Free Guerrilla Recording From the Vault: Dies Irae at the Ranger

It's not quite spring yet, but the time has come to clear some space off our hard drives to make room for upcoming recording projects. As I was backing up sessions to DVD I came across a CHiTT guerrilla recording of Laramie metal band Dies Irae captured live at the Ranger Bar last year.

We rolled in to record that night as kind of a last minute decision. We were short our usual selection of microphones and hardware (which were probably snowed in somewhere across the state) but we cobbled together what spare microphones, cables and hardware we could find and decided to let the tape roll anyway. Dies Irae always draws a rowdy crowd, and at the very least we just wanted to capture the energy of the evening, even if nothing usable turned out from the recordings. In the end, as we expected, neither the band nor CHiTT Productions thought the material stood up to our expectations for an official release, so we decided to scrap the tracks and go with stronger material.

Still, we find it a shame to let good efforts go to waste, so before I made the final purge from my hard drive we selected three tracks to release for free download. Even though we felt the recording and performance weren't top tier that night, it was an intense evening and we thought we'd offer this brief snapshot of the energy released that night (read: heavy metal umlaut). Even more, it's an argument for the hypothesis that you don't have to own elite gear or have bourgeois audio attitudes to produce decent recordings, and this is a good example of how even the worst recording conditions can produce solid, fan-worthy tracks in the end. Remember would be naysayers: the digital age is also a revolution.

Download: Follow the link, click "continue," and click "download file" for free download.


Dies Irae, Live at the Ranger, 3/24/07
3 Songs, 192 kbps, 21 MB


In the next post, we'll give a complete rundown of the recording setup we used that night including scathing reviews of the sub-par gear we used, and what we did later to clean things up.