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Q.R. Station is a new group and we hope that one day we will be a new phenomenon. For that, we will need fans, and lots of them. For those of you who have been supporting us here at the beginning, we want to give you a sincere “thank you”. It means a lot to us when we see that people are reading our blog and checking out our website. Now we can be honest with each other, so I’m not going to lie and tell you that thousands of people are checking us out. That’s not quite the case ….. yet. We don’t know how many people will get to know us, and to a large degree that’s not even the point. We are making our album out of a love of music and hopefully to add a small piece to the rock and roll groove.
But wouldn’t it be nice if a little following did develop for our band? You bet it would. And the first fans we get are probably going to be among the most memorable. We joined ReverbNation last month as a means of getting our music out to the world. ReverbNation is a great place for artists and music lovers to connect with each other. Listeners can become “fans” of the groups they like. A few days after we registered on the site we had our first fan, a wonderful young lady from Ohio who signed up to support us. I can’t tell you how much that meant to us to have someone take a moment and let us know that they care about what we are doing. How cool was that! Since then a number of others have signed up as fans or signed up for our mailing list via qrstation.com.
We don’t know what is going to happen with our first album – whether anyone will even notice that we put it out. But we really do hope that a following will develop and that with time there are a bunch of people out there paying attention to what we are doing. For those of you reading this blog so far and for those that check our web site from time to time – thank you for doing so and please hang with us. We promise it will be worth it. We will be releasing the first single, Walk Next To Me, sometime in May. We are working real hard to make some final adjustments to the recording and the mix and we really think you’ll like it. When it’s released, Q.R. Station will be off and running …
QR
Performing can be difficult when band members don’t live in the same location. I’m separated from SwingDoom by a few hundred miles, so arranging gigs will initially be challenging for us. SwingDoom has been performing all his life, so gigging is no big deal to him. As for me, I have a particular friend that got me into performing initially.
My friend is in a folk band located in the Boston area, and when he and I initially met I had only been playing guitar for a little over a year. That didn’t matter to him – he wanted to get me in front of an audience because he knew that would be good for me. Folk artists often perform at open mic’s and there’s a large community of open mic’er’s in Boston. I was never trying to be a folk artist, but the line between rock and folk can often be a thin one so I didn’t mind a folk venue to start. So off I went to an open mic so very early into my guitar playing life. I remember playing a U2 song that I love – “Running To Stand Still”. It’s such a beautiful song and it really suites my voice. It’s also quite simple to play if all you are playing are chords. It’s mainly just variants of D,G, and C chords, nothing too complicated. When you are performing for the first time, keeping things uncomplicated is a good idea.
I performed at my first open mic in Concord, MA and it could not have been a more encouraging crowd. When it was my turn to go, they set up a mic in front of my guitar and gave me a vocal mic, and they asked me to strum some chords so they could adjust the levels of the sound system. I had tuned the guitar before getting up there, but it must have been slightly off and the sound guy quietly asked me if I wanted to tune up. Tuning my guitar in front of a room full of folk musicians wasn’t going to happen, thank you. I told him I would just go with it and off I went. I wasn’t really too nervous – well, let me not lie, I was pretty nervous! Mainly, you simply don’t want to screw up. You also don’t want to forget your words or chords. I had been playing “Running To Stand Still” for months, so I knew it pretty well. I got through it, but I did screw up a chord at the very end right when I thought I was home free. I probably was so excited to get through it that I lost my focus for a second. Afterward, it was such a cool crowd that people came up to me and complimented me and thanked me for coming. It was really cool.
That was a good way to get started, and I’ve performed a bit every few months ever since. I’m planning to go to another open mic this week, again in Concord, MA. My plan is to play “Walk Next To Me”, since Q.R. Station is about to release it. I’ll go acoustic because I won’t have SwingDoom with me. Hopefully people will like it and maybe they’ll even visit qrstation.com 
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One of the things I’ve tried to do as we’ve been working on this album is to “study” rock and roll music. When the radio is on, I’m half listening for enjoyment but there is half of me that is trying to learn something from the music. If you pay attention when you are listening to the radio, what you will find is that there is a good percentage of the music that is being played that is total crap. Why would they play music that isn’t any good? Well if you are a radio station, you have a lot of air-time to fill. So at some point you just have to play some of what’s out there, even if it isn’t that good. Even if you are playing the oldies station or the 80’s station, or whatever station is playing a flashback from the past type of show, what you are typically hearing in that case is the best that that time had to offer. The crap of that time got filtered out so that we no longer have to listen to it. But most definitely, if you put yourself back in that time and listened to all that was on the radio in those times, you would inevitably have to come to the same conclusion – there was a good portion of the music out at those times that we don’t remember and don’t care about.
As a song writer, I have definitely had moments where I felt that the songs Q.R. Station is working on are as good or better than some of the stuff on the radio today. Of course, in many cases (the cases where the songs are crap), that’s not saying much. But the more we develop our songs, the more I tend to think they are pretty good. That opinion is based in part on the reaction we have heard from those who have sampled our music (please go and take a listen again on qrstation.com . It actually will help us in a number of ways if you periodically revisit our site and play the songs on the web-player. Those visits are counted and those counts will have impact in several ways that I’ll describe on another occasion).
I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a song good, what makes a song really good, and what makes a song something that will be played for decades into the future. Obviously, the Beatles were doing something right, as their music is played thousands of times a day all over the world. I believe you could release some of their songs today, assuming they had never been released before, and they would be just as big a hit today as they were originally. I think the difference between a good song and a great song can be subtle, but when it comes down to it there are a few ingredients that are critical to making a great song. The first is melody – the song has to have a melody that really catches the ear. Along with that melody, it really helps when the musicians are pretty good and are playing that melody in an interesting way. SwingDoom is really important to Q.R. Station in that he is capable of taking a good melody and adding layers of sound that elevate that melody into something really special. But melody alone won’t get you there. You have to have lyrics that catch the listener and make them want to listen again and understand what the song is about. Those lyrics must be delivered with passion and attitude so that the audience will really feel what the song is about.
But you can study great songs all you want – making them is another story. I don’t know if Q.R. Station has made any great songs yet. I hope at least everything we have made are all good songs. I really do hope that before we are done we’ve managed to capture the ingredients to a great song a few times over. If you like what you have heard so far, keep playing them on our site and also send us a message letting us know what you think. You can send us messages via the “Send Us A Message” tab on qrstation.com.
QR
In early July 2006, I got a call from SwingDoom asking if he could drive up to Boston for the July 4 celebration. I hadn’t seen Swing in awhile, so it sounded like a great idea. I mentioned to Swing that I had decided to make an album and that I had a few songs I was working on so he decided he would bring his electronic drum machine with him on the trip.
Swing is a very close friend and it was really good to see him. We can go long stretches without talking and when we get on the phone it’s as if we are picking up straight from our last conversation. Our friendship never grows old. He’s one of those people you are better off for knowing. So when he popped in, it was like days of old. We decided to have a barbecue cookout, and Swing was going to make a special sauce. We went to the store and the dude was picking out all of these ingredients that I had never thought to put in anything, but let me tell you that the man can cook. He finished with that sauce in the middle of the night, and when we tasted it we could not find enough things in the house to put that sauce on and eat at four in the morning. That sauce was tight.
When we had a moment, I showed SwingDoom how I had been recording my songs on my computer using Audacity. My computer had a built-in microphone on the sound-card so I was just recording this stuff open-air. This was, after all, a low budget operation. I didn’t have any special recording equipment. I had my guitar plugged into an amp and would play through the amp with the sound-card microphone picking up the sound, so there was no direct connection between the guitar and the computer. By it’s very nature, this was a relatively noisy way to record. I was doing the same thing with the vocals – I had a performance microphone that I connected to the amplifier and when I would sing I would have the sound-card microphone pick up the open-air sound with no direct connection between the microphone I was singing into and the computer recording system. So the early recordings of the songs for the album were, well …, let’s just say they were a little rough around the edges. I was surprised to find that Swing liked what he heard. I half expected him to be unimpressed since Swing has been in various musical endeavors for over twenty years, dating to when he was a kid. But he was encouraging and he liked the songs.
So the next thing I knew he had got the drum-pad out and we were having a little jam session with my songs. Let me tell you – at that moment Q.R. Station was born. The project changed that day, from something I wanted to do for the fun of it – to make an album just to make an album – to something that was suddenly pretty good. Now hopefully by now you have gone to qrstation.com to hear some of our sound clips. If you have, then I think it goes without saying that SwingDoom knows what he’s doing when it comes to percussion. The man can play. Now I want you to imagine what I was feeling that day. I had written some songs that were pretty good. Everyone that I had played the songs for had responded well to them. But suddenly there were some serious drums that took those songs from being pretty good to sounding great – Swing had taken them to another planet. And keep in mind that SwingDoom was just ad-libbing to songs he had never heard. He was just playing by feel, and the result was phenomenal.
We started talking about recording, and Swing agreed to play on the album. That was a huge development. But another major influence of Swing’s presence occurred when we talked more about the recording process. At the time I didn’t have high aspirations for the album. I wanted to make it – that was a definite. But I didn’t have any notion that there would be many people that would want to hear it, let alone buy it. I didn’t think I could record with the necessary quality that would enable that sort of thing. But Swing changed my mindset. He told me that I had to buy a mixer for pure recording. He told me the open-air recording was over, that I had to plug instruments and microphones straight into the mixer and then into the computer for recording so that there was no noise at all. I would have laughed at that idea before his trip, because even if I were to record the songs cleanly, how great would it sound with only a guitar and a vocal? But now, all of a sudden, I had an experienced drummer on the project. With multi-track recording using a mixing/recording device, these songs would get a new life.
So you could say that Q.R. Station was born on July 4, 2006. I took Swing’s advice and bought a mixer. That in itself was a bit of a journey, as the first product I bought was not the right one for the job. It took about three months of adventures to finally get the right recording setup. But I got it. I started recording the songs this way and they were crystal clear. Since Swing doesn’t live in Boston, I was working alone and would eventually meet up with him to record the percussion pieces of the songs. The first joint recording session wouldn’t happen until November of 2006. But the momentum picked up significantly from that July visit.
QR
This blog has focused a lot on going back in time to cover the beginnings of Q.R. Station. Tonight let me take you into the here and now. Tonight is a good night, because we have completed the final take on the lead vocal of Walk Next To Me, the first single of our album No Standing. We did a completely new take on the vocal tonight and I feel very good that we nailed it. This recording is the one you will hear upon the release of the single.
Recording vocals can be a real challenge, as the key is to bring the listener into the song. You want people to really feel it. Like a lot of rock singers, I have had no formal vocal training. What I have found is that my voice gets stronger the more I use it. It’s interesting in that we naturally train our minds and voices to get the best sound we are capable of. When you make a bad sound, if you aren’t tone deaf, you will hear it and try not to do it again. You may not even know how the offending sound happened, but somehow your mind and body figure it out and filter that sound out in the future. But most importantly, your vocal chords are a muscle like any other muscle in your body. And just like other muscles, the more they are used the stronger they get. In fact, I can hear the difference when I haven’t been singing for a period of time because the muscle is just a bit weaker for not having been used. So over time, through the practice of singing my favorite songs and some of our own songs, my voice has become stronger.
But having a strong voice is not enough. The absolute key to vocals is making sure that you are in the moment of the song, with your mind on the meaning and purpose of the song. You really have to be feeling the song and trying to bring that emotion out in the vocal. It is not enough just to sing the words. You must give it more than that, or the vocal will be completely flat. This is definitely something I had to learn, and I have really been focusing on this recently as I have been re-recording the lead vocal to get the final take. The key moment for me came a month ago when I forced myself to get rid of all of my inhibitions and throw myself into Walk Next To Me. I worked on singing from my whole body, with the sound forming first down in my diaphragm. I had heard this was how it was meant to be done, but had never been taught it. So I just tried to make it happen, and I tried to sing the song with all the meaning it had when it was written a year ago. The amazing thing is that when I did this and then played back the recording, I could clearly hear the difference. The song took on meaning and feeling like it hadn’t before. Tonight, without question, we recorded the best take. When I sang it, I focused my mind on the meaning of the song and on bringing that meaning to you. I am happy to say that you will hear the result of that effort very soon. I feel very good about this because we have put a lot of effort into this song and the instrumental part came out very well. But the final result all hinges on the voice behind the song, and I am happy to report that it came together tonight.
We have some final touch up to do on the recording, but we are on schedule to release Walk Next To Me for sale before the end of April. If you haven’t joined our mailing list, please sign up at qrstation.com so that you will get first notice of the release of the single. You can of course continue to follow the blog as well for up-to-date information.
Thanks for staying with us as we develop this album. We really do appreciate your support and we hope you will tell your friends about us.
QR
There is a part of all of us that wants to be told that we are doing well, at whatever it is we are spending our time on. We are like children that look up to the parent after a small accomplishment, waiting to be acknowledged for a new achievement. I am no different, I must confess. I am the first to tell people that I am not the greatest guitarist you are going to hear, but then there is that side of me that wants to hear someone say “you play the guitar pretty well”.
Over the last few years I have had a few people give me just enough words of encouragement to make me think it might be worth my while to keep playing. One person that stands out is a friend of mine that goes back to school days past. Rob is a very good friend, and from the earliest days when I first picked up a guitar he has always had a kind word to say about my progress. In fact, Rob gave me my first assignment when I first started to learn to play. He instructed me to pick three chords, to learn how to play them, and then learn how to move between them fluidly. From there, he said, I would be able to learn other chords quickly and build upon my knowledge, but first I had to train my fingers to move in a way they never had before. What great advice, and I spent a couple months focusing on that task. Shortly afterward I had learned enough that I was able to start learning some of my favorite rock songs. And when I did, I would call Rob on the phone and he would listen to me play and sing each of these songs. Now that’s a good friend, because I know I wasn’t that good. But he always had a kind and encouraging word for me.
So in March 2006 when I called Rob to tell him I had decided to make an album, he was very excited about the idea and was a big supporter early on. Now you have to understand how important this was at that time. All it would take is for a few people to tell you that you are crazy to think you could make an album and you could see how it could throw you off course. But if you have people to push you forward things can pick up momentum very quickly. So it must be said that Rob has had a major impact on the Q.R. Station journey. He has propelled it forward at every opportunity.
Rob is a great spirit and also an expert in several important areas, such as sound healing, Tai Chi, and instrument building just to name a few. If you live in the Tuscon, Arizona region, check him out if you know what’s good for you: http://www.ironwoodtaichi.com/
QR
Q.R. Station has loaded new clips of Easy and Walk Next To Me on qrstation.com and ReverbNation. They give a better flavor of the songs we are working on. We expect Walk Next To Me to be ready for release in the next few weeks.
Please take a listen to these latest clips and we would love any feedback you have to offer.
QR
So the time frame is still March 2006 and it was that first week after my return from Mexico. I was in the zone of writing songs for the album I had just decided to make. So far I’ve talked about the first two writing sessions that yielded two songs off the bat. So I had some momentum going and I tried to keep it going. For a third time that week I sat down in my living room with the intent to write a song. But this time was a little different.
I was thinking about a story I had read about U2 back when they were making the Joshua Tree Album, arguably one of the best albums ever made. Bono, along with a couple other members of the band, are well known to have spent a lot of time thinking about their spiritual faith, and they have said that their second album October was a “God album”. The story goes that during the recording of the Joshua Tree, the producer suggested to Bono that he write a gospel song. Bono made an attempt at doing this, and the result was I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I don’t know about you, but I love that song and I think it is absolutely amazing in terms of sound and lyrical excellence. So I was sitting down to my third recording session and I started thinking about the story of how that song came about. And I wondered what would happen if I tried to write a “gospel” song – what would come out? So I decided to try it and see what would happen.
You know the beautiful thing about this song concept is that you get some interesting results from attempting something like that. For instance, I think a lot of religious people originally took issue with I Still Haven’t Found because they were saying “what do you mean you haven’t found what you’re looking for – the answer is God. He is all you need and you don’t need to be looking anymore”. Of course those folks were sort of missing the point, weren’t they. Every person I have ever met that has been a real person of faith has always said that it is a life-long journey.
So there I was sitting down to make my attempt. Once again, I started with the guitar in hand first with the idea of writing lyrics later. Good idea, at least for me, as that always seems to work best for me. So I started strumming various chords, just looking for a sound that was the foundation of something, whatever that something might be. I started taking chords that I knew and adding extra finger placements to them to form chords that I didn’t know just to hear what it would sound like. And then I hit it – I strummed a chord that immediately resonated with me. Honestly, to this day I still don’t know exactly what the chord is called, although it must be some standard chord. It’s kind of a cross between a C and a G chord. Anyway, as soon as I played it I knew it resonated with me. I quickly searched for a matching chord or two to go with it, and luckily I quickly found it. I started strumming those chords and I knew I had stumbled across something really special. There was something soothing about the sound.
Well then I set about writing the lyrics of my “gospel” song. My only fear in telling the story about the writing of this song is that any time you tell such a story you start to bias your audience in how they will hear it. But I figured I would tell you anyway. Like any song, I think this one can take on a variety of meanings. Anyway, the song I am talking about will be Q.R. Station’s first single -Walk Next To Me , and you can hear a clip from the song now on qrstation.com.
QR
In telling the Q.R. Station story, I have to complete the picture of what was going on in March/April 2006, as that is when it all started. For those that haven’t read other blog entries, the idea for an album came about when I was reading Dylan’s autobiography while in Mexico. When I read this line – “On my first album …” – I suddenly was inspired to make my own album so that one day I could also talk about my “first album”. I came home from Mexico, picked up my Schecter electric guitar, and started writing songs for the album.
On my second writing sit-down, I started by playing through a bunch of chords and listening for some combination that sounded like the beginnings of a guitar riff. Now let’s be honest – I had only been playing guitar for a few years and it was a part time hobby. There were only so many chords in my arsenal at that time. I was looking for a rock sound, and given my limited knowledge that only left so many chords to work with. Oddly, it didn’t matter. I really was in some sort of musical zone and was incredibly inspired. I talked about all of the inspirational moments in Mexico City that had me in a certain mood, and I came back to Boston very ready to focus on writing. It wasn’t long during this second writing session that I came upon a guitar riff centered on just two chords, E and A. Now during the last forty years or more, there must have been thousands of songs with these chords at the heart of them. But I have to tell you, I had never heard them played in the pattern I was playing them. Now all I had was this simple guitar riff, but as soon as I played it I knew I had a song right there. I quickly wrote down what I had on a pad of paper and started thinking about lyrics.
For this song the lyric writing was a little different than for others. Sometimes I’ll have a particular topic in mind that I want to write about and the music and lyrics will follow that inspiration. In this case, it was done all by feel. When I sat down before making that riff, I had no preconceived notion of what song I was trying to write. So when the riff appeared, there was no particular direction to run lyrically. So I sat there on my couch, played the riff a few times, and just tried to think of how the riff made me feel. And in a moment, I just started singing along to that riff “I’m going Easy”. Believe it or not, that was it. It fit the mood I was in, the feeling I had for the riff, and boom, the song was on its way. From there, I wrote the rest of the lyrics within twenty minutes. Sometimes you hear famous artists say “that song wrote itself”. Well this one sort of did. If you want to hear a piece of the result to put some music to this story, there is a clip of Easy on qrstation.com.
I recorded that song not long after writing it using Audacity. I am going to write a good bit about the recording process because that in itself has been a long and interesting journey. What I can tell you now is that Q.R. Station is recording the album No Standing on its own. There is no record label or studio involved – we are doing this in our home studio. It’s funny listening to those early recordings of Easy and Walk Next To Me from spring 2006 and compare them with what you are hearing now on the web site. The difference is night and day. For fun, in the future I’ll put those early recordings online so you can hear the difference. But for now, go to the web site and listen to Easy, and what you are listening to there is the result of my second writing session for the album.
qr
Well I have to thank you all for reading this blog, and for following links to our new web site qrstation.com. There has been a pretty good flow of traffic to the web site, to this blog, and also to ReverbNation.
In this blog, over the coming weeks and months, it is my hope to get you up to date on the evolving story of how Q.R. Station was born and how it has evolved. It has been an interesting journey for us, and I think you’ll enjoy reading about it. But today I just want to quickly tell you about the flurry of activity in the last few days.
Recently, with some nudging from a great friend in Queens/NYC, we have been working real hard to finish the first single, Walk Next To Me. This dude demanded that when I took a recently scheduled visit to NY that I come with a cd of the current version of the single so that he could disect it and give suggestions (he’s a rising artist also). He also demanded that we advance this project every week, including getting some online publicity. Now if you are anything like me, sometimes it takes an external push to get you going on projects. And this dude would not leave me alone – I was getting text messages daily reminding me to work on this project. So in the last few weeks we’ve been re-recording some vocal pieces of the song that needed touch-up. And we started investigating web options. This last weekend the momentum on the web activity really picked up. One of the things we were worried about, not having done this before, is how to get our songs on-line such that our web-site would deliver streaming audio. So last weekend I did a search and stumbled upon ReverbNation. What a huge find! Man, these guys make it so easy for artists to get their stuff out there. The audio player you see on qrstation.com comes from their site. In the near future, we will finish our single and we will sell it on our website and on their website, using their technologies. So I want to thank them for their great work, and I want to thank all of you who have visited both ReverbNation and qrstation.
What I hope is that you will keep visiting the Q.R. Station web site and the blog. Both the blog and ReverbNation are reachable through our site, so please start at qrstation.com on a fairly regular basis and check out this blog. Please register to be on our mailing list through our web site. We won’t send email often, just enough to let you know when there is something especially interesting to check out. Please tell people about Q.R. Station and point them to our site. You can also register as a fan on ReverbNation and then sign up to be a fan of Q.R. Station. We already have some fans and we would love more. You can also send clips of our songs in emails to friends through ReverbNation. Feel free to leave us comments on the blog and at ReverbNation. You can send us emails at qrstation@gmail.com.
In the coming blogs I’ll continue the story about some of the important early moments of this project. That drummer you hear on the sample tracks – that’s SwingDoom. That man can play. I’m going to tell you how SwingDoom came to town and transformed Q.R. Station. I’m going to tell you about other influences that helped this journey progress. So keep dropping by and follow the journey.
thanks,
QR
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