27 Jun 2012

Preview #2. Two songs this time.

Best Girl is a new song.

The other clip, Noobs Rush In, is shorter (and is the shortest song on the album.) It's from an old piece that was written for my 2nd most favorite Red vs Blue episode of all time, S3:E39. (It also appeared in the historic S3:E49, and a couple of subsequent episodes.)

Even watching 39 again just now, I nearly spilled my coffee all over my keyboard.

The inspiration for Noobs Rush In came from playing quite a bit of Myth back in the day. The classic maneuver of inexperienced players when faced with an enemy in PvP was to "throw everything in the battle," which invariably resulted in massive casualties for that player, hence the term noob rushing. (I did this a lot.)

It was supposed to be on Ghosts That Linger, our 2nd album, but it wasn't until recently that I was able to locate the old multi-track project and make the little tune fit for release

04 Aug 2011

You can hear our song Vale Deah in Bungie's awesome ViDoc that was released today on bungie.net -- it's at around 39:21.

The whole ViDoc, if you're a Bungie fan, is delicious and interesting, made only better by the appearance of Burnie, Geoff, Claude, and other usual suspects.

It's incredibly flattering to have our song playing in the background while Jason Jones is on-screen. Jones is a classicist-poet-warrior-coder whose vision and creative force in Marathon, Myth, and Halo was responsible for many inspirations, and many hours of reflection, usually out of ammo, far away from a save terminal, and looking in real fear at the approaching red triangles on the motion sensor while figuring out the Latin displayed on the terminal in front of me.

Friday July 26, 1996, 9:56 AM

i'm putting tin foil up on the windows, sitting down in the dark to dream.

*/

If you'd like to listen to the song by itself, you can click on the Music tab or click here

You can buy Vale Deah on iTunes and at the Rooster Teeth Store

10 Nov 2009

We've updated the Music section with clips and lyrics for songs from our second album, Ghosts That Linger.

I spent a good deal of yesterday and most of today on a project I'd been putting off for a while. My favorite solid state amp is the Gallien Krueger 200MB. The MB stands for Micro Bass, and the first generation ones (you can tell them from the newer models by their black control panel) was an amp I first discovered in college as my upright bass teacher had one. It's a very mellow sounding amp, with an extremely musical compressor / sustainer and fixed EQ section. 

The newer models sound more brittle unless you turn every knob from the parametric EQ section fully counter-clockwise, and while I owned one for a brief period, I sold it the moment I was able to find an older model. The one I have here is my 2nd 200MB -- the first one is permanently kept in Saint Barths, which the band used for several shows we did there back in the day.

My only complaint about these amps is that the stock Pyle speaker they came with sounds a bit dull, and is voiced for bass. I replaced the speaker in my other 200MB with an old JBL K120 from the 60s, and was very happy with the results. I've had a JBL D123 from the same era which I've been intending to put in the GK, and I did just that. Even though D123's were really meant to be hi-fidelity speakers (not at all voiced for guitar like the D-120s or K120s,) I really love how they handle highs.  (Sorry, blurry photo.)

These GK's are a real pain to disassemble, requiring almost 40 screws that need to be removed and replaced in a specific order.  (Think of working on a late 80's compact Japanese car, where to get to the alternator, you have to take off the front right wheel and, like, the manifold.)  

But they are small, light (even lighter with the JBL), and sound great -- almost ideal for baritone guitar.  Here's the GK back together (with my copy of ODST for size reference), and my wounded Pro Reverb in the background.