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| So, let’s clarify this for all your readers... You did everything? the keyboards, the drums, the guitars, etc? Speaking of drums which can really make or break a recording - I really didn’t get the impression they were programmed - they sound like a drummer Yes, everything. The last 2 tracks are drum machine, and the intro to Where Do We Begin is drum machine, too. But all the rest are real drums. I would program a metronome or a drum machine sequence and play along, mostly, while recording the live drums, to keep it in time. For a ‘guitar as a second-instrument’ guy, there’s some serious shredding in ‘Breaking the Law…’ This solo was actually just a sound check for mic placement, just improvised, and my hands were ice cold, but when I played it back, I had to keep that lead! I added the harmony at the end of the solo a few days later. I really liked ‘Classicl’ - It’s quite ambitious to put a nylon-stringed song on a CD! Thanks a lot! Dude, it took me 2 years to get that song from inside my head to on a recording. I still can’t play it clean, the intro that is. You can hear a lot of bum notes in the intro. Your voice seems to adapt to what your singing - some times it reminds me of Ace Frehley (the GOOD Frehley) and at times it reminded me of David Byrne, and sometimes, even Frank Zappa. People always have been telling me I sing like Frehley, which I don’t mind because his singing sounds so real and not overdone. I guess it’s because we have the same NY accent! I learned to sing as different characters from people like Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and of course, from Chris Newman. He’s a master of character voices. As a recording guitarist myself, I have to ask. How did you do the guitars?? Is it all a mic’d amp? Or did you do anything direct? It’s the Carvin Vai Legacy, miced up with a large diaphragm condenser mic (Oktava). I used various ibanez and boss stompboxes on some of the tracks, like a Boss Super Chorus on Where Do We Begin, and a Boss Super Phaser & an Ibanez Flanger on Longshot (one on each rythm track). Also alot of Bad Horsie Wah Wah, mostly just held my foot all the way down on that to get that screaming UliJon Roth lead sound. I’m not sure I remember correctly, but I think the lead solo in Breaking the Law Is So Much Fun might have been an experiment with the direct out of the Legacy Head. I used a few Tube Screamers (the TS9 and the new Deluxe) on a bunch of things too. Tell me about ‘Recreating the Magic’ - the live part.... how was that put together?? Some SERIOUS Frehley chops in that!! Is that an ‘older’ piece? Here’s the story with that: Last year or 2 years ago, just messing around I put up a loop of drums and bass on my keyboard sequencer and just played along with it. Just an improv jam, and I recorded it straight to DAT with 2 mics just getting the whole room sound. I found the DAT sometime while I was in the middle of recording the album and I loved what I did, and I tried to re-do the song with a more proper recording, track by track. But it just didn’t have the same feel as the live improv jam. So I wrote the words and called it Recreating The Magic, and it’s about how it’s usually impossible to recreate the magic! In other words, the song is about that song. So I figured out I could use the best of both worlds. Start the song with the new version, then I made a sound like someone grabbing the reels and stopping the recording, come back in with the old version. The old version’s recording wasn’t as nice and hi-fi as the new version, so I tried to make up for that by giving it a bootleg feel. The audience cheering is from the end of Rush’s All The World’s A Stage album. The only sample on the record. Pretty neat, huh? It’s a very diverse outing...you should be very proud. It’s extremely diverse, and not in the sense that it’s got an obligatory ‘power-ballad’ (which it doesn’t). It actually has many styles within. Well, Metal is a broad category now. Like Rock and Jazz, you have a bunch of sub-genres. There’s grunge, hair metal, thrash, hardcore, etc. So you can still keep it diverse and be Metal all the way! But I also like to delve into Goth, Industrial, and Jazz. The Classical Guitar is something I rarely pick up, but in the rare occasion that I do play it, I usually come up with a new song and wind up using it. So that adds to the diversity, too. plus the fact that my keyboard (Roland XP50) has about a billion different sounds in it! So, how did you record this? In a studio, on a PC, on a Digital workstation, or a mix of all? The basic tracks were done on a Yamaha MD8, which is an 8-track machine that stores on mini disc. It’s an analog board with digital storage. When that filled up, I bounced it all to the PC and used Sonar Producer Edition to mix. I feel like I actually lost alot of the depth to the sound from that MD to PC transfer, because I did it track by track through the PC’s sound card. It’s a Soundblaster Live! Platinum, and I guess the Analog-Digital converters are crappy. There was one song that I did a little differently. Recreating The Magic, just the first half, was recorded on less than 8 tracks, so I got to mix that one directly to DAT, the go from DAT, DIGITALLY, into the PC. So there was no loss in that transfer. The second half of that song was all recorded live onto DAT, so there was no loss there, either. {I have one of those Bose WaveCD radios next to my bed. I had your CD wake me up this morning. That second song - with those layered guitars in the beginning - it's like a southern rock riff - that's really cool - I'm going to listen to that closer - I really like the effects on that intro...} I'm flattered that you like it so much you would want to hear it first thing in the morning! Southern Rock Feel...you GOT it! Not many people "get it", you know? There are a total of eight tracks of guitar throughout the whole song, total. The two lead guitars in the intro become the rythm guitars during that long solo section and return to the ending lead (repeats the intro). Then there are three "solos", each is two guitars, in either unison or harmony, at a time. That was the most challenging part of the CD to do, aside from the intro to Classicl. {How did you do that abrupt tape stop in that 'magic' song?? Sounds like reels stopping...} Glad you "got it" there, too. That was exactly the effect I was shooting for. Sonar has a "scrub" tool, where it simulates the way they used to move the reels by hand to make edits. I used the "what you hear" as the input for record and did the Scrub Tool, just drag the mouse over the waveform. {There's a song that fades out and fades back in - but it's a LONG gap - what's the reason for that?} I thought it was a little long. I would have faded it out faster, but there were some cool guitar riffs during the fade, and some neat drum fills, too. I would have missed them if I axed them out by fading too quickly. It fades back in because i did this trick with the 8-String Bass at the very very end, but again, I had to keep it because I was so happy with that particular spot that I didn't want to lose it with the fade. I know it can be annoying to listen to a 2-minute fade out, so I understand what you mean, there. There was no other choice but to fade out faster and lose all those goodies. My apologies to the listeners. That song is called Where Do We Begin? but i guess i should have called it Where Do We End This Thing! What has been the reaction so far? I wish I knew. I guess people are just plain busy, and they get this CD in the mail and it sits on their coffee table still in the plastic. Time goes by and it becomes a coaster. I thought I’d surprise a bunch of people and send it out without telling them I was sending them something, and figured they’d get excited there’s a surprise new album, my first in 5 years, in their mailbox, all nicely pressed with a pro packaging and all that stuff. But out of like 30 people I sent it to, only a small handfull even contacted me to let me know they even got it. I was really surprised. Next time, I’m not pressing up 100 at a time. I’ll make TEN, and if people want it, they’ll have to contact me. I might even charge $15 or $17.99 like the record stores next time instead of giving it away for free. Maybe people take things for granted when they’re just given stuff for free. But if you pay good money for something, you subconsciously have to justify it in your own mind that it was worth paying for, and you make yourself listen to it and convince yourself you like it. I don’t know. Or maybe people just didn’t understand it, and it was too wierd for them, and they didn’t know what to think of it, or how to react to it. Maybe it just plain sucks, and that’s that! It could be any reason. ADDED 5/23/2005 Yeah, I was giving it a little more thought today. It's not that people suck, so much. I think that they just didn't get it. And I'm kind of glad they didn't get it, in a way. I'll explain what I mean. See, I wrote the stuff on that disc to be a little deeper than your average hit radio bullshit music. And I knew that putting Mockery as the first song was going to make a lot of people scratch their heads. Maybe even turn it off. But those people that heard it and said, "hmm, what is THIS? this is something new/interesting/different/original", those are the ones that I would want as a fan/listener. I don't want to write a song about banannas just so I can have a million monkeys singing along to my song! That's not what I'm about. I never cared if I sold a million copies. It's easy to write a hit, but it's not the kind of music that I enjoy playing! Or listening to, really. So the average joe schmoe is NOT gonna "get it", and they're gonna wonder what the heck I was thinking when I wrote this or that. All I wanted to do was make music that is original and still somewhat tasteful. Art? Yeah, but not as far out there as Toasted Fishermen or Unround was. More listenable, but still have a great deal of substance behind it. And if you listened to it 100 times, on the 100th listen you might hear something there that you missed the first 99 times, like on a Floyd album, like Animals or something. And deep within the lyrics, for the most part, I buried alot of hidden meaning things that I bet alot of people would not "get". But it's really meant for those few that listen to music beyond the surface. You know my influences - Zeppelin, Rush, Floyd - some of the deepest bands that ever existed. That's where I'm coming from. If people want to just tap their feet and dance and sing along to a song, that's fine, but they're going to have to buy something else. This is music for real music lovers only. And now, I'm glad that so few people got it. That, to me, means that I must have came up with something a little more special. To those of you that "get it", thanks alot. This Bud's for you! ~Rob Added 5/28/2005 Alright, I guess this interview has provoked some of my friends and fans out there to get off their asses and let me know what they thought of the CD. It seems that most people who have gotten back to me agree that the more they listen to it, the more it grows on them. I'm very happy with this type of reaction, because that was my intention when I made the album. Like I said above, I tried to make these tracks as deep as possible, so that it would not be stale after a few spins. I guess that was successful! At first listen, you might say, "Huh? Wha?", but play it again and again and you'll be rockin' out of your chair! I hope you all enjoy it for thousands of more plays. And if you got through the web site this far and haven't heard it yet, go to the music page and start clicking around. There's some bonus tracks and samples offa the CD there, plus a new link to my page at Download Dot Com, which is going to be adding more tracks directly from the CD over the next few weeks. So far, as of today, there's one track up there. Classicl has gotten 21 downloads since Thursday, today is Saturday, without any advertising or any promotion. The site put me in the top slot of the Album Rock category because I'm a "new artist' to their site, so that helped. I uploaded three more tracks since then, but it could take up to 2 weeks for them to get approved and posted. The quality is excellent, 198Kbps encoded MP3's made from a 24 bit master. As good as I could make it in my 'modest home studio'. I still want to hear more feedback from you all out there, for better or for worse, so let me have it! Go to the contact page and give it to me. If you still don't have a copy, send me a lousy five bucks and you'll have it within a few days. Thanks for reading all my drivellings here! ~Rob |
| Rob has recently been in touch with musician/writer Christopher Bell-Boudreaux from Hollywood All Access magazine. They met years ago, briefly, when Rob was in Toasted Fishermen and Christopher was lead guitarist for Prime Evil Council during Queens, N.Y's Music Building scene. They often discuss the art of shred-guitar and honing chops via email and phone conversations. The following interview came about after Rob asked Christopher for some feedback on his new CD, Madness Of Obsession. The questions came back from Christopher through email, but we thought it would make a good read for our site visitors. |