Bang Camaro

How to play the “Pleasure (Pleasure)” Guitar Ostinato part

admin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:35:16 +0000

I’ve been hanging out on the road for the past few days. You’d probably think that I’d be doing some sweet partying or living like a rock star. Not really. I have been able to get some guitar practice in though. Lots of people have been bugging us for years about writing some tab, so I thought I would throw a quick lesson together.

I chose to the the ‘Guitar Ostinato’ part from “Pleasure (Pleasure).” Mainly I decided to do this not only because it was really easy to tab out, but it’s also a good picking exercise. So, first, the tab:

The part is all played on the high E string, while alternate picking straight 16th notes. I originally came up with this part as an exercise because I SUCKED at picking on the same string for any length of time. For some reason, changing string kept me in line, but if I tried to stay on a single string, I would eventually get off.

So, I fired up my metronome and worked on this Yngwie-esque guitar lick for a while. Eventually, when Alex came up with the main riff of “Pleasure (Pleasure)” I thought it might be cool to modulate the song up to Bm for the guitar solo. So, I played the line tabbed while Maclaine played a third above that line, and then rocked the main solo. (Maclaine is no longer with us, so Alex and I each play half the solo live.)

The trick to this part is keeping the picking very even. I can’t stress enough that you should practice to a metronome. In fact, I found out my problem with picking on the same string wasn’t that I couldn’t keep up… it was the opposite. I tended to pick too quickly and get ahead of the beat. Sometimes, when the crowd is going crazy and beer is flying everywhere, I still tend to jump the beat a bit and have to relax and get back into the groove.

So anyway, happy picking! I’ll try to keep putting more tabs up every so often. I also have a flipcam now, so hopefully I’ll have some video in the future. Let me know if you have any questions.

ROCK!

-Bryn

1 Million Plays!

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:00:49 +0000

Late yesterday we broke 1,000,000 plays here on MySpace. That is simply unbelievable to me. Thank everyone so much for checking out our Camaro Thursdays and generally supporting the band. It means everything to us.

We’re going to be in Orlando on Friday (Halloween!) and Tampa on Saturday. Hopefully we’ll see some of you there to celebrate.

-Bryn

Greetings from Charleston, SC!

admin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:45:05 +0000

After our Nashville and Atlanta shows, the band has a few days off. Most of the guys headed back to Boston, so I have 5 days to get the van from Atlanta to Orlando. No, that’s not a very far drive. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, but the dudes from Leslie (a band that we have been playing with) offered to let me hang with them in their hometown of Charleston. Those guys rule (check them out at myspace.com/leslierock) so I decided to take them up on it.

Last night we went to an Oyster roast… I think that’s what you call it. I’ve never seen one before, but let me just say THAT SHIT LOOKS GROSS. But everyone was ultra cool. We drank some MGDs and headed to a club to watch Unearth. The show ruled. Those guys have a strobe light and know how to fucking use it. I didn’t even know that a dude Derek that I know who plays (played?) in a band called Seemless now plays drums for them.

So, now I’m hanging at the Leslie pad. Like true rock stars, it’s noon and they aren’t awake yet. I’ll write a few more updates about my time trying to stretch my drive to Orlando into 5 days.

-Bryn

Bryn and CISCO?

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:45:10 +0000

A camera crew followed Bryn around for a while to see what it’s really like for him to live the life of a computer nerd and a guitar player in Bang Camaro. The results are…. well… Bryn is a geek.

Head on over here to check out the video that shows some of CISCO’s technology being used by Harmonix.

http://www.rockband.com/cisco
(Click on the “Programmer by Day, Rocker by Night” video.

LA: Night One, Day One

admin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:40:20 +0000

We haven’t been here for 24 hours and we feel like garbage; however, tonight is going to be another sweet one.

After raiding a Jack-in-the-Box, some dudes went to Sunset and others made a trip down to the beach. On Sunset we rolled around with our friend and original Bang Camaro drummer Dylan Halacy, meeting people and slaying drinks at the Rainbow. We met Ron Jeremy, Steel Panther, and a guy who may have been Bret Michaels (who we thought was in Steel Panther and, as it turns out, was not–he did know of Bang Camaro, though). Also, Morgan got sick out the window of Dylan’s ride as they blazed down the 405 at well over 88 M.P.H., but the conversation he was in the middle of was not deterred, and the night kept going long and strong.

Ron Jeremy, Morgan, and Bryn’s finger.

The other dudes soaked-up sea water, Cape Coders, and got $400 haircuts (for free) at 5:00am from a guy who was on Shear Genius. Photos will be found and posted shortly… Everyone who partook in this look pretty sexy.

Somehow we managed to make it to Go TV this morning with heavy hangovers in check to record this tasty nugget. We look rough tough. It was certainly something new to us…

Now we’re eating more Jack-in-the-Box, waiting for the next round of Presidential Debates, and recharging to hit the town again tonight.

Alex, Rich, Zach, Logan Cantrell, and Mike.

Tour video blog, part I: Rock the Wolf

admin — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:57:42 +0000

A while ago, MTV was stupid enough to give me and Alex a Flipcam to document our time at Lollapalooza. This is what we came up with.

Not the best journalism by any means, but it was fun. So, after having to return their camera, Rod and I went out and picked some up. So, now we’re going to spend some time taking videos of ridiculous shit that happens to us on the road.

First up… Bryn and Alex do some Camaraoke for Rock the Vote in Akron. Then, the band picks up their spirit guide at a truck stop.

Bang Camaro Unleashed in Portland

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:04:15 +0000

I slept for about six hours during my 3.5-day stay in Portland, OR, and I was the most rested out of the group. Four of us—Alex, Pete, Rodrigo, and I, were summoned to shoot a commercial for the Rock Band Stage Kit. Obviously this was going to be a good timer, but the challenge lied in putting the fury and disgustingness of a 20-man exploding space shuttle into a four-piece/oz. bottle.


 
The ‘Kit includes a fog machine and gizmo that shoots lights/lasers out of it. The lighting is attached to a modified controller (replacing the one the singer would normally use), because it’s required for the system to communicate with the console. The key to this is the tracks in the Rock Bands now have coding that tells the kit when to do something based on the music being played. To me, this is what sells it; I also see potential for modifying the lighting—it’s a matter of time someone rigs a real, er, rig to it with success.
Our wrangler and driver took us to the Hotel de Luxe, a really sweet golden era Hollywood-themed hotel with photos of Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn everywhere and went to our respective rooms to pee, clean up, and execute other euphemisms. We all found the same HD bikini adventure channel with girls in Brazil being wonderful on our giant plasmas while sniffing-out our mini-bars.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the multiple emails we received from management that explicitly dictated to us the importance of us staying dry and rested the first night in town for the following day of shooting. Obviously the next morning we’d receive word from BCHQ that management sent a new battery of emails about how unhappy they were with all of the photos we sent to their cell phones throughout the night showcasing us with rows of shots, pints, bottles, and cigarette blossoms. The fact that Portland is a bad-ass city wasn’t helping their cause. And thank you, Matador.


My call time was earlier than the other guy. I had some kind of foray into voice-over work and my morning alarm was a call from Nick Given telling me my truck was being towed away back in Boston. I wandered down to the hotel lobby and was greeted unexpectedly by the people who were running the whole operation. They were clearly nervous about the guy who was going to emerge from the elevator.
This, of course, was because a week earlier management came to us with a photographer, Jillian incidentally, to take individual and group shots. We refused, because it was presented as: “they want to see how rock you really are.” Yeah, okay. The real reason was they wanted an idea of what we looked like for wardrobe and compositional purposes, but hey.  I can’t blame the crew for their anxiety. Luckily for them Alex, Rod, and Pete are way sexier than me, so it all worked out.
Anyway, I was thrown in a sound booth with a list of lines in front of me—each having to be read in three different ways. I’ve only seen the 30-second version of the commercial as of this blog, but I guess they decided such taglines as, “at $99, it’s cheaper than a hooker you’d want and won’t rob you in your sleep,” and, “it’s fuckin’ sweet,” wasn’t what they really wanted. At least the women present said they were turned-on and the guys said they felt violated.
We were reunited in the theater the shooting was taking place in—I can’t remember the name, and the day was a blast. We were fortunate the entire crew behind this was awesome and, in the interest of protecting the innocent, I’ll just say everyone made sure we were always really comfortable. It was also nice to work with a crew that was experienced, organized, professional, and had an actual vision of what they wanted to do with us.
That night we returned to the Matador to discuss AC/DC over copious tequila and beer. I was propelled through outer space until I crashed into the classy toilet bowl in my bathroom. I got a few hours of sleep and then met Rod at Kingston for breakfast and Bloody Mary. Alex and Pete met up with us and we all resumed our rampage through the clean streets of Portland.
Along the way we encountered a dude riding a bike who looked like he could tell us where we’d be interested in going since we’d run out of bars in that area. We called out to him from the sidewalk and he rolled toward us on the road. It went something like:
“Hey, can you tell us where there’s a bar around here?”
“Yeah, man, you’ll want—GUHHHN,” before gagging.
The guy tried to hop his bike up over the curb to stand next to us, but somehow slipped so that he crushed his people-makers on the bar of his bike. I don’t know if you’ve seen someone crush his Bs and D not six feet away, but we all thought it was the best ever. I tried not to laugh in this poor guy’s face, and then peered carefully out of the corner of my eye to see if the three saw this. Pete had his giant devil’s smile, which was enough. Maybe you have to be there, but my eyes are a little watery just thinking about this. We kept it together long enough for him to walk his bike away. Poor guy.
The rest of the day was spent at the Oregon Brewers Festival, where ska covers of 311 songs drove us to drink even more, and Alex met Bizarro Alex, who kept giving him beers. I sang “The Pirate Song” obnoxiously into my Brew Fest mug to passerby as we hiked to McDonald’s to prepare to revisit our favorite Portland bars. Beer and shot, beer and shot–2am suddenly arrived, and with a taxi call time of 4am, what else would you do in your room but things you’d receive a surprisingly high bill for in three weeks? (They are very, very thorough at the Hotel de Luxe.)
The taxi ride was painful, but I nearly died when I found out the next day I accidentally tipped the driver $60. When you drink your way into the Astral Plane, a $100 bill looks a lot like a $50 you were given by the crew for your $40 cab fare. I’m a buffoon—no wonder that guy was so excited and gave me a blank receipt.  At least we all made it to the plane in time—no, wait, I got held back because I missed the cut-off by one minute, twenty-five seconds. Alaska Airlines doesn’t mess around. The woman at the ticket counter spent about 15 minutes looking for flights back to Boston that were either late that night or early the next morning (while I ground my teeth and sweat my ass off) before mysteriously allowing me to go onto my original jet anyway. Yaaayyy… I’ve never run at full-speed through an airport before, much less had airline attendants along the way rooting for me—equal parts cool in a John Hughes-sort-of-way and fucked-up. I got onto the plane and slept the entire way back to Boston behind Alex.
Portland, OR: you made sweet love to our livers, hearts, and minds and we want you again. See you on October 4th.
-MORGAN

Justin Buckley’s view of Lollapalooza

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:10:40 +0000

Just Buckley was once a supplemental choir member from South Carolina. He performed with us in Raleigh and Atlanta. (Do you want to join our supplemental choir for your town? Head over to www.ourstage.com/bangcamaro to learn how! He later contacted us about doing a full tour with us. We already knew he had a great voice and was a cool guy, so we said “sure!” He spent the next month with us, driving around in our man-van. Afterwards, he headed home for a few weeks, but then met up with us again for our show at Lollapalooza.

This is what he had to say:

—————————-

So this past Friday, Aug. 1st, the band im in, Bang Camaro, played at Lollapalooza at 11:30 in the morning. We basically kicked off the festival and it was AMAZING.

At around 11:00-11:15, the gates were opened and thousands of fans rushed into the empty park. A few thousand die-hard fans sprinted to the main stages (one of which was ours) to secure a front row seat at the Radiohead concert (about 10 hours away). After about a thousand had crowded in front of the MySpace stage (ours), we began our set at around 11:30 and as the fans continued to stream in, they were drawn to our stage by our hard rock licks and sweet man-choir choruses! By the time we were through with them, it was a sea of fist pumping, chanting, synchronized-clapping METALHEADS! (About 3,000 of them.)

After the show, we were whisked away to interviews and autograph signings. I went to the signing first where i proceeded to autographize (yep, invented that word) our fans’ merch/bodies/ticket stubs/bags/bandanas. Now it was time to get interviewed by Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass. This was pretty cool, as we were invited on to his tour bus to take part in a bit for GMnext (an attempt to make the interviews fun and witty, i suppose). It was kind of funny i guess, but the interview went alright. KG is a pretty sweet dude.

So throughout the rest of the day, we were all shuttled around the park by these golf-cart operating Lollapalooza employees, (which BEAT WALKING’S ASS. It was hot too), to all the shows we wanted to see (The Raconteurs, Rogue Wave, Radiohead, The Yea Sayers, etc.). That night at dinner Elijah Wood cut in front of me to get a fork and knife.

So yeah, we played an AWESOME set, had tons of great interviews (pretty much from 12:45 - 6:00pm), and got tons of press! Thanks for the free laptop, Dell!

-Justin