than we have been reaching through SecondLife, is that we now have to actually get dressed in nice outfits for our shows. Previously, since nobody could see us, we used to perform in very casual comfortable outfits. Now we will have wardrobe, hair and make-up (for me) to incorporate, along with creative stage setting. I am really interested in that whole aspect of band-life, so am psyched about this new aspect.
Anyway in this post, what you’re seeing are a few snaps of us during our sound-check yesterday. Since our shows are 100% live, there are no Youtubes or videos to show, so one will have to ‘be’ at the show in order to see/hear it. I do however plan to set my camera on a tripod in the studio at some point in the future to get some live action shots taken during the actual performance. I also hope to use the requirement to dress-up as the jumping board to doing more outfit posts. (btw .. I got a new camera that I haven’t used yet, so hopefully my pictures will be better .. yay!)
The screen-cap shot at the top was what the cameras captured when Nick turned the cameras off after the soundcheck.
Thanks for your visit. I appreciate your friendship.
xo loulou
If you’d like to check out our music : The Rails Bandcamp