tshirts for tourists

release party is off

Due to medical reasons. Apologies to anyone who was planning on attending.

I hope to be back soon.

"T-Shirts For Tourists" Album Release Party

Join us downtown on May 29 to celebrate the release of my new lo-fi album, “T-Shirts For Tourists”

Featuring Dawen Wang and Alfa Garcia

Hosted by NaRhee Ahn

Fri, May 29, 9pm
$5
Blue Dahlia
738 E. 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
bluedahliacafe.com

I’ll be playing selections from the new record, accompanied by Dawen and my friend Colin Nasseri and selling all my albums at recession-friendly prices. Dawen (a recent Chicago transplant) and Alfa (visiting from NYC), will also be doing full sets throughout the night.

Sponsored by:

AngryAsianMan
angryasianman.com

Alive Not Dead
alivenotdead.com

iQQU
iqqubeauty.com

Blacklava
blacklava.net

Asians For Miracle Marrow Matches
asianmarrow.org

Royal Party
royalpartyonline.com

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Be my fan here:
facebook.com/pages/Scott-Tang/6936858905

And check out my blog:
tshirtsfortourists.com

I’m sort of on Twitter :/ (still on the fence about it :)
twitter.com/scotttang

Check out Dawen’s website:
dawenwangmusic.com

and Alfa’s website/blog:
alfa-music.com

"Sublingual" was on TV again (but I missed it)

The music video for “Sublingual,” directed by my brilliant friend Karen Lin, was on TV again recently… although I’m not exactly sure when. I got an email from Bell Tsou, who has her own show now (and rightfully so, cause have you ever heard how fast she can speak Chinese? I have!). Bell said she’d been wanting to tell me about how she ended one of her shows with “Sublingual,” but she kept forgetting. Anyway, here’s the link.

Of course, you can still check out the high[er] quality version of “Sublingual” here.

For those of you who are still scratching your heads after listening to my new lo-fi album, you can watch it and reminisce about the days when I was still making music that sounded normal.

my ghetto version of "lo-fi"

So… I’m still getting comments from people who don’t understand that I purposely made my record sound the way it does, and apparently think the recording quality of my album is just really bad… which is kind of funny to me. But I thought I should at least take some time to show a little of what went into making this record sound “lo-fi” or whatever it should be called instead. There are probably a dozen different ways to achieve the same thing in half the number of steps, but this is the way I did it.

Below I’ve posted some screenshots of the effects chain on one of my lead vocal tracks, to give people an idea of the process of getting this destroyed sound (and I guess to demonstrate that it was the result of work and experimentation and passion, not shoddy recording).

And as a final note: I know not everyone appreciates what I did on this record, which is totally fine. But it’s what I was into when I made it, so that’s why I’m explaining it.


Manually going through the vocal tracks to trim the volume. This was a pain, mostly because I sing with a ton of sibilance.


Lopping off a bunch of high end to tame some more of the sibilance, especially in anticipation of the next step…


Adding the overdrive to dirty the sound up. This is where that distorted sound comes from. The plug-in I used gives an insane amount of control over it, and with lots of possibilities comes a mind-boggling amount of time experimenting to get just the sound you want. I must’ve tried dozens of settings for this plug-in alone on each track I used it on.


EQ on both pre-filter…


…and post-filter. Notice how much I’m still rolling off the top end, cause the overdrive added so much treble.


A de-esser, because the sibilance is still noticeable this far down the chain.


a tiny bit of verb to give it some space.

Final result = people wondering why the recording quality is so bad.