Music Review and Exclusive Interview with heavydms from the EDM/Electronica duo, dasmeter
Formed in October 2014, Dasmeter is an EDM/Electronica duo of real-life brothers who are passionate about capturing life’s most powerful emotions in their originally developed and produced tracks, this past month officially released their highly anticipated debut album, Evolution, as a follow-up to their two first hit singles of 2015: Mercury and Commodore.
This is a very well produced Album that shows dasmeter are at the top of their game. They understand all the elements needed to make EDM go down a storm with a crowd and this album ‘Evolution’ certainly does just that! It’s a great representation of their musical styles which incorporate EDM, electro house and progressive house and showcases dasmeters talent for writing and producing excellent trance and house tracks that are perfect for the dance floor.
Although they are all instrumentals, dasmeter creates variety through tempo, texture and style from track to track making it good just for listening as well as ideal club tracks. Defining your own sound in the world of instrumental electronica is no mean feat, but dasmeter achieves this through hybridizing several genres, sometimes within the same track.
‘The Wall’ is an inspiring track that blends several musical styles in an inventive way. Ultimately, it is an upbeat dance song that could become popular on the clubs, but it’s also just enjoyable to listen to due to its infectious beat
Overall, this is an absolute artistic jewel of an album from start to finish. The quality is of the highest caliber and you can tell the whole album has been a labor of love. In an era where Electronic music is quickly becoming a premier genre, here is a perfect example of the artistic heights it can achieve. I’d expect her rise to major success to continue with this release.
By Heather M.
Music and Fashion Blogger
Exclusive Interview:
Exposed Vocals: So tell us your story. Where did you grow up? What made you decide to become an artist?
heavydms: I grew up in a little city called Pleasant View in Northern Utah, back when it was nothing but peach orchards. My Dad was a native to the area, and traveled the world while he was in the AirForce, which is how he met my Mother in England.
Music is in my DNA. The passion for music that I have comes from my parents and my two oldest sisters really. My parents and my oldest sister both had a ton of vinyl records that I would go through and spend hours listening to. My other sister was a total metal head and introduced me to the edgier side of music. I was probably the only kid my age that listened to bands like Foreigner, Neil Diamond, Corey Hart, Fleetwood Mac, Olivia Newton-John, John Williams, Julio Iglesias, Poison, Motley Crue, GnR, Judas Priest, Styx, White Lion, Ratt and a ton of other 70s and 80s artists spanning all kinds of genres.
With this massive library of music at my disposal, any opportunity I could get to earn money would usually go to buying blank cassette tapes so that I could make my own mix-tapes.
Exposed Vocals: How did you come up with that name? What was your inspiration behind it?
heavydms:
I’d been googling for hours trying to find something that was brand-able, and for whatever reason I ended up on page describing a ‘dasimeter’, which is an instrument used for testing the density of gases. It didn’t exactly jump out at me, so I took the ‘i’ out and we ended up with dasmeter . . and it just kind of stuck. It just happens to turn out that there is a straight German translation that means ‘The meter’.
Exposed Vocals: What do you think about online music sharing? Do you ever give your music away for free? Why?
heavydms:
I’m on the fence with online music sharing. In a lot of respects, when it’s early days for a band, it makes a lot of sense to get your music to the masses by whatever means possible – wether you’re getting paid for it or not. It’s hard though because by the same token, every dollar you can get in the door is a dollar you can put back into the marketing engine of the band to get two dollars back.
dasmeter is extremely fortunate in that we have a resource pool to keep the wheels turning while music is being made and distributed to the masses. We give our music away for free on our website and through sites like ReverbNation and Soundcloud because those are great distribution channels to get our music out and get people familiar with who we are. If people want to buy our album, they can pretty much go to any major music distribution or streaming service in the world and buy our stuff too.
Exposed Vocals: Since everyone was a start-up once, can you give any smaller or local bands or artists looking to get gigs and airplay some tips?
heavydms:
If you’re really serious about music, and you have the chops for it, don’t ever give up. You never know when an opportunity will come out of no where!
Obviously you’ve got to have good music, but especially when you’re just starting out, you’ve got to be really thrifty with your money. Begging bloggers, DJs, and radio talent to play your music usually never works. Check out sites like fiverr.com where you can do promotions on a shoe string budget. Make sure you buy from sellers that have a really high amount of feedback and a high percentage of positive feedback at that.
You can use folks like CDBaby to register you with a PRO affiliate to collect royalties, and you can use services like landr to do mastering on the cheap as well (just make sure you have an excellent mix).
Last but not least, make sure that you DO NOT buy fans online or fake listeners. No matter what they claim about using “real” people and not bots, this will backfire 99% of the time. Sites like FaceBook and others actually weed through those accounts and can take large amounts of your follows away in one big swoop. Other sites will BAN you which could potentially cost you a massive distribution / PR channel you can’t afford to lose. It’s better to have 10 real listeners than it is to have 1000 fake ones.
Exposed Vocals: Do you ever make mistakes during performances? How do you handle that?
heavydms:
We haven’t done any live performances – yet -, but mistakes can happen at every level of production. Our advice to anyone out there trying to make music and connect with the world is to bounce your tracks off of other trusted people in the industry and to use crowd reviews. Anything from a note out of place, to the levels of a track during mixing, or white noise that was missed during the mastering process, and more can happen. Be religious about listening to your music outside of the booth (we use the “car test” a lot). Feedback can help you pinpoint parts of your tracks that may need a bit more work or have something out of place.
Exposed Vocals: Do you tour? Anything interesting happen on tour that you think our readers would enjoy hearing about?
heavydms:
We haven’t toured just yet, but it’s on the horizon! There is a lot of work that goes into touring (logistics, merch, etc. etc.) that can’t happen overnight if you want to be successful.
Exposed Vocals: Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?
heavydms:
Life . . for better or worse, has provided the bulk of our material to date. Some of the songs written on our latest album, Evolution, actually had lyrics, but we felt like keeping them in for a few tracks just didn’t jive with the rest of the album.
We’re big fans of a site called hooktheory.com too. It basically allows us to do in a couple days mapping out a melody and harmony, what would take typically take us a week with a traditional DAW (we use Logic Pro).
Once we’ve got a nice chord progression laid out for the harmony, then we’ll usually map out some partial lyrics to guide the melody.
Exposed Vocals: Do you have a band website? What online platforms do you use to share your music?
heavydms:
We do, and you can visit it at http://dasmeter.com. We use ReverbNation right now as our primary platform, just because they offer so many things that take up so much time (and money) if you we were to just go build them out ourselves (and we know, because we’ve tried).
Social media is critically important and a lynchpin to any indie artist trying to make it. We use ReverbNation, SoundCloud, Twitter, and Facebook as our primary vehicles to get our music to the masses.
Exposed Vocals: What are some really embarrassing songs that we might find on your mp3 player?
heavydms:
Hmm . . I don’t know if I’d use the word embarrassing so much (because I love these songs), but I have a few tracks that don’t get super heavy play like:
Nelly the Elephant by the Toy Dolls
Tribute by Tenacious D
Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It by Will Smith (my boy!)
Frog’s Legs & Dragon Teeth by Bellowhead
Exposed Vocals: If you were given half a million dollars and a year off, what would you do? How would you spend it?
heavydms:
Wow . . I think after a quick trip to Disney World and some equipment upgrades, I’d be in the studio!
Exposed Vocals: Any planned studio upgrades? What are you working with now?
heavydms:
I’m always on the lookout for plugins that make my life easier, especially the creating beats and side-chain compression.
We use Logic Pro on a few MacBook Pros exclusively as our DAW of choice. Backing that up is the Native Instruments KOMPLETE 10 plugin suite, and literally all of the plugins from the folks at OUTPUT.
Exposed Vocals: How do you find ways to promote your music? What works best for you?
heavydms:
Self promoting takes a lot of grit and determination, and you have to be tireless at doing it. There are a lot of places that can help with those efforts (like fiverr.com for instance). Social media the true gift that keeps on giving, and you simply wont make it without working those outlets.
Exposed Vocals: If you could perform anywhere and with any artists (Dead or Alive) where and who would it be with? Why?
heavydms:
Wow . . this is a loaded question. There are so many great artists out there it’d be really hard to say. Right now, I’m really enjoying folks like Halsey, Sia, JT, Jessie J, Alan Walker, Lana Del Rey, Selena Gomez, Kygo, Ellie Goulding, Calvin Harris, Tiesto, Zedd, Skrillex, or Nicky Romero.
These folks are hot, and not only with the hits; they are all just really creative and amazing artists.
Exposed Vocals: So, what’s next? Any new upcoming projects that you want to talk about?
heavydms:
We’re already hard at work on a follow up album! 🙂
Exposed Vocals: If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?
heavydms:
If making music wasn’t in the cards for whatever reason, then likely it’d be something related to music engineering. We mix our own tracks, which is not a very common thing, and it requires a lot of practice.
Exposed Vocals: Do you remember buying your first album? Who was it? What was going through your head?
heavydms:
If I’m being honest . . I’m pretty sure it was Poison by Bel Bin Devoe. I’d just never heard a beat like these guys were belting out!
Exposed Vocals: How do you juggle the rest of your responsibilities while trying to stay ahead in your music life?
heavydms:
Like anything else worth having, it’s a lot of work, and juggling is a great way to describe it. Get a great calendar app, and beat the heck out of it!
Exposed Vocals: What should fans look forward to in 2017?
heavydms:
With the release of our new album, Evolution, we’re busy working on the PR campaign to drive that forward. We’ve been doing a TON of interviews all over the place, so fans should definitely look forward to getting to know us, and our music, a whole lot better!
You never know . . we may round out the year with another album! Be on the lookout!
