I'm not going to lie to you; I'm very happy to be seeing 2011 in my rear view mirror.  There were some good things about the year, but overall, I feel like it was an exercise in slamming my head a doorframe repeatedly, followed up by a luxurious bath.  Moments of good stuff, but a lot of painful slogging was required to get to them.

Keeping this in ( Read more... )

THINGS TO DO TOMORROW:

1)  Play Doom 3 or Quake 4, whichever one floats my boat at the time.

2)  Get down and dirty with the Ibanez RG 550 and play some gut-busting old tunes I haven't dredged up in a coon's age.

3)  Laundry.

4)  Watch Stargate: SG-1 or Friday Night Lights, whichever one tickles my fancy.

You'll notice nowhere on that list is write or ( Read more... )

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Another untitled rhythm track that I came up with about three months ago. My wife ordered me a wonderful USB cable that will plug directly into the Zoom 9002 and also features drum tracking and mixing software as well, so this should do away with a lot of the fingernail-chewing and playing with audio settings that usually makes something plugged ( Read more... )

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Some people have been after me for a while now to post some original music, so here's one. Hopefully after the new year I will be able to use my new equipment to have a fully mixed MP3 with drums and bass, but for now, here's the bare-bones rhythm riffs. My wife did the taping and the composition is original and copyrighted so please, play if you ( Read more... )

I may not have been tremendously creative with the laptop lately, but I have seen a definite upswell in the amount of time I have spent thinking about music.  I'm not going to claim an extraordinary amount of knowledge about scales, modes and lines, but I have a decent basic understanding of the underlying nuts and bolts of music theory... enough ( Read more... )

All right, so here is another photo of myself and the new RG550.  I plan on painting the body bright green (while leaving the silver and black headstock alone), and then putting green covers on the pickups, green knobs and a green toggle switch cover to boot.  The bridge pickup (the one next to the whammy bar) will be removed and replaced with a ( Read more... )

As some of you may know, I'm a slavish disciple to Ibanez guitars, particularly the RG550 model from the late 1980's.  It was designed by legendary shredder Steve Vai to serve as an affordable model to his personal signature model, the Jem, and while the eletronics might not have been the same, there was nothing skimped in design and construction ( Read more... )

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...that I very nearly was in a band?

I guess if we're being completely honest I should mention that I was in a three-man outfit in high school named Ominivore (don't ask) with myself on guitar, Keith on drums and Anthony on... guitar.  Except I turned the tone knob all the way down on my guitar so it came out very low-sounding and rumbly, so I was ( Read more... )

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