Oh craigslist, you are definitely worth writing a song about!
Tag: the rungs
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 🙂
The best part about loading out after last Sunday’s show was knowing that we have another show just around the corner! This time it is with a fellow local Ithaca band, Powder the Moon, featuring music by our good friend, Gabe Tavares. For anyone interested, you can listen to his music here: https://www.facebook.com/GabeTavares/app_2405167945
Having a show to look forward to on the calendar makes my days leading up to it feel so sweet 🙂
At our last show, my camera died while were playing, so hopefully I will get some good video from this one to share!
Well I started out with a fresh new session, but a little dip in the visual art of all distracted me!
So genius could strike at any moment, or a light bulb can suddenly flash on in your head, but don’t just wait for the ideas to come. Seek out inspiration, listen to everything around you, be a sponge and soak it all in! Sometimes inspiration can come from the funniest things. Like at work in meetings, on the bus talking to a stranger, waiting in line at the grocery store, the list goes on and on. I love it when my friends use silly expressions and cheesy metaphors because it gets my mind spinning with words. Be a sponge all day long and you’ll fall in love with the littlest things! 🙂
Here is the second ever song release by The Rungs, hot off the computer just yesterday!
The main riff started as a slow guitar line, but after multiple transformations via synth sounds in Ableton Live the layers multiplied. We also had a little fun with some samples at the end 🙂
Confluence of Anomalies
In the most simple explanation, the purpose of my blog is to share the fun musical endeavors of The Rungs, an electronic indie pop band formed by my husband (Diwas) and me (Mandy). Let me give you a bite-size version of the back story:
My husband and I spent our first year together in a long-distance relationship while I completed college. He was a dedicated guitar player in a local rock band in upstate New York and I was studying plant science at the University of Delaware. I was never quite fond of my college town (no offense Delaware!) and as soon as I graduated I loaded up my car and headed to New York to live with my ever so compatible dude 🙂
Now being a Florida native, in the very beginning of my first upstate New York winter I discovered I needed a serious indoor hobby. Something that could keep me busy while sitting next to the heater in thick warm socks from December to March…those long winter months!
With Diwas in and out of the house on band tours and practices, I took advantage of the rotating population of guitars in our living room. ‘Okay guitars, its you and me, lets do this!’ Diwas taught me basic scales and chord progressions, bought me a metronome and downloaded Reaper, a nice user-friendly recording software to my computer. At this point my little musically unexperienced brain was just like, ‘Wwwowww!!!&!#@$@!!!!!’ I thought that playing music at home was just the best thing ever and I pushed through my 9-to-5 plant-bio-lab-tech job with the thought in the back of my head, “I can’t wait to get home and plant myself in the living room with a guitar!!!” I spent evenings recording layers of guitar on top of each other (You can only imagine how awkward the first recordings sounded), somehow became obsessed with the White Stripes, and for reasons I will explain in a future blog post I started singing.
About a year after this newfound hobby (or should I say lifestyle?), Diwas organized a Birthday Bash for me at a local venue. We played a few songs together and it was a blast of a bash! We got such a great response from friends that we continued to play together around town. Eventually we needed a name, and being the clever devil he is, Diwas dubbed us The Rungs.
Oh what a fateful night that Birthday Bash was! …as you can see in the dark fuzzy cell phone image provided by my sister… How long we’ve come since then!
Fast forward to today: I’m boiling over with excitement about music and I needed a place to log and share this overflow of musical energy! I must admit I was a little hesitant at the thought of starting a blog, not really knowing what to write about or how to organize my pages. For the past few weeks I’ve been dipping my toes in and slowly swishing around the WordPress waters. Already I’ve had a chance to visit some really cool blogs by very creative people! I’m discovering new music that others are sharing, found some other great bloggers to follow, annnd I have more ideas about what pages to add. So blah blah blah enough about me and Thank You WordPress! I’m ready to get blogging 🙂
We recently had a great time playing with the Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band at the Chapter House, one of our favorite pubs in Ithaca! Here is a rough video from the show; our cover of ‘Kids’ by the psychedelic rock band MGMT. This was such a fun one to play! I also love their song ‘Electric Feel,’ its so funky and danceable.
Hmmm more MGMT songs to cover in the future? I think yes 🙂
Sometimes it just feels good to rock out to some metal!
therungsband.com 