Anyway, the show was a blast. As usual, we set up and line-checked and started playing within half an hour (which usually means that the first 10 minutes of your set are split between playing and yelling back and forth with the sound-guy). Just goes to show, folks, always be nice to your sound-guy. Couple things that stood out for us was The Sultan’s 5am set (flawless …someone get that guy playing in Nelson), getting to see our good friend Lowell, breakfast at the Friesens and of course, all the fine people we met at Fandango.

And, in case you were wondering, here’s what the night looked/ sounded like:

The funny thing is: you gotta listen to a LOT of shit, just to catch that 6-second hook worth sampling. The end.

The Ableton set used in the video is available here

Well, we’ve been sitting on the news for a while, but now that everything has been made official, we’re please to share that Ropeadope Records, in Philadelphia, has added the Kashoo album to their catalogue, which got released on September 25th, 2012!

Wicked super awesome

When we cut the CD a few months ago, we ran out and told some of our mates that it was ready and set it up for download and whatnot, but generally kinda low-keyed it a fair bit. We had 300 physical copies made too, 50-odd of which went out to co-op and independent radio stations across Canada. It got play in Ontario and plenty in Kamloops (thank you CFBX 93.5). Somehow though, we never really felt like running out and telling everyone it was done, even though it took over a year to finish Then our good friend Rich Rabnett, who wrote Secrets of the Park with us, thought the folks he knew at Ropeadope should hear what we’d cooked up. And they liked it and we skyped a bit and we sorted out and cleared the samples and the whole thing was a lot easier than you’d think. Thanks Rich.

Also, muchos many thanks to everyone that helped put that album together, vocal skills Ben Midwicki, Gisto, Tommy O, Kyran, piano skills by Ian Cox (fastest turn-around on production work we’ve ever seen!), Anneke and Jonnine for the wicked work with the horns and of course Adham Shaikh for giving our stuff a real listen to in the infamous Sonic Turtle!

You can cop the album here.  We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. And we really do. You know how sometimes musicians can write a piece of music and then hate it? Nah, we frickin love this album.

]]> http://www.kashoomusic.com/ropeadope-is-dope/feed/ 0 http://www.kashoomusic.com/mr-ericos-georgiades-thank-you/ http://www.kashoomusic.com/mr-ericos-georgiades-thank-you/#comments Sun, 09 Sep 2012 21:30:28 +0000 kashoo http://www.kashoomusic.com/?p=487 We wanted to write this quick little post and say thank you to my brother Ericos, for all his time and effort in helping us with maintaining this site. We were originally hosted on ipage, which turned out to be a disaster. We would wholeheartedly discourage anyone from hosting their site on ipage: aside from 2 months of automated technical support replies, the service is slow, unreliable and unpredictable. By the time we asked Ericos to step in and help us out, it was taking the site over a minute to load… and there were frequent occasions when it didn’t load at all.

Though the band is based in Nelson BC and Ericos lives thousands of miles away in Cyprus, he worked tirelessly troubleshooting and testing the site’s functionality, dealing with ipage (back when we still thought they would assist us in resolving the issue) and finally, moving the site to a new hosting service. We appreciate the time he took to help us out, given that, between work and family responsibilities, Ericos works 2000 hours a week.  Love ya bro!

]]> http://www.kashoomusic.com/mr-ericos-georgiades-thank-you/feed/ 0 http://www.kashoomusic.com/days-are-shorter-nights-are-colder/ http://www.kashoomusic.com/days-are-shorter-nights-are-colder/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 02:44:43 +0000 kashoo http://www.kashoomusic.com/?p=444  Track Info:

• File under: Glitch-Hop, Crunk, Fat Funk
• Bit-rate: 320kbps
• Length:3:36
• Sample details: For all you hip-hop heads out there, the vocal sample is snippet from “If I ruled the world” by Nas.
• Sample pack: Available upon request

Cop the tune here + share + enjoy

(right-click to save)

Ableton Live set with all MIDI instruments + Samples + Beats (note: requires Ableton Live 8.1 or higher)

 Notes:

We’ve added quite a bit to this set. The Master channel is rigged with our custom-built mastering chain we use to ensure that all or tracks come out sounding consistent. You’ll notice that the bass track is side-chained to the kick from the beat track (side-chaining is key!). We’ve left our arrangement intact in the arrangement view. The Sharon Jones sample has been carefully warped and synced to tempo. We’ve eliminated all 3rd party plug-ins and transfered all the instruments to Ableton Samplers. In a nutshell, it’s a out-of-the-box set: plug in your keyboard and have at ‘er!

Get Sample Pack (.alp)

So what does it sound like?

All the way from Waterloo we got some love from a nutty bunch of radio programmers led by DJ Steel + DJ Adrock on the Mano A Mano show, broadcast  on SoundFM 100.3 ! Safe! The boys were pro enough to give us a heads up on the show, sending us a link to the podcast where we listened to them rant about (in no particular order):

1. How our live sets remind them of Cariboo (awesome!)
2. How great the Shambhala Music Festival looks (it is)
3. The difficulty of pronouncing our names (we get that a lot) and
4. Where our music is best suited to be listened to (mainly, grimey inner-city back-alleys)

Check out the podcast here.

Also for your reading pleasure is  DJ Steel’s blog, The Rain God’s Memoirs. Through his Seasonal Sounds Project, he shares different bands, musicians and sounds that go well with all the different seasons of the year. Kashoo must have a spring sound then

 Contents:

1.  One-shots + Field recordings
2. Ableton Set containing beats + bassline

 Notes:

Jakob put these sounds together when he wandered into a hardware store with a sampler and spent a couple hours recording random sounds from around the shop. He got a few funny looks from the staff,  but was not asked to leave. “Crazy musicians, best not get too close, we might catch it”. Right.

These sounds would complement nicely the collection of kicks, snares etc we shared in Kashoo-pack01. We’ve used them extensively in our tracks as little extra snippets of candy over our main beats. However,  in demonstration of  the limitless possibilities of sampling and sound manipulation, we’ve created 2 beats using only these samples, and threw them into this pack. We’ve also added a tidy little bass hook to go along with the beats and formated everything into both .wav loops AND as a Live set. Feel free to use everything here as you please. Hit us back if you cook up something you wanna show off !

Get Sample Pack (.zip)

• File under: IDM, glitchy, loungy whompstomp
• Bit-rate: 320kbps
• Length:3:37
• Sample details: Jakob chopped up an acapella of “The Shore” by Basia Bulat. As far as we know, this may be the first  bass remix out there. It’s, er .. a departure from the original for sure, as they say.

 Notes:

We started and finished this tune in 19 hours.  We counted. Up until just recently, it would take us, quite literally, months to finish a tune. Producing tracks as a band can be challenging when, really, computer art/work is quite a private thing. We’d individually work on a track, passing it back and forth, each of us pouring over every insignificant detail. For the album, we included a lot of live instrumentation in our tracks which then added a whole new layer to get “just right” (read: get fixated on). We had a really hard time deciding a track was done and moving on.

Luckily, this doesn’t happen anymore today. Over the last 6 months we’ve completely changed the way we write our tunes. It’s not that we’ve invented a groundbreaking method of music production. Ill Gates was hosting one of his Ableton workshops and he was all about a “20 hours-to-completion” rule for his tracks. We were like ” … “. And sure, you gotta have your production chops up a bit, but we found it has to do more with being organized, being comfortable and familiar with your DAW and having a decent library of samples. And it works! From rough sketch to rendered track in 19 hours. Which leaves us a lot more time to waste our day on other things like, well other things.

This is one of our latest songs we’ve wrapped up in just under 20 hours (which works out to roughly 4 days of studio work). We’d love to share a few ways to save time when you’re writing up a tune, over a series of these posts, just a few bits and pieces that’ve worked for us. Check out Ill Gates workshop if it ever comes your way, we sure picked up a ton from it.

GET YOU YOUR TUNE HERE + SHARE + ENJOY

(right click to save)