What a fun Memorial Day Weekend! Thanks to some very nice friends, we were able to play at a local outdoor party, an annual Boogie Shakedown. The air was a little chilly for late May, but clear skies let the heat of the sun keep us warm. Our set was a rough one, but a few musical kinks can’t stop us from having a blast while playing live 🙂 It’s just encouragement to keep practicing! Plus, we’re our own worst critics right?
There’s no place better than a sunny outdoor party with friends, food, and fuzzy beverages to enter new musical territory..
Luckily there was some video caught of our Elephants for Autism Music Festival set at the Boneyard in Atlantic City! This is currently our roughest song, but we decided to give it a go. Not too bad, but definitely time to vamp up the vocal practices!! Check it out:
Note the cool sparkly lights in the background. We need to get some cool sparkly lights!
This weekend, we will be heading out to Atlantic City to play at the Elephants for Autism Music Festival! It will be our first out-of-town gig, first time playing at a music event in support of an important cause, and first time in Atlantic City! I am already excited to see some of the other bands at the Festival and feel very thankful to Jerry Ryan, the organizer of the event, for all of his dedication and hard work!
Any readers out there in Atlantic City? Here is an article with more information:
Yes UMPG publishing, I acknowledge that our cover of Iron Maiden’s The Trooper involved playing a song owned by a third-party.
The power of search engines enables us to find information we desire on the web. It still amazes me that I can type a word or phrase or question in Google and instantly retrieve vast amounts of information matching my query. Search engines use algorithms to mine databases for matching content. Beyond our basic queries, a web crawler, or bot that browses the World Wide Web, is an amazing tool for discovering trends in scientific data, determining where advertisements are most effective, and providing publishers with matches to third-party content!
So, what does this mean for us playing cover songs and sharing them with friends online via YouTube? Well, a WebCrawler may match a YouTube cover song to audio content of an original copyrighted version. A content ID claim from the publisher, like matched third-party content, will appear in your video manager and you can either acknowledge or dispute it. Once acknowledged, any advertisement revenue produced by the video goes to the publisher with rights to the content.
Considering the rapid emergence of online music sharing, publishing companies must remain innovative to reduce copyright infringements. With so many free and illegal MP3 downloads, you bet a publisher is going to claim rights to copyrighted content!  No wonder why the music publishing sector is growing 🙂  I’m just happy that my video can still be shared!
We are thrilled to have ‘confluence of anomalies’ included on Wanderlust Playlist #4 – songs that give you a feeling of being suspended in time! Check it out @ The Record Stache music blog!
Okay, not sick like ‘rad!’ or ‘awesome!’ .. more like under-the-weather-sick. It was pretty rough, but I couldn’t let a stupid cold keep me from playing music!  We played in a local art gallery, with beautiful artwork hanging on all four walls, completely covering them from the floor to the ceiling. The room wouldn’t have been the same without the art. We stood surrounded by intricate colors and designs and it felt wonderful to play music amidst such creativity!  I swear there were charges of energy bouncing off the walls, giving off a buzz. Here is a video of our last song of the set, and guess what, its ‘Trees!’
Here you go, one of the first songs I ever wrote, performed live loop-style! Â When I was just learning how to sing, these lyrics spontaneously evolved one day while walking to work. The video is from one of our very first shows!
Before watching this video, I must first tell you the story of the drums. It goes all the way back to when I was a confused little highschooler.  My parents temporarily decided to reward my sisters and I for getting good grades and a drum kit arrived after   my one-year-younger-than-me sister got honor roll. Now none of us really knew how to play music, so setting up a drum kit in my sister’s room was a horrible recipe for loud aimless noise.  As some of you might know, drums have this way of hooking you into a trance. Once you sit there and start playing, its like a black hole of time! (Is this just me?)
The drums survived our beatings through high school, and when my sister moved up to live with me, you bet she brought them! With aged hardware and parts missing, they were first used in the attempted formation of my girl band. I met a girl, she wanted to start a band. Then we met another girl, she wanted to play drums. I happened to a have the drum kit, and we took it from there! We didn’t know a thing about setting up or tuning drums, and we shamelessly used random kitchen supplies to make up for missing parts, like the high hat that we concocted from small grilling sheets. Yes this really happened.
The drums now live in my apartment. New and improved with replaced parts, the drums on the premises come in super handy when friends stop by to jam. They’ve also allowed my husband and me to practice at the same skill level. I am a beginner at guitar, and he is a beginner at drums. Our excitement about this resulted in a recent crazy idea, ‘Lets bring them to our show!’
The best part about our band is that anything goes, so bring the drums we did! It was a blast 🙂
Mondays are always sweeter after having an awesome weekend to reminisce about. Weekend awesomeness is difficult to measure,  but I usually base this on the amount of music that was experienced. Whether its writing, recording, practicing, listening, or dancing at a live show…all are considered crucial weekend material!  This one was particularly special. I not only had friends over for a fun Sunday brunch jam followed by a Rung’s practice, but I also got to catch a killer performance by my husband’s recently formed band,  Photoreal, on Saturday night.  What an amazing night!  They played a powerful set of  new songs and ended  with an  impressive cover of 17 years by Ratatat, which I managed to capture on video. Although this is a blog about The Rungs, I can’t stop myself from wanting to share this with my fellow music lovers 🙂
therungsband.com 