November's Doom

For those who don't know, I played guitar in a band called November's Doom for about 5 years. They are still making music quite successfully. More information can be found here.

While I was in November's Doom, I would periodically record music at home on an old Tascam 424 Portastudio cassette 4-track recorder. By today's standards it was really pretty primitive, but worked for back then. I mostly used it for making demos of new material to bring them before the band in a more fleshed-out vision. After recently moving, I discovered some old tapes from these home sessions and decided to salvage some of the material as best I could. Please keep in mind these are humble home recordings, and were originally only intended for myself and 4 or so other people in the band to hear: they are NOT studio quality, either in sound production or in musical execution. Many tracks were just single takes, merely to get the ideas down. Arrangements were often changed later on when they were brought to full band realizations. Notes will be off, timing will be off, etc. On top of that, my old 4-track is broken, so the 4-track original tapes had to be dumped down to ProTools Free from a regular tape deck. Two tracks from one side were played forward, and the other two tracks had to be gathered from playing the tape on the other side- meaning the tracks' music was dumped down backwards and had to be reversed. The differing direction of playback altered the speed between the two different track groups, so things didn't line up right at all, and I had to do a lot of altering sections as far as tempo, intonation, etc. ProTools Free was very useful here; check it out if you have a machine that will run it. In the end, some sections may sound more off than the original takes, but they're decent enough to share. Some EQ and light compression was added where it seemed to help.
These are really just intended for fans of November's Doom music who might be interested to hear the original incarnations of some tunes that made it to record and a couple that did not. I believe these are all I have, but should any other tapes be found, I will add them to this page. I'll reiterate that these demos were done by only myself- no other band members played on them. After hearing the performances herein they would probably be glad to know I specified this. Nevertheless, hope you enjoy.

Untitled Track #1
This is a tune I had written shortly after finishing Of Sculptured Ivy and Stone Flowers. We originally worked on the beginning part of it with drummer Abbas before the recording of Sculptured Ivy, but I believe it was never a big favorite of other band members. After moving on with another drummer, completing Sculptured Ivy, and beginning work on material for what would become The Knowing, I reworked the tune into this and resubmitted it to the band on a tape (see notes on Searching the Betrayal). It still wasn't really latched onto, and never went anywhere after that. Had I taken more time in the recording of this, perhaps the ideas would've been more clear. This is a prime example of: 1) why click tracks are helpful and 2) why you should not record guitars without click tracks (see #1) first and THEN make a drum track on a drum machine running through the tune live and playing the drums with your fingers. Yikes. I do still like some of the riffs, though.

Awaken
Awaken was included on The Knowing, which was recorded in the summer of 2000. This version had been something I did at home some time in 1999. I wasn't really sure it would fit in with what we were doing on The Knowing (that whole concept storyline proved to be really difficult maneuvering music and lyrics around in a cohesive way), but I liked it and brought it up to the band to see if we could fit it in somewhere. I was initially nervous about recording it because we really didn't practice it much before going into the studio, but I was really blown away with how well it came out. It ended up being a favorite of mine on that record. This is where the idea for the interwoven dual guitar melody lines came from. I couldn't find the original 4 track recording, so this is just the original stereo version that was mixed on the 4-track.

Searching the Betrayal
This track was also included on The Knowing. I never actually intended this tune to be used for November's Doom. I had recorded it at home just messing around one day and mixed it down for my own giggles on a tape with some other tunes I was intending for the band. I gave the tape to someone in the band (I think Mary or Paul), and they came back and said they loved it- even though at the time I didn't know which track they were talking about. It was a difficult one to decide what to do with in the studio: death vocals didn't really seem right for it. Paul's lyrics helped focus where the tune would go, utilizing both male and female vocals. I came up with the melodies for the female vocals, and Mary set up a meeting with me and her friend Sarah, who volunteered to do the vocals. We hashed out the melodies in one night and then it was studio time. This one I happened to have the original 4-track tape for, so I was able to separate each track in ProTools and tweak things from there a bit better. There was an additional clean rhythm guitar track that I just ended up dropping from this mix for sake of time; it was difficult enough to line up the melody track right with intonation and cutting and moving bits around to make the timing sound right. The intonation still bugs me. (I really should've fixed the 4-track before attempting this.) This was recorded some time in 1999.

Untitled Track #2
This is a track I did during the writing for The Knowing that didn't get used. The band referred to it as the "trip hop song". I was getting into a lot of stuff like Bjork and Portishead and downtempo stuff at the time, so that's the direction I had wanted to go with a tune. Of course, I only had a Boss DR660 drum machine, so my sounds were limited and this was a really poor attempt. The tune was fairly decent though; I liked the idea of incorporating the more metallic aspect of the band in the buildup, and bookending the song with more of a downtempo vibe. This was done at the WNUR studios (using their keyboard for strings) the same day some friends and I recorded some material for THOTH, the evillest and fattest band in the land. This is the original stereo mix done on the 4-track. Again, do NOT play drum machine tracks with your fingers, as the results (evident here) can be less than stunning.

All sounds ©Chupetunes 2005