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This Autumn (free emo song title right there)

August 15, 2011 2011, News 0 Comments

Hey, how’s your summer been? Not good? That’s awful; sorry to hear that. But I’ve got good news: fall is on the way! And with it we’ll have three cool things going on here in Banner Pilot World (as we call it).

#1: A new album. Our third full length, it’s called Heart Beats Pacific and it comes out October 25th on Fat Wreck Chords. We’re stoked. Read more about it here.

#2. We already announced that we’re doing Riot Fest in early October, and The Fest 10 in late October, and now we can announce (“announce”; that sounds so goofy) that we’ll also be touring the east coast with our pals Dead to Me that month. THEY have a new album coming out on October 25th too, so it’ll be extra awesome. On top of that, October also has us playing shows with great bands like The Flatliners, The Menzingers, Broadway Calls, Off With Their Heads, Nothington, and more. Check out the shows page for more info.

#3. We’ll be playing our record release show in town at the Turf Club when we get back. November 5th. Our new album will be there, it’ll be our first local show in a long time, and we’ll be “tour tight”, as we call it. So you gotta come check it out.

That’s all for now!

-Nate

Useful Information About The New Album

July 31, 2011 2011, News, Studio Diaries 5 Comments

Hey-
Our new full length album is now complete! That’s pretty cool, huh? It’s not “done done”; we mix it this monday through wednesday, and then master it later in the week. But as far as the actual music goes, it’s all wrapped up.

Here, while you wait for it to come out, are some Factoids about the new record:

Number of songs: 11

Number of songs longer than 4 minutes: 1

Number of songs in drop d tuning: 2

Number of songs with piano: 1

(I’m probably freaking some people already, but don’t worry)

Number of minutes the full album is: click here

Number of songs that, in my opinion, sound like Jawbreaker: 1

Number of songs a random person in a suit and tie you stopped on the street would think sound like Jawbreaker if you played them Jawbreaker and then this album back to back: 11

Number of songs ideas written in the first 12 months or so after Collapser wrapped up: 50+, although many of these are just riffs i stitched together, not “songs”

Number of people who would think “This album is…. kinda not so good” if we had used nothing but those songs: everyone

Number of songs written in the last 10 or 11 months that ended up on the record: 9

Number of lessons we can learn from the last 3 factoids: At least one, “It’s a good thing we didn’t rush this album”

Number of days we spent in the studio: 21, once mixing and mastering are done

Number of days Jacques, the engineer, worked from noon to 6AM or later: at least four

Number of songs Zack from Dear Landlord sings backups on: three

Number of times I ate a Con Uovo pizza, which is a pizza with egg, cheese, and black pepper on it, from a nearby restaurant for dinner: some crazy number

Number of times someone made the boneheaded decision to purchase White Castle despite the plethora of outstanding food establishments within a short walk from the studio: Only 1, I think!

Number of days I biked to the studio: 17 so far, with 4 days left

Number of days I was stoked to be biking to the studio, and not shivering my way home in sub-zero stupidity, staring at the ice beneath my feet, like I did last January when recording In Desolation at the same studio: Every Single Day

Number of album covers I designed before we finally found one everyone liked: 15+

Number of album titles we had before settling on one everyone liked: 1

So there you have it! Now you have a pretty good understanding of this album. Look for more info — the album cover, tracklisting, some MP3s, a release date, etc etc — in the weeks and months to come. For now, i’m stoked to get this mixed/mastered!

-Nate

Studio Blog #3: Pianos, Saxophones & Guitar Leads

June 29, 2011 General 0 Comments

One song left! That’s right, we’ve recorded 10 songs and are hitting the last one later tonight. Very excited. Now, it’s not like those ten songs are “done”; in fact, not even close. We still have to fix a few things, add vocals, I gotta record guitar leads, we need to figure out and add backup vocals, gotta record a piano part1 (not joking), sweet saxophone part must be added2 (joking), etc etc etc. But it’s still a nice landmark because after we track the 11th song, the fun part begins and these start to actually sound like songs. The good thing is, we’re already pretty stoked on how these are sounding, even in their exceedingly raw and stripped down current form.

Right now I’m at home sifting through the original demos on my computer, making sure nothing was forgotten. I’ve already found one missing lead! I don’t think we’ve used it since this original Garageband demo (looks like I wrote it way back in November 2009), so maybe it sucks; i have no idea. But i’m glad I found it now rather than after the album is done.

After going through all the practice space demos I’ve discovered there are 68 guitar leads I need to record. That sounds kind of crazy/ridiculous but I guess it’s accurate. Don’t worry, these aren’t wanky shred fests, just dopey little leads that, in some cases, you won’t even notice.

OK, back to it!

-Nate

  1. don’t worry, it’s a four note part in one song. That’s it. We might make it rad and have each of us play one of the four notes [↩]
  2. is saxophone the worst instrument ever? I think it might be. It’s always goofy and it ruins otherwise good songs. Go check out that one Green Day song on Warning; I think it’s Jackass. Decent song and then, suddenly…. the sax kicks in and it sounds like the theme song from a court room comedy out of the 80s. Not Night Court specifically, just that kind of show. The only cool thing involving a saxophone, ever, is the image included in this post. Is it a clip art-looking dude playing a sax…. or is it a woman’s face? OH DAMN! [↩]

Studio Blog #2: The Reverse Crunch Wrap

June 26, 2011 General 0 Comments

Well it’s day three and we have five songs tracked; probably will get one more done before the end of the day. A little slower than expected, but it’s sounding pretty bad ass. We listened to Collapser for a second to double check a snare sound and these new songs already sound better as-is than that record. So, we might just call it a day and have a rad 5 song instrumental record. Or maybe not.

One thing demo-ing and recoding songs has reminded me about is the awesome names we have for various drum parts. You definitely know what a roll is, and you might know what a Taco is (snare/bass drum, snare/drum drum… this intro is an example). But do you know what a Burrito is? A Reverse Crunch Wrap? A Fruit Rollup? Those are all legitimate drum parts we have. Maybe for the next studio blog we’ll do a video where we play each part, and you try to guess what each part is. First person to get it right, and explain why, gets a free t-shirt (or maybe nothing if we’re low on shirts). Look for it later this week!

Ok, back to recording/Super Mario Brothers now!

-Nate

Studio Blog #1 : Deadly Towers

June 25, 2011 2011, Studio Diaries 0 Comments

Here’s an interesting thing about being in the studio: the first couple days of being in a studio aren’t very interesting. I’m not sure how I can convey any intriguing updates; “Hey, guys, quick update: we nailed that one fill!” or “After trying a few different options we decided the ping cymbal works best because of the outro section”…… not really that mind-blowing. So I guess I’ll just talk about what we’re doing between songs for now.

We brought back in the same hacked X-Box we used for Collapser and have started revisiting some truly awful NES games. As of right now we’re playing the game Deadly Towers while waiting to record the next song, which has the dummy title ‘Neon’. Perhaps some of the game will slightly influence our playing of the song, and months from now you’ll be like, “That one drum fill reminds me of a guy trying to kill a weird blue slime.”

Yesterday we ordered pizza from this place that specializes in weird toppings (Mac and Cheese Pizza, Burrito Pizza, etc), and came up with a great idea: Gum Pizza! Instead of sauce and cheese, it’s all gum. Your pizza would last forever.

OK, you must be getting pretty stoked to hear this album by now. I’ll keep the updates coming. Within a couple days they’ll be sounding more like actual songs and I’ll have more relevant info to report!

-Nate

We are Recording a New Album!

June 23, 2011 2011, News, Studio Diaries 0 Comments

Hey, later today Banner Pilot is entering the studio to record a new full length album. Yeah! We’re recording at the Terrarium with Jacques Wait, same as with Collapser, so it should sound totally sweet. Look for updates from the studio, right here, starting tomorrow or Saturday!

-Nate

 

Welcome to the new Banner Pilot webpage

June 23, 2011 2011, News 0 Comments

Hey, thanks for checking out the new Banner Pilot site. “Why does this exist?”, you ask? Well, I got sick of having a bunch of small, scattered sites for the band that all did a single thing (some better than others). This way, just about everything is one convenient spot.

It would look pretty lame and pathetic if the entire website started off with nothing but this dorky “Hey, welcome! C’mon in!” post you’re reading right now, so I decided to move all of our old updates/tour diaries/studio diaries/you name it here, too (stuff from our Myspace/Tumblr/Blogspot/whatever pages). This way, there’s a ton of old content to sift through. Some of it is old and irrelevant, but rather than pick through it for the best stuff, I just added all of it.

Everything else should be pretty self-explanatory. Take a look around, make yourself at home

-Nate

PS- Why “Bannerpilot.net”? Yeah, I know. Trust me, dot com would have been better, but whoever owns it doesn’t even have it for sale, and has no way of being contacted. I was super tempted by the cheaper options — Bannerpilot.Info, so catchy; Bannerpilot.biz; so professional — but decided .net was the best bet. So there you go.

PPS – if you are a banner pilot, and found this website while searching for a job, I have nothing to offer you. But you should totally buy one of our t-shirts! A banner pilot wearing a Banner Pilot t-shirt, that would be so badass! Click on ‘store’ up top

 

A Brief History of Banner Pilot and the Internet

June 20, 2011 2011, Randomness 0 Comments

First, in 2005, there was Banner-Pilot.com

It was a pretty lousy website, but it did the trick. The message board proved to be awesome. It soon became nothing but spam bots talking to each other. Literally. Check out an archive.

Soon enough something called MySpace came along. “Finally, we can add blinking lights and glitter and glitches to our website!” we, along with thousands (millions?) of other bands thought. Actually, as awful as Myspace is — it is just a pile of garbage at this point — it was pretty slick at first. An easy way to post songs… people could communicate with you directly (“OMG FREE iPOD MINI CLICK HERE TAKE SURVEY!” and so on), you could post upcoming shows…. and with that, Banner-Pilot.com had no reason to exist and died of neglect, before finally getting an awesome facelift under new ownership. “What you need, when you need it”…. at least they kept our slogan.

Myspace worked OK for awhile, say, 2005-2009 (damn, that’s actually a pretty long time!) but its inner core of crap become more and more apparent over the years. So, since that time we have (like most bands nowadays) had a mixture of different sites: Facebook (for short updates that disappear one week later), Twitter (I think Twitter is awesome but it’s obviously limited), Bandcamp (for tunes), Tumblr (for longer posts), Storenvy (to sell shit), and probably more I’m forgetting. Some of those, particularly Bandcamp and Twitter, are really really awesome sites. But it still feels kind of disjointed. Thus: BannerPilot.net. A way to centralize some of this shit. That’s the slogan of this website!

-Nate

LP3 Update #3: Trimming the Fat, Increasing the Phat

June 17, 2011 2011, Songwriting Notes 0 Comments

Originally Posted January 2011 on Tumblr

Well, it’s some random day of the month, so you know what that means: a Banner Pilot Album Three Songwriting Update!

Let’s recap. When I posted the last update we had 6 or 7 songs. We’ve scrapped a couple of those since then and added a few more. Most of these new ones have been in the last three weeks; in other words, you could say that we’re on fire. Well, maybe not “fire”. Maybe “a roll”. Or “a tentatively encouraging pace.” Yeah. Kick ass.

Granted, most of these new ones aren’t sure things, and in some cases we don’t even have vocal melodies sorted out yet. But they *feel* like they have a good chance of working out, unlike the vast majority of Rough Ideas we have, where the feeling is closer to, “Eh, well maybe this might be OK at some point, possibly.” You can just tell sometimes. The sketchy ones are similar to a Bad Job Interview…. halfway into it you have a bad feeling, and while there’s a tiny chance you could turn things around, it’s pretty clear you’re screwed. At a certain point, further investment of time is pointless and it’s better to stand up and say, “You and your battery charger factory can go shove it, mister.” And then you walk up the street and start fresh somewhere else. Like a Jamba Juice.

That’s what we did recently: abandoned song ideas that were, upon further inspection, probably futile. And there were a LOT of these. I mean, as recently as two weeks ago we had tons and tons of rough ideas and random riffs and stitched together chord progressions, most of which were sad and unfinished and directionless. Looking now in my iTunes folder, I count 203 demo files. Granted, there are duplicates, but still: it’s SEVEN POINT TWO HOURS of mostly crappy demos. Most of them are just rough ideas I came up with in Garage Band, some are recordings of the live band at the practice space, some have vocals, some don’t. Most of it is no good, and again: 203 files, SEVEN HOURS.

Having this crushing volume of ideas floating around turned out to be counterproductive. “What should I work on? Something in the “LP3 – September Best” folder, or maybe ‘LP3 – Older Crap Heap’? Didn’t ‘Spanish Reds – Alt Vocals Sept 2’ have a cool part? Wait, was ‘Wimpy Riff’ the track I wanted, or was it ‘Chorus Idea – Track 7 (2)”?”

Total confusion. So we went through basically every file we had a couple weeks ago and ruthlessly discarded 99% of them. Now it’s way easier to tell where we’re at, and to focus on the songs that actually have a chance of seeing the light of day. Before it was “7 pretty good songs and 40+ ideas that have cool parts here and there that maybe we can combine stuff from and blah blah”; now it’s “these 10 songs have the best chance of working out, and these other 4 have some cool parts. The end.” WAY easier. The end result will be an album that’s much better than if we were just like, “Screw it, the 12 songs that are closest to being done, boom, there’s our album.”

So there you go. There’s the update. Next time: a discussion on song tempos! Whoo hoo!

-Nate

 

Rock Metal Punk Interview 2010

June 17, 2011 2010, Interviews 0 Comments

Here’s an interview with a Belgian fanzine called Rock Metal Punk. Check it out at their site, or below.

—–

‘We actually don’t have a tour bus. Maybe if someone out there gives us a tour bus, we’ll tour more. If anyone has a tour bus they don’t want, shoot us an email’, says Nate from Banner Pilot as he answers our related Groezrock questions.

Banner pilot celebrates his 5th birthday this year. How do you look back on the previous years?
Nate: ‘It’s been really fun! I feel like we’ve gotten better as we’ve gone along, too, which is better than the opposite trajectory. And we will last as long as it’s still fun, and we don’t suck, or at least aren’t aware that we suck. Hopefully that’ll be awhile!’

The volcano made it hard for a lot of bands to get here. But you made it. I heard you’ve made a song about it. Do you intend to put it out on your next record?
Nate: ‘Heh, that was just a joke I made before we left. But yeah, maybe we should do that, now that we’re back. I don’t think there’s enough songs where the band taunts a volcano. I mean, probably a couple dozen, but the world could use more.’

You first studio album came out in 2008. The second was already there in 2009. Can we expect a third one later this year, or are you planning on taking more time for it?
Nate: ‘Well, that’s sort of misleading because Resignation Day got delayed for a long time. It was recorded in September 2007 and Collapser in April 2009. So, at that rate we’ll hopefully record a new album early in 2011. That seems about right. We already have a handful of new songs that I think are pretty good.’

Collapser was released on September first, 2009. It’s your first record on Fat Wreck Chords. A label that houses lots of great punk rock bands. Do feel like real punk rockers?
Nate: ‘Hmm, I guess I’m not sure what a ‘real punk rocker’ is. When I hear that phrase I think of Mohawks and bullet belts and stuff, and we don’t really fit into that. I’ve been meaning to get a bullet belt, but nothing yet. So, I guess I’m not sure. I think the two bands I grew up on as a kid that stuck with me were Jawbreaker andScreeching Weasel. I mean, I also listened to Dead Kennedys and what not but in the long run I don’t think that had as much of an effect on me. But aside from that, I can say that Fat Wreck Chords is a fucking great label and it’s really cool to be on the same label as so many awesome bands.’

Belgian fans of Banner Pilot will be really happy to see the band perform on the biggest Punk festival of the country. As this is your first visit to this festival, what are your expectations?’
Nate: ‘I didn’t know what to expect exactly, but I had an amazing time. Huge field, tons of wasted people stumbling around, and great bands! What would you want more?’

You’ll be in Europe through April and May, and then fly back to America to have some concerts on the west coast. Are you ever home? Or did home change in your tourbus?
Nate: ‘Oh yeah, we’re home more often than we’re not. We tour maybe, i dunno, 4-6 weeks a year? A lot less than a lot of bands. And we actually don’t have a tour bus. Maybe if someone out there gives us a tour bus, we’ll tour more. If anyone has a tour bus they don’t want, shoot us an email.’

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