Knocking the rust off
Despite our last post being made in August, Paper Windows has been active. Well, active for us.
We had three gigs in August, I think we played at our church in October one Sunday then in November we had a gig across town at a really cool venue called Bohemeo’s.
And to end out the year we played to the biggest audience we’ve ever played to. I bet it was more than all the shows we’ve ever played combined. We played an event called Lights In The Heights, a giant, three street, eight blocks long Christmas party. Apparently this is a really big attraction for Houstonians and thousands upon thousands of people walk up and down the streets listening to music, eating, drinking and watching the parade that kicks it off. This was the 24th annual event.
So after that show on Dec 11th, Jen, John, George and I thought we’d take a little break. The holidays came and went and after four weeks of not playing we finally got together.
Things were pretty rusty to say the least.
But weekly rehearsals are starting again because we’re getting ready for a gig we have up in Huntsville, which is about 40 or 50 miles north of Houston. It’s the longest trip we will have taken to play a show.
Another unique thing about this show is that the people there will actually be there to listen. Even at our CD release party which was ALL about us, people were talking, drinking, laughing… oh, AND they listened. But this gig is for a coffeehouse where it’s treated more like a listening room. The audience is very quiet and is there specifically to listen.
Wish us luck y’all. This will be a first for us.
What you missed at our weekend gigs
So Jen, George and I played on Saturday and Sunday afternoon at a couple of farmer’s markets here in Houston. John wasn’t there because he had to go out of town so I thought I’d write a post to let him know what he missed out on.
Playing outside gigs in the middle of August in Houston is pretty insane. It is unbelievably hot, humid and just all around miserable. Yet despite the weather being pretty normal for this time of year (which is blistering hot) it was a pretty good time.
So here’s what you missed.
Kids dancing: This is always cool when it happens. Little kids have no worry of what people will think of them if they decide to move their body to music. At both gigs I saw little ones shakin’ what their momma gave ‘em while we played. That was pretty awesome.
a free sauna: It’s surprising how hot it gets in the morning down here in Houston. The farmer’s market on Eastside street sets up on a black-top parking lot. Luckily for the musicians who play there every Saturday, the organizers bring a 10′x10′ tent and of course the individual vendors have their tents as well. But still there is plenty of exposed blacktop. So about 10:30 or so we got a little shower. It only lasted about 10 minutes at most but it was pretty heavy. Once it stopped you could literally see the steam coming off the ground.
rushing the stage: At the Sunday gig George was a pretty big hit with one little gal who was watching us. Who ever said bass players don’t get any action. So we’re right in the middle of a song when this girl starts running right at George! Granted she was only about 18 months old but still… we had fans rushing the stage! Fortunately her mom caught her just before she would have toppled over our monitor and done a faceplant right at George’s feet.
There ya go John… see what you miss when your gone?
If anyone else missed our shows this past weekend you can catch us tonight at the JP Hops House at 8:00pm. No cover. Free soup!
solo gig at the farmer’s market
Whew! What a weekend!
Rob here.
Well, the band was scheduled to play at the Bayou City Farmer’s Market on Saturday but John, George and Jenny left me high and dry. They all took off to the Hill Country of Texas and are hangin’ out at the Kerrville Folk Festival.
Alright so I shouldn’t say they left me high and dry. They and their families had the trip planned for months… pretty much since last May.
our dear friends, Suz and Chris, sending a picture message letting me know Skinny Dip by the New Belgium Brewery was offered this year at the folk festival.
For those of you who don’t know this about the members of Paper Windows, we were all friends from church long before we started playing music together. Well, for the past four or five years a bunch of us (this year more than 40 people… hey everyone!!! by the way, Susanna… you and Chris suck for rubbing it in! See picture to the right. 
) have headed up to Kerrville for a little spiritual renewal at a place called U Bar U as well as getting a little musical renewal at the folk fest.
So anyway, that trip had been planned for a LONG time.
But just like last year, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it this year because of other obligations. One of them being playing the farmer’s market.
So there I sat. All by myself. Me and my guitar playing for a few hundred people who stayed in town and decided to go to the farmer’s and take a look at all the fresh locally grown veggies.
The gig wasn’t too bad. In fact, except for the heat, it was pretty fun. I haven’t played solo in a really long time and I have to admit I don’t like it as much as making music with my friends. Come back soon!!!
Anyway, the people who show up there come with the sole purpose of snagging some great veggies but there were a lot of people who would stop, if even for just one song or just a couple of minutes, and listen.
The little kids were AWESOME. So many little kids would come right up to me… just a few feet away, and watch and listen and DANCE. That was really cool. Something else that was really cool was I met a little four and a half year old boy named Noah.
Hey Noah!
Noah, was pretty interested in what I was doing. I was able to talk to his mother for a little bit and from the sounds of it, he is a little musical prodigy. He plays the violin and has been playing for about a year. Well little Noah bought a Paper Windows CD and if what his mother says is true, we may have a guest Paper Window on stage with us when we play Discovery Green at the end of June.
great news for Paper Windows
So if you’ve been following the blog a little you know that we had a CD release party back in November. It was a really good time. We had our party at our favorite place to play, The JP Hops House. We had food, decorations, even a cake with our PW Logo.
And although we released our debut CD back in November we have a release date of March 30, 2010.
Why?
Because we’re on iTunes !!!! Check us out at the iTunes store!
kids in a candy store
Last week after the gig at the Last Organic Outpost urban garden, John, George and I were headed home and realized we’d be passing Guitar Center (how coincidental!) and thought we’d go in and look for some stuff we might need. Guys in a band always need something right?
Reminds me of that joke: If a guitar player won a million dollars in the lottery what would he do with it? Answer: He’d gig around as much as he could till he ran out of money.
So we get to Guitar Center and saw a sign saying it had moved. Lucky for us, it only moved a few blocks down the road and it was still on our way home. George has been looking for an elusive cable that he had at one time that helped him work his 20 year old effects pedal, I thought I’d check out the prices on guitar strings and John… well, John doesn’t need to buy more crap for the band but definitely wanted to check out the new place.
The new store is cool and all but it felt like when your favorite band goes commercial instead of sticking to its roots. It was highly polished, very modern, slick and up-to-date. Felt kinda like a sell-out but we ventured in. The staff still looked like the seedy, this-is-my-day-job, band-member types… so that was a relief. And of course the store had all the same stuff. Unfortunately we didn’t get pictures of the Flying V acoustic guitar or the reverse Flying V electric or the double neck 12-string / 6-string acoustic by Ovation but we did get these.
Like the title says, Kids in a candy store.
paying our dues
In the last post I mentioned a last minute gig that kinda fell into our laps. We thought it would be a good experience because it was way on the other side of town from us where no one has seen us play. Plus it was being held on the grounds of an urban garden in a historic district of Houston and with John being a vegetarian (besides who doesn’t like fresh veggies) we thought it would fun to check it out.
Well Houston can at times get pretty cold and the day before we were to play Old Man Winter decided to give Houston a little blast of his cold air. A front came down from the north and pulled the temps down to a hair below freezing at night, so when we went on at noon the next day it was still really cold. It was supposed to be really sunny (which might have helped if that had happened) but instead it was overcast up until about the time we played our last song.
Holy crap was it cold! Unbelievably FRIGGIN’ cold!!!
And the front brought in rain so with this venue being a garden… the place was soggy all over. Walking in the entrance there were pieces of plywood on top of wooden shipping pallets to cross over a big muddy mess. A slight wind made it feel colder than the 43 degrees that it actually was. Apparently, the place had been a junkyard for cars and there quite a few laying around with weeds and overgrowth coming out of them. The remains of a metal container was used a makeshift fireplace so smoke and embers were drifting into our faces. I think it’s safe to say it’s one of the hardest gigs we’ve ever played…
AND IT WAS AWWWWESOME!!!
There were only 20 or so people there but they were quite appreciative, clapping after every song, although very quickly so they could get there hands back in their pockets.
So after about 45 minutes of playing we peeled our fingers off the fretboards of our respective instruments… John peeled himself off his trejon and we began tearing down our stuff. Not a single CD was sold but the founder of the garden said there are normally a lot more people there on the weekends and for us to “not give up on them.” We were also told by someone else with the garden that they’d really like us to come back again. And if wanted we could pick as many fresh veggies as we’d like.
Normally we either go for being paid or a nice sized beer tab but hey… an all-you-can-carry, fresh-from-the-earth bag of veggies…
The band has decided to go back next time they want us to play.
Here we are after the gig, a little worse for the wear with Jenny’s husband Ron (back left) celebrating with some lunch at a cool place called The Hobbit Hole.
last minute show this Saturday
Our good friend Mark Holt from The Gorilla Dance Band invited us to play a show with his band this Saturday. We just got asked yesterday so sorry for the late notice.
We’re playing an outside show at an amazing urban garden (http://LastOrganicOutpost.org) located in the heart of Houston’s fifth ward at high noon.
Come out for some good music and pick your own fresh veggies for a small donation to the garden.
new website design
Hey everyone… just a quick announcement to say we have a new design to our website. There will probably be some tweaks and adjustments made but you can still hear a few of our songs off the ReverbNation player, see a few videos and get added to our mailing list.
Oh another quick announcement… we’re scheduled to play a show at Northwest Community UU Church on Jan 23, 2010.
We’ll get a few more details here in the next couple of weeks.
Happy Holidays everyone.
Rob
Thanks to all our friends and fans!
Hey y’all… i just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who showed up at the CD release party a couple of weeks ago. We had a blast and it would have been for nothing if everyone hadn’t shown up.
Thanks so much !!!
A special thanks to my brother J. who took these pics for us; to Tracy, Ron and Beth who made the food for everyone to dive into, especially the cake and to Jen for her awesome paper window centerpieces!
the CD is en route!
Well, George and I headed out from Houston about 9:00 this morning. And after a stop at Jack in the Box, piss breaks, ice cream and coffee pit stops I’m proud to say we’ve got this baby in our hands!!!
We got it in the back of the Prius!!!! George and I are on our way back now from picking up in Fort Worth from the awesome guys at Nationwide CD.
I gotta say y’all…. it looks pretty damn good. It sounds pretty damn good, too. We’re listening to it right now and are up to Track 9…. crave. Sounds awesome.
If you’re in the Houston area November 21st, we hope you can make it out to the CD release party.
It’s at one of our favorite places, the JP Hops House. The show starts at 9:00.
Rob
long time no hear
I can’t believe we let the ol’ blog slip into the void for so long without an update or anything. Sorry folks.
We thought we had things finished in July but summer came along, the band did its usual summer hiatus, a CD release got canceled and some polishing was done to the recordings we had thought we had completely done.
Needless to say, the times posted in the previous post aren’t exactly accurate but the songlist and it’s order are still going to be that way.
The big news is the CD is being pressed as I type and George and I are headed up to Fort Worth to go pick them up in a couple of weeks. Hopefully John can go, too but we’re not sure and Jen is almost certain she can’t go. If we can swing it, we might try to hit an open mic somewhere in Big D to push the CD.
If anyone in the Dallas/Ft Worth area knows of a place let us know. You can email us at: paperwindows [at]gmail [dot] com
Also, we have a date set for the CD release party! Our good friends Jim and Pam over at the JP Hops House are hosting the shin dig at their pub and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Hope you can make it to the show. It’s gonna be mucho fun time. Our friends and spouses are cooking up some mean groceries and Jim and Pam will have plenty o’ drink to fill your glass.
How could you pass it up? There’s no cover and free food!
Also visit us on our website at: http://paperwindowsmusic.com OR add us on to your Facebook page. Do a search for Paper Windows… you’ll find us.
CD song list OR…
what a value!!!
We say what a value because we’ve got 14 songs which equals about 67 minutes of music on this baby. At first we were hoping we could get at least eight songs just so it would be a respectable first effort.
We’re not finished yet but we’re coming down to the home stretch everyone. We’re really excited about having this CD finished.
Here’s how the song list is gonna play out once we do get it done.
1 within you 04:14
2 worn out welcome 05:13
3 little things 03:36
4 she came to me 04:47
5 safe harbor 05:14
6 heart has found a friend 03:58
7 fireflies 04:16
8 ready to love again 04:30
9 crave 05:56
10 join me 05:48
11 let me adore you 04:31
12 three day weekend 04:39
13 gotta have love 05:38
14 paper windows 05:06
And to give you an idea of what some of it sounds like below is one of the songs.
Here’s a free download. It should open a new window asking if you’d like to download the file. It was created on a Mac and is virus free.
Also visit us on our website at: http://paperwindowsmusic.com OR add us on to your Facebook page. Do a search for Paper Windows… you’ll find us.
closer to being finished
Last night the band met to try and put down George and Jen’s tracks on a few songs. This was after John and I had met the night before as well as on Saturday night as well.
It’s really tough and the recording schedule is really taking a toll on me and the wife. She’s having a tough time keeping the home fires burning while I’m gone all the time but we’re getting closer and closer to finishing the CD… well, at least the recording. Then comes mixing and mastering. Ugh.
Her’es a matrix of what we’ve been doing with our best friend “Mac”.
I think we’ve got 14 songs done. Of those there is one we want to completely re-do and about five that we’d all like a crack at giving our part another shot. The problem is we really want it to be finished by the time we play our gig at the UU Spring Music Festival on May 2. The deadline is pretty intense so we’ve stepped up the length of time and the number of days a week we try to record. Here’s a pic of Jen laying down her track on “crave.”
Here’s George listening as Jen does her thing.
The mix sounds pretty friggin cool. I know we’re all looking forward to when we get the mastering done and the finished product in our hand. Look for us on iTunes once we get it finished. We hope it will be available on iTunes (as well as Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster and eMusic) towards the end of July.
The CD should hit the streets by the end of May though. Wish us luck!
Watch our website and here for an announcement as to when it’s done and our first CD release party.
~ Rob
I got a new drum
Hey, everyone… John here. I’ve been playing a cajon with the band since we started. I was looking for a way to add a little more diversity to the percussion sound and found a new Meinl cajon called a “Trejon”. It’s got three separate panels in front instead of the typical single front plate of a cajon.
The pic below is from the Meinl website.
I had an awful time getting the wires behind the face of my first cajon to sound the way I wanted. It seemed like I got the wire buzz in the bass as much as I did when I was going for a snare sound. On this new drum, the snare has a better design and is on a plate that is isolated from the other two. Plus that little nob on the side is where you adjust the snare tension. No more flipping it upside down and twisting screws. I can actually do it while tapping on the snare frame.
So I sort of have a bass, a tom, and a snare now. One complaint I have is that the snare plate is in the upper left instead of the right but I’ve been able to adjust ok.
The corners still give a nice snap if you loosen the screws on the frame a little. So far I’m very happy with it. The only downside I see so far is it is a great big honkin’ box. One reviewer joked that you could sleep in it. (That’s just a joke, the sound hole isn’t big enough to crawl through.)
The band also seems to like it. Rob got all excited when we played “Three Day Weekend” at a practice after I got the trejon. He wanted to know what I’d changed in the rhythm. “Nothing”, I said, “just a different drum.”
~ John
Here’s a pic of my rig with the new box as well as my old cajon.
a long night of recording
Holy crap… recording is starting to take it’s toll and it’s only been two or three weeks. I know it’s starting to get to me anyway. Hi all… Rob here.
We had a five hour recording session last night. And that came after all of us worked nine hours at our day jobs. ugh… i think the bags under my eyes have bags under them. No bueno on a work night.
i think we can get one more in.
I showed up at 6:45 last night. John trailed close behind and we started setting up our sound/recording stuff.
Jen and George showed up about 7:30 and we still didn’t have ourselves set up. Come 8:15 or so and we were finally ready to get to work.
Man, it’s hard. Hard doing this by ourselves when we really don’t know what we’re doing. As the night wore on we kept going thinking there was no sense in going home… our spouses are probably already pissed. May as well forge ahead.
So 12:30am rolls around and we finally had to call it quits even though Jen’s mantra was, “we can sleep when we’re dead.” This coming from the woman who has to wake up about 5:15… 5:30 in the morning.
a pic of Jen's instruments
Jen got a really nice mournful recording for “worn out welcome” but there were moments she wasn’t happy with so we’ll have to do them over.
We were able to get some ok stuff but there are little hiccups, glitches, hiss and weird stuff we never really paid much attention to before.
I think we’ll all be doing tracks over. I’m not really happy with my vocals on “ready to love again” and I can hear some stuff on some of the other tracks.
Hopefully if we clean the files up some, they can get scrubbed and polished even more during the mastering.
pop filter view of George
visit our website at: Paper Windows Music.com
holy crap!… Paper Windows is recording a CD
Well, our friends and family have finally convinced us we should put out a CD. I can’t believe this thing we started two years ago….
Hey! more than two years ago! I can’t believe we forgot. Paper Windows’ birthday was on the 23rd!
Anyway, this isn’t a birthday post. It’s an announcement that we’re recording and trying to put together a CD.
We’ll warn you now… this isn’t a low-budget-record but a NO-BUDGET-record. Actually that’s kind of a lie. We do hope to throw some bucks at this project in the packaging, pressing and mastering. Holy crap… a real CD.
So, like I was gonna say above… I can’t believe this thing we started two years ago has come to this. We’re actually gonna put out a CD.
Keep on the look out for it. We hope to have it done by May 1st of this year.
Wish us luck
~ Rob
a new video
Hi all… Rob here.
This actually turned out pretty cool considering the fact that none of us knows much about video recording and editing and it was shot with a little point and shoot camera.
The sound was what got captured by said little camera (which by the way once got dropped in a bucket of water mixed with Mr Clean cleaning solution and has been dropped a time or two.)
Hope you like it. If so give us a good rating on YouTube.
some images used were shot by Ron Bosch and Rob Barreda. Graffiti images shot by my daughter Heather.
visit our website at: Paper Windows Music.com
rehearsing with Paper Windows
Hi all… Rob here.
Man, you could have thought the band broke up since it’s been so long since we posted anything but we’ve all been pretty busy. Plus we’re just not used to keeping up with the ol’ blog thing.
At any rate, we have been keeping up with band rehearsals. We actually did have a gig that came up and we do have our monthly deal we do at our church and we’ve been rehearsing a lot since we last posted.
We hope to put some time aside at the beginning of next year to do some real recording. Maybe not in a studio but not just one mic in the middle of the four of us either. So keep on the look out for some posts on how that’s going.
In the mean time… here some pics from a rehearsal back in August. You can see more of the pics from this shoot at our website: Paper Windows Music.com click on the pictures tab.
a cool fan page
