Hey. I've been a lurker for awhile but it's time to actually post, I think.
Here's my Dev discovery story. First maybe a little history...
I'm a mediocre multi-instrumentalist focusing mostly on guitar/bass these days. I've done a couple of independently released ambient albums (think Hummer but with more of a folk-metal influence, yes I said folk-metal
), I have had some rock tracks in my head for more than a few years but I'm stuck in a very musically-depressed area for now and only in the last few years has technology gotten so commonplace that it isn't a factor anymore (I'm also a Drumkit From Hell user). So those songs have gotten demo'ed repeatedly while I obsess over what the final versions will sound like.
I was playing bass for my friend's band while his bass player was out with an illness. During this time I was also helping record his album. His drummer knew a guy (still in high school) who was trying to get their first album recorded and asked if he knew anyone who could help. He let them hear some of the stuff we were cutting and they wanted to work with me. We set everything up and a few weeks later we were off and recording. This was mid-February of '06. I had never heard of Dev or SYL; however I did at one point own the Rush tribute album Magna Carta put out in '96 but it had almost been ten years since I listened to it because it wasn't all that good imo.
I'm a Cakewalk SONAR user, and one night before a full day of recording I was browsing through Cakewalk's forums just to pick up new tips or ideas. As I was scrolling through the messages, I happened to see someone say something like "Check out the Devin Townsend Band!" but he also had this hideous avatar of some fat cross-dressing guy or something and I remember thinking "ick, that must be his band or something, okay yeah that'll be a winner," and I just skipped past.
The next day we all get together to record and the bass player is wearing the long-sleeve buttoned black shirt with the DTB logo. Of course I don't know that at that point, I'm 31, I see a swirly logo on a kid's shirt and I don't expect I'll ever know what it is. Anyway, during a break in the recording that day, we got talking about some of the music I was working on, and I played them a track I was writing... the bulk of the song is a sort of ambient alt-folk (think Days of the New meets Sigur Ros) in C# but then at the end just explodes into this ridiculously heavy ending with pummeling low-tuined guitars and crazy drums, just goes nuts.
The kids of course light up, because this guy is making their record, but the bass player goes, "Dude! You need to send that to Devin Townsend and he will promote the SHIT out of you!" And I was like "Devin Townsend? The fat cross-dressing guy from the Cakewalk forums?" And of course I was wrong about that, and they proceeded to school me in Dev.
They're like "let's go for a drive." They have Synchestra in the car and we listen to it beginning to end, twice. I felt that great feeling you feel when you've been exposed to music that just changes you immediately. Their love of it was very fresh and child-like: "Isn't that funny? It's like a polka version of Vampira!!" "Listen to this. He wrote the happiest song ever, it's called 'Sunshine and Happiness.'" They were really in tune to the tongue-in-cheek stuff. First time I heard that hoedown in "Triumph" I nearly cheered.
Long story short, I ended up getting Synchestra and falling in love with it... then dove into his back catalogue... loving every bit of it. I still have to grab the ambient stuff but I don't do a lot of credit card stuff over the 'net if I can help it.
As someone who produces/mixes/masters music, I sincerely wish I'd gotten into Dev a long time ago. These are my new reference CDs. I have learned so much just by even casually listening to these albums. This is everything I've wanted in my mixes... thick but clear, crushing but clean, just HUGE. As a technical aside, I was also learning at this point that in order to make digital recordings sound "right" you've got to inject a fair amount of tape or tube "distortion" to make it sound right. Having DTB right there really drove home that point. When I found my saturation plugin of choice (PSP MixSaturator if you're curious) I began calling it "The Devin Townsend plugin" so the people around me made the connection as to what it does.
Anyway, that's how I found Dev. There are a select few musicians/bands that have really blown me away and changed me in some way... among them, Rush, Dream Theater, BT, and Sigur Ros. Now Dev. And if you're reading Dev, THANK YOU. And thanks to you guys for having this forum here so I can get to know other sick twisted Dev-heads.
Here's my Dev discovery story. First maybe a little history...
I'm a mediocre multi-instrumentalist focusing mostly on guitar/bass these days. I've done a couple of independently released ambient albums (think Hummer but with more of a folk-metal influence, yes I said folk-metal
), I have had some rock tracks in my head for more than a few years but I'm stuck in a very musically-depressed area for now and only in the last few years has technology gotten so commonplace that it isn't a factor anymore (I'm also a Drumkit From Hell user). So those songs have gotten demo'ed repeatedly while I obsess over what the final versions will sound like.
I was playing bass for my friend's band while his bass player was out with an illness. During this time I was also helping record his album. His drummer knew a guy (still in high school) who was trying to get their first album recorded and asked if he knew anyone who could help. He let them hear some of the stuff we were cutting and they wanted to work with me. We set everything up and a few weeks later we were off and recording. This was mid-February of '06. I had never heard of Dev or SYL; however I did at one point own the Rush tribute album Magna Carta put out in '96 but it had almost been ten years since I listened to it because it wasn't all that good imo.
I'm a Cakewalk SONAR user, and one night before a full day of recording I was browsing through Cakewalk's forums just to pick up new tips or ideas. As I was scrolling through the messages, I happened to see someone say something like "Check out the Devin Townsend Band!" but he also had this hideous avatar of some fat cross-dressing guy or something and I remember thinking "ick, that must be his band or something, okay yeah that'll be a winner," and I just skipped past.
The next day we all get together to record and the bass player is wearing the long-sleeve buttoned black shirt with the DTB logo. Of course I don't know that at that point, I'm 31, I see a swirly logo on a kid's shirt and I don't expect I'll ever know what it is. Anyway, during a break in the recording that day, we got talking about some of the music I was working on, and I played them a track I was writing... the bulk of the song is a sort of ambient alt-folk (think Days of the New meets Sigur Ros) in C# but then at the end just explodes into this ridiculously heavy ending with pummeling low-tuined guitars and crazy drums, just goes nuts.
The kids of course light up, because this guy is making their record
, but the bass player goes, "Dude! You need to send that to Devin Townsend and he will promote the SHIT out of you!" And I was like "Devin Townsend? The fat cross-dressing guy from the Cakewalk forums?" And of course I was wrong about that, and they proceeded to school me in Dev.
They're like "let's go for a drive." They have Synchestra in the car and we listen to it beginning to end, twice. I felt that great feeling you feel when you've been exposed to music that just changes you immediately. Their love of it was very fresh and child-like: "Isn't that funny? It's like a polka version of Vampira!!" "Listen to this. He wrote the happiest song ever, it's called 'Sunshine and Happiness.'" They were really in tune to the tongue-in-cheek stuff. First time I heard that hoedown in "Triumph" I nearly cheered.
Long story short, I ended up getting Synchestra and falling in love with it... then dove into his back catalogue... loving every bit of it. I still have to grab the ambient stuff but I don't do a lot of credit card stuff over the 'net if I can help it.
As someone who produces/mixes/masters music, I sincerely wish I'd gotten into Dev a long time ago. These are my new reference CDs. I have learned so much just by even casually listening to these albums. This is everything I've wanted in my mixes... thick but clear, crushing but clean, just HUGE. As a technical aside, I was also learning at this point that in order to make digital recordings sound "right" you've got to inject a fair amount of tape or tube "distortion" to make it sound right. Having DTB right there really drove home that point. When I found my saturation plugin of choice (PSP MixSaturator if you're curious) I began calling it "The Devin Townsend plugin" so the people around me made the connection as to what it does.
Anyway, that's how I found Dev. There are a select few musicians/bands that have really blown me away and changed me in some way... among them, Rush, Dream Theater, BT, and Sigur Ros. Now Dev. And if you're reading Dev, THANK YOU. And thanks to you guys for having this forum here so I can get to know other sick twisted Dev-heads.
Last edited by Fuzzplug Jones on Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
