Two friends and I tried to enter the Escalada do Rock in 2000, a music competition that would give the winners the opportunity to play at Rock in Rio III in 2001, and the first place winner would be able to record a CD.
I had the vocals and guitars of Érico Barbeitos and Alexandre Ferro, the same ones who had invited me to play with them at Colcheias Confusas. We recorded a very electronic version of the song “Até Quando Esperar” by Plebe Rude, and an old song of mine from 1996, “Meu Único Desejo”.
We didn’t have a name for the project, so we decided by chance. We randomly opened a magazine that was lying around the studio and landed on a page about a new Modess, and in large letters it said Modo de Usar, which we all adopted.
I was in charge of designing the logo, covers, booklet and recording the demo CD.
The competition required that one song be a cover of a big hit. Our cover was a song by the famous Brazilian band Plebe Rude, which was a huge success here. To take advantage of this success and also the band’s return after years of inactivity, we chose this song because it is also by a Brazilian band that everyone really likes, and also because Alexandre had worked with Plebe before.
We recorded in a studio in Tijuca that is not bad, but the sound engineer was horrible. After all, who told that guy he was a sound engineer? Well, he didn’t know how to operate the equipment, or even set the mixer to record in stereo. He is really used to recording rock bands. And to top it all off, the final mix was terrible, so we had to spend money and time in a studio.
The final result was cool despite the low quality of the production, but since what mattered was the idea of the project and not the production, we were satisfied.
We had just finished recording “Até Quando Esperar” right before the submission deadline, so we didn’t have time to record another song that way. So I suggested to Érico that he just put the vocals on one of my old songs that I had recorded a long time ago in my room on cassette tape, which were complete and only missing the vocals. I chose the song “Meu Único Desejo” because it was one of my favorites and better recorded than most.
It was recorded entirely on a PC386 DX40 with only 8mb of RAM and a Sound Blaster 16, and was recorded live in 1996 on a cassette tape that was passed around from hand to hand until this year of 2000, when I transferred it to a CD and mixed it live with Érico‘s vocals on my Pentium 133Mhz that I had in 2000.
And believe it or not, after all these quality losses, the final quality was 10 times better than the one that was recorded in the studio.
Unfortunately, on the same day we sent our Demo CD, which was still within the registration deadline, the newspaper published the news that the 72 bands chosen for the first phase of the competition were a hit, which caused some outrage among many bands who had spent a lot of money to send something well-produced and when it arrived, it didn’t even have a chance to be heard.
We have no idea what happened to this CD, it probably went straight to the trash. Who knows, maybe it will become a collector’s item in the future.
