Music

Hours of Midnight
Myk and I were talking last night and we decided to remove this song from our list. The amount of time and effort it will take to get this one up and running will only delay our release. It will be shelved for another time when we don’t have a deadline and can dedicate more time to develop it. With that decided, we needed to introduce a new song to replace Hours.

Death By Inhalation
Myk sent me an mp3 of a piece that he’s been working on called Death By Inhalation with lyrics included. It sounds like it can be incorporated into our catalog with a few A93 modifications. I’ll start building the foundation of drums and bass over the next couple of days in preparation for Sunday’s recording session.

Listening
With most of the songs on our list done, or close to it, I’m spending a lot of time just listening to what we’ve done so far. I’m in the car doing deliveries at night, so this gives me plenty of time to go over it all again and again. In the listening process I’m looking for any recording imperfections, uneven mixes, or continuity issues. The CD master will be permanent, so perfection is a must.

Myk and I have both pin pointed a few areas that need adjustment or editing. Some we agree on and some not. Most of the imperfections that I’ve found are very minor and can be fixed easily. Here’s some examples:

Stranger in the Mirror – In the last chorus the vocals are a little “hot” (Overmodulate, or exceeds standard or prescribed audio levels in comparison with other track levels) and need to be adjusted.
City of Pyramids – The distorted guitars need to be brought forward in the mix.
Face of Fear – Guitar solo effect needs to be changed and the vocals in the outro need to be brought forward in the mix.
Reincarnate – The distorted guitars at the outro need to be faded. Other than that, this is the only mix I’m completely happy with.

There are more, but these are just some examples. Once all the these are fixed the 3 of us will sit down together and listen through the whole list for a final sweep. To get an outside opinion I’ll pass the songs off to someone with a trained ear for a listen to pick out anything we might have missed (cough, Tattooeddad, cough). Again, perfection is the goal.

Online Stuff
Last night I worked on the website a bit, preparing the Beneath the Cypress Tree page for the CD release. I also cleaned up the photo page a little for when I have pictures of the whole band. That way it wont be just my face splattered everywhere (really, there are others in the band). On our MySpace page I took down my photo and replaced it with the CD cover.

Live Prep
The great thing about being a vocalist is that I carry my instrument around wherever I go. While in the car doing deliveries, I’ve been rehearsing all of my parts, getting my timing and words down. I’ve also been starting to put together my stage rig. I hoping that my 5 year old ancient PowerBook G4 will be sufficient enough to run Logic with 4 channels and not crash in the middle of a song. It’s been having some serious issues in the last year.

Photo Shoot
Our photo shoot with ZenBones is scheduled for this Sunday starting at 10am, hopefully. Things are looking grim, weather wise. Here’s the forecast for Sunday: December 21st.

If it’s just minor snow showers, then we should be ok, but anything more dramatic, like a blizzard or ice rain, then we’re in trouble. ZenBones is coming from New Hampshire that morning, so i would hate to have him drive back and forth through that crap. The worst possible scenario is that we postpone until the 28th (which is supposed to snow more). We’ll keep an eye on the weather and make a decision on Saturday.

Once the photo shoot is finished and I’ve posted some on the website then it will prove that Myk and Carlos are actual people and not just figments of my imagination or alternate personalities. Ha ha ha!

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