Listen to the podcast here

If you tried visiting this site or our main site in the last few weeks your browser may have blocked you, saying that the site was “malicious”. I can guarantee you the site is in fact not “malicious” and we are working to get everything back up and running. What had happened was, a malicious, dirty, evil douchebag of a hacker took advantage of some sort of vulnerability in our set up and was able to inject some malicious, dirty, evil code into our WordPress installation. Google detected this and added us to their block list, which is used by some browsers to block sites that may be harmful.

As a temporary solution I moved the new site over to one of our other domains (sincharmy.com), which is where you are now, and redirected all traffic from http://sinch.net to the new location. So, for the time being, most of sinch.net, except for the music store, is inaccessible. Things will hopefully be back to normal soon.

Who gives a shit? What’s Going on with the album?

Right. The new album.

Things are moving along. We’re making progress. I know we’ve been working on this thing for a long time now and some of you are probably wondering what’s going on. Maybe you’re even regretting your donation because you didn’t think it would take this long. We can totally understand that. Honestly I didn’t think it would take this long either. We’ve also been frustrated at times with the pace of the recording, but we’re doing this outside the label system and with a much smaller budget than what you would get on a label. We have to just take things as they come and keep pushing forward.

Some of you may think that being in this band is our full time job but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. We all have full time jobs outside of the band and have for quite a while now. Trying to complete a project like this that would normally take up to two months (or more) of 10-12 hour days in the studio with the amount of time we actually have has been challenging. I try not to focus on stuff like this most of the time, but I think it’s something we need to revisit every once in a while just so everyone knows where we’re at.

Having said that we’ve made pretty good progress and we’re pushing things forward every week. Drums are done. Bass is done. Guitars are most of the way there, aside from some stuff we may want to add once we get into mixing. Vocals have been the main focus lately and Jamie has 7 or 8 of the songs most of the way there and will be moving on to the rest within the next week or so.

Something we may not have mentioned before is that we’re recording 13 songs for this album. So it’s going to be bigger and longer than anything we’ve done before (that’s what she said). We’re anxious to get it done but we also want to get it right. This may seem like it’s taking forever. OK, it actually is taking forever. But just know that we’re doing everything we can to make sure that when it’s finally done and in your hands that it’s something that it’s as good as it can possibly be.

We hope the new site has everything you could ever ask for, or at least enough to satisfy all your donating-to-Sinch related needs. Let’s have a look at some of the new stuff we got going on here:

New Widget

If you look over on the right you’ll see the new donation “widget”, made possible by a new company in the Philly area called ENJYN. Their service is specifically made for artists to raise money from their fans so it’s much better suited to this project than the old Chip In widget. We were able to import all of our existing data so the new widget reflects all the donations going back to when we first started this project in 2008.

Before we continue, a moment of silence for the ol’ Chip In widget…

… OK, that’s done. Let’s move on.

Promotional Tools

If you want to help us promote this project (and we’re pretty sure sure you do), there’s a bunch of new stuff on the Project Info tab to get you started. You can “Like” this on Facebook (you can do that up in the header too), “retweet” this site or share the link on pretty much any other social network you can think of (and even some that you can’t). We’ve also provided the embed code for the donation widget in all its copy-and-paste-able glory if you’d like to add it to your own site.

Progress Updates

We’ve been keeping everyone (pretty much) updated on the main Sinch site, but now that we have a site specifically for this project it totally makes sense that the updates would be here as well, right? Well here they are. (You’re reading the first one right now!)

Comments

Our Chip In page has comments but I don’t think most people saw them because they don’t show up anywhere on our site. I honestly kept forgetting they even existed so they obviously needed a new home. Now you can comment right on this site and everyone will see it and you’ll be the most famous person in the goddamn universe (if only for a thousand millionth of a half of a nanosecond). Plus, we like to see the comments and join in the discussion so it’s much better having everything all in one place, isn’t it? Yes, it is. You’re welcome.

If this is your first time on any of our sites then this is all new to you anyway and probably doesn’t make much difference. We hope you enjoy it all the same.

SINCH – New Album Guitar Tracking on Viddler

The following footage is of the studio sessions we spent tracking guitar for our new fan funded album. These sessions took place sporadically between the dates of October 2009 – February 2010.

We’re reorganizing things a bit for a final big push to try to hit our goal of $20,000. Although we’re only a little more than half way there I think we can make it happen. So far we’ve raised over $10,000 from the donations of just 233 people. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to think that there are another 200 Sinch fans out there that want to get involved and help make this happen.

If you’re here to donate, all is not lost. Things will be up and running again very soon. Sign up for our mailing list, follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook to stay in the loop and be one of the first people to be notified when the new donation site is up.

We would absolutely love to be getting this done faster but everyone involved in this project has other things going on where they actually make the money needed to survive. The donations we’ve received go a long way towards paying for the new album, but that’s all we’re using it for. When it comes to rent/bills/etc, everyone’s kinda on their own. So whether its fishing for Alaskan King Crab or doing pet dry cleaning for the rich and famous… we gotta do what we gotta do.

I’m hoping that playing rock music will someday be a viable career option. Until then it’s more like playing the lottery and winning just enough to buy some more lottery tickets.

Sunday Nov. 22 @ 11am
Monday Nov. 23 @ 7pm
Monday Nov. 30th @ 7pm
Wednesday Dec. 2nd @ 7pm
Saturday Dec. 19th @ 11am
Sunday Dec 20th @ 11am

The best way to get notified when the stream goes live is to follow us on Twitter. If you’re not into Twitter, you can still find our latest update here on the site (in the right sidebar) or over on our Facebook page.

You can also stay updated through email by signing up for our newsletter.

Here it is as a sweet slideshow:

See if the stream is live here »

Oh and we kinda just launched a new music store last night and released a (sort of) new album. Check it out.

We’ll have more info on that soon. It was kind of a “soft launch” with minimal fanfare, mainly because we just don’t have to time to create much fanfare these days. But it’s live and open for “bizness.” We now have all of our releases (except the self titled album) available directly from us.