What is a Habitape?

Also what is Chase Bliss Records?

posted by Joel Korte

Hello!

Lots of questions today.

• How are you doing?

• Did you know Chase Bliss was a record label before it was a pedal company?

• Did you know it still is?

I wanted to talk a bit about the quieter half of Chase Bliss, in light of the Habitapes release.

Chase Bliss Records (est. 2009)

Chase Bliss Records predates my first pedal, the Warped Vinyl, by about four years. And it started with my brother, of course.

While my parents were going through Chase’s things they found a list of his favorite musicians, and I was on it. Or that’s what we thought it was at the time. I saw the list later and I think he was actually just burning a CD for a friend. But heck, if my brother was putting my songs on mixes for other people it said something to me and just made me really sit down and try to figure out what my 'bliss' was, and making music was a big part of it.

I felt inspired. It was the first time I had an idea of something I could do, with my skill set, that would have made him proud.

So in 2009 I released some of my music for the first time. A full-length album called Melrose that I recorded in my grandma's now-vacant home and an EP called Strange Red Afternoon that was five of my favorite songs I had recorded in various places over the years.

There’s no way Chase Bliss the pedal company would exist today without taking this first step. I was trying to live my life in a new way.

So it’s important to me to keep this side of things going. Chase Bliss Records has released a dozen or so projects from various artists since that time and you can still find all of them in the merch section of our website. But this Habitapes release feels like the start of something new, a bit of a refresh. Especially the idea that you all can be a part of it.

Sooo, what is it?

Habitapes

Building a pedal like Habit is a bit like stacking blocks. You start with the essentials — recording, feedback — and add the fun bits slowly over time. So it was only after about a year of development that we were able to test the COLLECT function for the first time. 

And we realized you could record songs in it. 

Which is about as disorienting as you would think, recording a song inside a pedal. In theory and in practice. You have to surrender a certain amount of control, you can’t undo. It forces you to adapt. So Habitapes was our way of exploring that, and also proving it was possible. 

We reached out to a number of friends and people that inspire us to see if they were up for it. It’s a pretty damn humbling collection of people, and importantly, it worked! All of the songs you’ll find on the Habitapes were made inside of the pedal, and then simply recorded into a DAW from there as a single mono track.

Here’s what the guidelines looked like:

Side A features songs from artists and friends, and Side B is made of songs we recorded ourselves. 

So that’s Volume 1. 

For me the most exciting part of all this is that it’s your turn now. We want to release a second volume made entirely of your music. Habitapes isn’t a money-making thing for us — we aren’t putting the cassettes up for sale — it’s more like a fun tutorial. We’re giving away cassettes to the first 100 people who submit a song for Volume 2, and that’s it! There’s no prize for being selected for Volume 2, I just loved the idea of being able to release some of your music on Chase Bliss Records. 

We don’t have a release plan for Volume 2 yet, but you better believe we’ll make enough cassettes for everyone selected. You better believe that. 

So if you want to give it a shot, check out the guidelines here:
Habitapes Volume 2 Submission Guidelines.

Also, here’s a companion video on how to make songs in Habit. This will be really helpful as you get started:

Hope you enjoy the collection and can’t wait to see what you come up with.

You can stay up to date on all things Chase Bliss Records on our Bandcamp page.