Sessions in the studio

Well that totally kicked our asses! After 8 hours in the studio we've got our first 3 songs down and ready to be mixed and they sound unbelievable. After we set up our gear and did a warm up song, our engineer Bryan said that just our practice song sounded better than anything we'd ever recorded in our previous band. That totally made my day.

Everything went great, we got all our music laid down in a timely manner and at the most we only had to play Sugar and Spice maybe 5 times to get it right. The other two songs we got in 2-3 takes. After Gary's drum tracks and my bass tracks were down Tim recorded each individual guitar part and finally we got Heather and Tim in the booth to do vocals.

This was the best part. Heather went in a sang her first track and afterwards Tim says, "Tell her to sing it again." To which our engineer Bryan responds, "Why, thats fucking awsome. She doesn't need to do it again, it's perfect!" All in all Heather probably beat us all out by getting her vocal tracks done in about 30 minutes, and I mean done like they kick ass, not done as in "it's fine let's move on." At one point Larry was so excited to work with such an amazing voice he was running around the studio looking for a specifc program for the Pro-Tools computer program that was specially designed for female vocals.

Expect pictures from the studio and a handful of sound clips here or on the website by the end of the week.

Kaiju Big Battel

For those of you who haven't heard of the Kaiju Big Battel, let me introduce you. Web-peoples, meet Kaiju Big Battel http://www.kaiju.com/ The Kaiju is like a glorified wrestling organization homegrown in the insanity laden minds of some young Japanese men who tell the classic story of good versus evil inside the 10 foot high danger cage. Yes thats right, good and evil. All you need to know is that Kung-Fu Chicken Noodle is my new hero.

Today was a good day

Today was a pretty damn good day, but thats pretty much because my last shipment of comics showed up in the mail. Ah, completion is near. Only one more issues to find and it wil be complete. I'm sort of OC about this kind of thing, and kinda running up an insane bill on my credit card...but it's worth it.

This morning Tim calls me at like 10am and I left this message on my phone saying I should call as soon as possible and it's really important. So Immediately I'm thinking something bad is going on. Someone is dead, or seriously injured. So I call him back and he says, "I just quite the band, Gary called and cancelled practice because he wanted to hang out with Julie tonight." I'm speechless and like "what? what!?@" And then he starts laughing at me and he goes, "Nah, I'm just gonna be late tonight, I was fucking with you." I believed him though, he sounded angry and pissed and Tim never shows any kind of emotion. Tim's a bastard. Tonight is practice and the Thursday Night Ritual@ Buffalo Wild Wings, I love thursdays.

I need more pictures

Well I figured sooner or later I should put some pictures up. Unfortunately Gary has pretty much all of them and I have three. So I'll have to get on his ass to hook me up with some digital media to post up here. For the mean time these will have to do.

Your lifestyle determines your deathstyle

Everyone makes mistakes, it's a sad unavoidable truth. Maybe you lied under oath to congress about doing steriods in major league baseball. Maybe didn't get caught killing your wife, but you did get caught stealing satellite cable. Maybe you got caught giving Jesus Juice to kids at your Neverland Ranch. All fucked up mistakes, but tonight I made one major mistake too. I watched Some Kind of Monster: The Metallica Documentary.

It really was that bad; I wish I had those 2 hours of my life back. To some it up for you it went something like this:
"After a bad recording session, overrought with drugs and alcohol, Lars Ulrich (the band's resident asshole/drummer) has had enough.
Lars: I'm just not feeling the music man, come on James pull it together, you sound so....stock.
James: What exactly don't you like? You keep kissing my rosy red ass but won't tell me what to change.
Lars: It's just so stock, you know? Like, it sounds very...stock!
James: Is it the new head? Too hollow? The distortion have too much gain?
Lars: No, no, not that. It's just... just...sounds so stock to me...
At this point I wholeheartedly believe James Hetfield is about to tear off Lars's head and eat it.
Kirk Hammet: Come on guys, we can work through this! This is silly.
James: What the fuck is stock?
Lars: It just sounds so stock to me
Kirk: Settle down you guys, this is ridiculous
James & Lars: Shut the fuck up Kirk!"

Fast foreward through two hours of bitching about how hard it is to be a rockstar, to the band filming the video for St. Anger. Yea, I get it now. They'll play for free to a bunch of inmates at a prison, but they want to charge $90 for tickets for average joe schmoe to see them? Man these guys are fuckers!

Seriously...

I am slowly coming to realize that St. Louis actually has a rainy season! For serious, there has been a major storm every moth now, multiple times a month, since spring. I'm talking storms of biblical proportions that bend trees and sometimes drop them on my car. Hail producing storms that turn the power off in my house and make my dog freak out like it's the end of the world. Storms that somehow make a mounted deer head appear on my kitchen table. Oh, no that was mom's latest yard-sale find.

This morning I was dragging ass through the house and whilst half asleep I come into the kitchen and there is a mounted deer head, 10 points and all! sprouting up out of the table as if it grew out of the table like some freakish episode of the twighlight zone. After a phonecall to mom to make sure we haven't got the only dinner table that can sprout deer heads I find out it was her latest yard-sale find and it's going to the lake! Yippee for dead animal heads!@

Last night practice was sans-heather, but that was alright because it's fine tuning time in prep for the studio on the 28th. I also found out that our engineer pal Brian from the studio is now married! But last night Gary was like on cocaine or something because he was bouncing off the walls. I'v never seen him spaz like that so much, but it was good. Drummers need to be brimming over with energy. Just lay off the coke.

Fanboys, it had to be fanboys....

Today after work I hit up the local Fantasy Shops to fulfill my manga addiction of late. I headed out early in order to try and dodge the normal smattering of fanboys that I recall hanging out at comic book shops and game stores, chatting away the latest new rules of 3rd gen advanced dungeons and dragons lore and talking the perverbial fanboy smack. "My fighter mage Gorax knows level 11 lightening spell. +5" And they aren't even the worst. By far the worst are the Larpists (Live Action Role Players.) All I'll say is 30 year old men should not be squeezing 250 lbs of ass into some yellow spandex so they can be "Link, you know...from Zelda..."

Wrong wrong wrong I was. I got the the Fantasy shop in Maplewood like 25 minutes after they opened and low and behold....fanboys. It had to be fanboys. But not just any old pasty white fanboys. No, these fanboys have evolved. Something crossbred between a Geek and a Nerd. This new breed of Gnerd, pronounced (Guh-nerd) has evolved from the small minded fanboy gamers in 1d4 greed, but lost 1d6 intelligence. The Gnerd only commicates by grunts and mean stares that would ward off anyone trying to buy that schwag they want. Not quite as interested these days in the statistics of their characters being able to cast "lvl 21 cock of the flaming;" no they prefer to oogle as much gaming, anime, manga and mostly marvel schwag as possible. The schwag to them is like a status symbol. To them it's like gaining 3d6 points of notoriety, to us it's like "What the fuck?"

Totally taken aback by the newly evolved freak of the comic/gaming world I walked right by the backissues and kinda did that thing where you look around like your actually interested in the stuff in front of you (because your kind of embarassed that you walked to where you thought the backissues would be and find they've moved and in their place is a 4x4 foot square layout for "miniature" role playing games. Little silver and gold figures litter the mini field of battle ready to square off in little fights to the death being commanded by herois lord Gorax... Might as well have had that crazy old prospector from that claymation christmas movie in their too, singing his silver and gold song and yapping about how Bumbles bounce...

To make a long story even longer, I picked up about 3 issues I needed there and hit up Kirkwood Fantasy shop. Thank christ I was the only one there. I also hit the shit shop and Gary calls it on telegraph. All said and done cut the gap in my collection down by about 1d6.

Bit by the bug

Practice went well as always last thursday, but we had to reschedule todays practice because Heather had to do some over night assignment watching some of her "clientel." And after staying up all night guarding the door from sleepwalkers she had to do some birthday shennanigins for her husband. Kudos to you ;)! I'm sure you could re-create the excitement of your overnight event by say, watching an automatic door open and shut several hundred times. Maybe spruce up the next overnight adventure Tom Clancey style, with some night vision goggles and hang from the ceiling to scare the crap out of those kids...

What I do know is that we now have an offical 10 songs and an extra 11th solo of Tim and Heather. We are studio bound in just something like 3 weeks! So we've got to be all the more dilligant in our efforts to make this recording everything we hope it to be. This cd is like an army of one. Be all you can be.

Finally this month is like a ticking time bomb till my sister leaves to go off to college at Truman. So she's got me taking her to do all kinds of shit before she leaves. We went to the comics shop Saturday, something I used to do all the time, and now I'm hooked again. I've got the Comic Bug. I've already called around to the Fantasy Shops around here to round out my Blade of the Immortal collection which I've neglected for the past year and a half. I swear, once I finally got out, they pull me back in. So tommorow after work we're going to the Afton, Kirkwood and Maplewood Fantasy shops. I'm such a fanboy.