Music Blog

My chance to rant and rave about music stuff!

Well, I guess you can consider my music blog "my thoughts of the day". Every now and then I just want to post some of my daily thoughts about music and be able to share my views with the world and a music blog seems to be the right tool to use! I have an extremely hi traffic website and feel I owe it to my fans, students, fellow musicians, friends, and the whole music community in general, to publish good content and also share all my music findings with you all.

Sign of the Gypsy Queen - April Wine

  • 07/03-2009 - We started recording the song about 2 weeks ago and just finished up mastering the vocal tracks. We will be recording the guitar solo section next. This has been one of Jeff's "all time favorite songs" and it will be on the "Covers Tribute 2009 CD". Jeff came up with a new recording technique while recording Sign of the Gypsy Queen. He said he wanted to only use 1 guitar track for the guitar solo and ended up using a guitar pedal to split his guitar signal to 2 amps. The song has a great stereo spread on the guitar solo and really sounds like it was doubled. Stay tuned for the release of Sign of the Gypsy Queen!

Hiway Star from Deep Purple

  • 07/08/2009 - I put my version of Hiway Star on the audio page today. Yup, I made a couple little mistakes but I think it sounded good enough to put on for now. My good Ole G&L ASAT Classic Telecaster was used for all the guitar tracks on this one. It gave it that touch of vintage tone that I thought was required for this song. Anyway, one of these days I will fix the mistakes, but if someone is interested in purchasing this backing track from me so they can sing to it, I would fix it faster haha. Anyway, you can hear it on the audio page. Ciao for now.

Started working on a kick ass original song on Independance Day with my bro and Lost Souls

  • 07/04/2009 - Strange things can happen when you crank up a mesa boogie trem o verb with a nice Gibson! Yup, on the 4th of July we sat around trading some rhythms and licks and ended up taking one of my bro's riffs and working it into a real nice metal rocken ass jam. My nephew Cassidy just came home from Hawaii today and his first impression was WOW, that sounds like Ozzy and Zakk. That is exactly what we are going for but for sure, it is Lost Souls! Greg started coming up with vocal melodies on the fly and I think this song is one we can see thru to the end and actually complete it and have it on our "music 2009" CD. I feel like the monkey is off my back too because I have been working on some similiar riffs in Drop D tuning, but this one makes me feel like I can move on to writing some new things and not get caught up in having to put out another Drop D! OK, well, haha I will keep writing in lower tunings but just letting you all know it is a "rocker tune" and I think everyone will like it. Its Dark and heavy, but not to heavy if ya know what I mean :).

Started recording Pull me Under from Dream Theater for my Covers Tribute CD

  • Update: For some reason, not quite sure, Firefox does not seem to stream Pull me Under correctly with my flash player, so try using Internet Explorer.
  • 04/20/2009 - I use to play this song and even recorded it a couple years ago with some of my best friends but I am just getting around to finishing up on it! This particular this song always makes me "think music" and "keys" and "note choice"... Plus it has some good chops in it and to try to keep up with Petrucci and the boys can be a real challenge at times :). Anyway, its not perfect and I did not spend a lot of time on the "guitar sounds", but here is the latest update for it. Listen from the audio link.

Just finished up recording guitar tracks to Steve Vai - Tender Surrender

  • 04/19/2009 - I thought this was a very good song to use for a guitar study to keep me playing "out of the box". It is probably one of the first songs I have worked on in a long time where I was forced to learn nice jazz runs, jazzy chordal patterns, blues, whammy bar tricks, metal runs and even neo classicl licks. I wish I could shake Steve Vai's hand and thank him for the inspiration. BTW, I took a very practical approach to recording the guitar tracks, it only took me 38 tracks and over 100 takes! You can hear the premix on my audio links page. It is automated and one of these days I will mix it down.

Tubes

Power Amps

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