Building a Math Rock Live Show w/ The Walding Family ++ some in-studio music clips

Right now Elijah & I are hard at work on The Walding Family’s live show.

_{A clip from rehearsal the other day.}

We have a blank slate to work with. While we did do some live shows four years ago during an older incarnation of the band… this time we’re throwing out most of that material in favor of new stuff.

While in the old days we were rock boys, nowadays we are electro boys. Which is to say that all I listen to is fat electronic music now, and Elijah’s into a lot of groovy music too. So that’s the direction we are looking at. Huge mind-bending beat music, but also math rock. IDK what is going to happen but it’s bound to be awesome.

What We’ve Been Listening To…

Making music is like taking a giant shit. What comes out depends on what goes in.

I listen to stuff, then new musical ideas happen in my brain. I know Elijah is the same way. Here’s some of the shit we have been geeking out on lately:

It’s just, funky, wild, unpredictable tunes ranging from the math rock side to the fully electronic banger status side.

How do you make these ideas work in a live context w/ only drum set and guitar? lol, that’s what we are trying to figure out. There will be some looping pedals and backing tracks, but only to a minimum - it’s important to me to have the meat of the track be happening from our live instruments.

Mostly I just want to keep the energy up as much as I can. I want people to experience the show in a vivid way, to be captured by the music and not let go for 30ish minutes.

Some Other Clips From Rehearsal

It’s fun to jam on live stream at the start of rehearsal because there is a little bit of pressure, it isn’t too different from performing on stage.

I mean if you have 10 people watching you on Facebook… is that so different from a random bar gig with a few people standing around watching?

Here’s two more clips from the jam (in addition to the one from the start of the post) that I enjoy:

Using Guitar Pro to Build the Set

One thing that we learned from the past is this: When you write a lot of math rock, it is easy to start forgetting parts. Writing several songs within a few days and having them all be non-repetitive, kinda crazy shit, makes it hard to keep the ideas steady within your mind.

So we use Guitar Pro to tab out all of our songs as soon as we write them. Even if something isn’t totally finished, we can still do this and update it later.

For example, we are working on an untitled track - “Song 32” for now - so we've got it all tabbed out in Guitar Pro. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

Looks cool, right? I love seeing sheet music for this kind of thing.

Here’s the sound of that little segment of sheet music, btw, in case you were curious:

More Updates Soon

I’ll let you know when we make more progress… it will be a lot of fun when we can share some full videos of live songs. We aren’t there yet though, I would expect at least a few months of work before we’re ready to start sharing any substantial material from the live set.

It takes time to make great music… and I’m trying to get more comfortable with the patience of it all.

Thanks for watching, more info soon :-)