When you’re with a band for awhile and it gets pretty serious, you start thinking about making a baby record together. Sometimes, when you lead hectic independent lives, this process can take longer than you bargained for. But there are a lot of significant and memorable moments along the way, and today my dear band mates and I reached a big one: The Car Test.
Also known as The Shitty Speaker Test, The Car Test is what bands do to test the almost-final mixes of their recordings to hear how they’ll sound to the average listener on non-studio quality speakers. Like crappy car speakers.
You may remember the scene in the movie Once (starring The Swell Season’s Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova) where the band piles into a car to hear their newly recorded demos:
Yay! It still sounds good through terrible speakers!
My band mate, Darrell, loved this idea so much he’s rounded up the group, rented a zipcar and will brave driving the streets of NYC for the first time in order to do this.
Wish us luck!
About Madelyn
