Believe it or not, even the "big" indie labels have to work within a budget.

That being said, everyone should buy the latest Much The Same, No Trigger, Hit The Switch, Crime In Stereo, and A Wilhelm Scream records to support Nitro's incredible new roster (and hopefully help with that budget thing as well)

i agree with ya

When that album first leaked, I near-hated it.

Now, I can't stop listening to it. I already listened to it twice today, and about 7 times yesterday. I'm actually going to get the real copy later tonight.

Fuck, DTM is AWESOME!

either that or by the throat god that album kicks ass

that is weird that they used to play out there all the time but i don't remember them playing detroit until this past year

I read interviews while I take a dump...then throw magazines away that end up in dumps...so I guess that makes sense

you are a massive douche

using the scene? like.. playing shows and building a fanbase? duh.

and is that song on your myspace for real? sounds like the kids of widney high.

Must....hate....everything!

You know absolutely nothing.

*grumble grumble* Back in our day, bands would have to walk 5 miles in the snow, barefooted to get to shows! And they didn't need the help of no gosh-darn scene to get there!

they apologize for not starting their band in 1983

yeah right they are a good ass band. fuck you.

Please don't feed the troll...

Go listen to some d-beat, please.

Wow....with the shit on your myspace you should be sucking off the swellers and swallowing when they they tell you to.

I've seen better user names at the dump.

I'd like to know that as well.

Yoko Ono surely wasn't autotuned.. If she was--GOOD GOD.

most vocals that sound really good are autotuned. sometimes it's done really well and you can't even tell, other times it sounds obvious. it's a handy tool in most pro studios to make vocals sound smoother and make horrible singers sound decent.

yes, its true, 99.9% of vocals are tuned somehow. radio hits or punk rock albums, either way, if there was any kind of budget for a halfway decent studio, they were tuned.

There are two methods that I'm aware of. There's auto-tuning, which is a machine that is either running during the recording of vocals or sometimes laid over a separate track after the fact. In either case the result is the same. The computer figures out which note the vocal is closest to, and moves it there. The threshold control decides how fast it moves it, so if you set it up right, it can sound fairly natural. If you set it too tight, it sounds very robotic like the vocals are jumping straight from one note to another without any of the natural area in between. Also, the further off the note the singer actually is, the more robotic it sounds. So the rule here is, the better the performance, the more natural it sounds when auto-tuned.

The other method is manual tuning, which is done by hand on the computer by taking each line into a visual graph and picking the points at which the vocals should be tuned. in a way you "draw" over the waveform of the vocals and lock them in on the notes where they should be. This is a much more tedious but incredibly precise way of tuning vocals and as long as it's done with care, leaves little to no trace of the tuning, as long as the base track was sung well and the engineer knows what he's doing.

I should also point out that again, 99% of the time, vocals are not only tuned, but dozens or hundreds of takes are spliced together. every experience I've had in the studio has been me singing the whole song until there's a pretty good take, then going back through it line by line, and singing the line over and over again until it's at its best. Sometimes one line you listen to will be multiple takes, cut into each other on the consonants so you can't hear the splices. This takes many hours for one song, but combine that with a tuning method and you end up with a perfect, or near perfect performance.

There are three primary ways to tell if something has been tuned (though you can generally assume it has been). #1 is the robotic sound I mentioned. Sean O'Keefe was a big culprit of this for a while, Plunchline - Action and Fall Out Boy - Take This To Your Grave are prime examples of badly autotuned vocals. They don't sound real at all. #2 is an odd tone the vocal gets, it SOUNDS processed. New Found Glory has this dripping all over every album they've ever done. #3 is simply, is it a near-perfect performance? Do you have a good enough ear to tell when a note is a tenth of a step off? If you do, and you never hear a wrong note, it's tuned. Listen to Punk in Drublic if you want to hear an album that has good singing but a lot of imperfect vocals.

For those of you who consider this to be cheating, remember that the goal of recording, for most bands, is to create a PERFECT rendition of the song that was written. It's not a capturing of the band's live sound or energy, though that is certainly a secondary goal especially in punk and hardcore. But most bands quickly figure out that if the album is perfect, then it has a much better chance of gaining fans, and when the fans go to shows they don't hear the mistakes because they're half playing the song in their head from the album. Most non-musicians don't notice that Bad Religion hardly does any of their vocal harmonies live (and that they pretty much suck when they do) because we're so in love with the recorded songs that a perfect live performance simply doesn't matter.

hell yeah dude. can't wait to come back. it'll cool off a little for us in october, too : )

you rule, bryan!

It's strange how some things never change.
-Dante

Whoo! Porn!

look at the first picture, then look at the last picture. he's shrinking, and the rest are getting fatter.

Yeah, I laughed at him to, what a fucking loser.

Believe it or not, I have lost 25 lbs. because I need to fit into my girl pants somehow.

thanks, guy.

I disagree. Sometimes the comments are relatively directed to the band and it's nice to hear a response from time to time. If greg graffin was in here commenting on every bad religion post you wouldn't be complaining. You might post some anonymous comment about webcams, but you wouldn't be complaining.

zing!

I think Fat Mike is over signing skate punk bands. sadly

yeah. they're really good.

now there is a brain surgeon who judges if music is good or bad based on a picture. Must be an MTV asswipe who is told what to think and what to like same as the other 12 years olds lined up in front of the tube after their snack when they get home from fuckin school........cretin dick

WHAAAAAAAAAAA PUNX OI OI OI PUNXXXXXXXXXXXX

PUNK ROCK IS ONLY GOOD IF YOU DRINK BEEEEEEER.

PUNXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Go buy yourself another bedazzler and put more studs on your leather jacket...tool

I really hope you are just really bad at the sarcasm thing, because otherwise, you're a complete idiot.

Well, they ARE signed to a label and HAVE toured nationally and HAVE played a leg of the Vans Warped Tour and DO have the respect of their peers such as A Wilhelm Scream, Much the Same, Black Dahlia Murder, etc. and DID have a label offer from Dexter Holland before all the members turned 18 and ARE signed to a label that has put out records from some of the hardest working bands in the scene today. Need I go on, or are you starting to absorb some of this?

+50 for the guitarists against me tattoo.

Plenty of bands tour... I know of a lot of bands that tour year round... doesn't mean their any good.

To get "props" from major bands like A Wilhelm Scream, Black Dahlia Murder, etc. that's a pretty big deal when you're a really talented band like the swellers.

I say, "go punknews" for promoting a talented band that deserves recognition.

I agree. The Swellers are a damn fine band and I gotta support my fellow Michiganders, but it seems a little peculiar that they're receiving this much coverage without really having anything to show for themselves.