My Band’s New Single!

My Band’s New Single!

It’s been a crazy-busy January. I’ve been cooking a few different blog topics in my head, but time has gotten the better of me this month. However, I’m really excited to announce that my band, Amy and the Peace Pipes, has released a new single, “Burning Bridges”. Go check it out!

I know many of us are now using streaming services (and why not), but if you’d like to download your own copy, we’re giving it away for free to our Peace Pipers mailing list subscribers, just join up and you’ll get the download link!  Even if you don’t download music, you should join up anyway.  In the age of prevalent social media, it’s become increasingly difficult for bands to reach their audience across all of the noise (especially when Facebook wants to force people into buying ads to reach all of the people who liked their page).  The mailing list is really the one true place where everyone who is interested in us has an opportunity to receive our updates – whether they open the emails or get too many emails to open them is another story, but at least I know that our updates were at least delivered.

Thanks so much to everyone for supporting me and my band. When I stop and think about it, it’s really incredible to think that we can put stuff onto iTunes and Spotify and make it available for the world to hear.

Photographing South to Cedars

Photographing South to Cedars

Last night Amy and the Peace Pipes played at the Stuff A Truck benefit for Homeless Gear at Pateros Creek. We had the honor of sharing the stage with Aires Attic and South to Cedars.  I managed to snap a few shots during South to Cedars set.

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In all honestly, the lighting was pretty challenging.  Pateros Creek has a great room, but the stage area shares about the same lighting as the rest of the room, with the exception of some flood lights that are covered by transparent colored film.  Pateros also had the (very good) problem of being completely packed for the evening, which limited the angles that I was able to capture images.  South to Cedars put on an amazing show and feature some awesome harmonies by all of their members (they don’t normally had a drummer, they had a guest sit in for the last few songs, so a lot of great singing moments.  In addition, the fiddle was a lot of fun to capture.  It’s not too often that you get to capture tight shots of musicians and their instruments.

As always, all of my band photos can be found on Flickr.  I’d love to hear what you think!

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Photographing Wolfer and Places Back Home

Photographing Wolfer and Places Back Home

A few weeks back Amy and the Peace Pipes played a show at Nixons with Wolfer and Places Back Home. Nixons has a really cool lighting setup on their stage, so I took it as an opportunity to capture a few shots of the other bands.

Ben Sawyer, Wolfer’s lead singer, has an awesome beard that was a lot of fun to shoot while light bounced off of it.

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Places Back Home also had a lot of energy in their performance. They were all over the place while they were on stage, which made capturing “full band” shot a bit of a challenge. They gave me a lot of really cool action moments!

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Are there any pictures that you like?

New Gigposter: Stuff A Truck Benefit Concert

We have a really exciting gig coming up with Amy and the Peace Pipes on Friday, where we’ll be playing with Aires Attic and South to Cedars to benefit Homeless Gear.  Members from the three bands has been doing a lot of work towards things, getting some generous businesses to donate really cool prizes that we’ll be giving away.  I got a chance to design some artwork for it, I do have to confess that I did borrow from a previous design that I put together 8 years ago – but I figured the Statute of Limitations for my artwork expired and I could make it useful again.

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One of the biggest challenges was the use of all of the logos for the sponsors. Everyone’s managed to come in different shapes, sizes and colors.  I also found it difficult to striking the balance to providing the logos enough prominence without detracting too much from the other information I was trying to convey.

I also played around a lot with the new Facebook banner design, coming up with this guy:

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The gap in the middle was allocated to give space for the event title and date that Facebook imposes. People who would click onto the cover art would see the full “donate items” text, but I wanted to put the most striking content above the fold. Here’s what it looks like over on Facebook:

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I played around with the art some more, making a 1×1 image for our Twitter and Instragram profile pictures:

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I’d definitely welcome any thoughts or input!

Girls Rock! (Gig Poster)

Just wanted to share out my latest gig poster design for the recent showcase that Amy and the Peace Pipes took part in at the Downtown Artery.

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One of our goals for this show was to stress that this was a showcase of all three bands, rather than having a headline with supporting acts, so I tried to keep all of the image sizes relatively equal (also working on constraint with the images that I was given).

As you can see there was also a significant amount of information that I had to include in the poster, so I was a bit worried that I may have made things too busy.  Overall I’m pretty pleased with the poster, especially when considering I also had to rush the design a bit.  I’m already looking forward to playing with some more original artwork for the next gig poster.