FatherAlabaster

It's to drive himself ever deeper into the pit of despair. Things are weird in the Southern Hemisphere, that's for sure.

That's awesome. Fuck "lifestyle", that's for kids with time on their hands. I'm hoping to get a live band together in the near future - all the pieces are hypothetically in place - and having regular practice and getting some decent shows lined up will be enough "lifestyle" for me. Man I hope my live band works out. It's been too long.

Unquestionable Presence and Here In After are on my list too, although I was specifically referring to bands that sounded like Gutted. I never liked Morbid Angel. I really tried. Maybe it's time to dig out "Altars" again and see what I think... Incantation is another one I just couldn't dig, I had three of their albums growing up but just kind of meh. Those others, I will have to look up! Thanks.

Metal Forum is the best way to avoid human contact.

You used a smiley!

Thanks again for your recommendations, I'll look up that Canadian stuff. The last Immolation album I really dug was Closer To A World Below (with Here In After being my favorite) but I haven't heard the most recent albums they've done. Must give them a spin. I have to say they were fucking amazing live, blew Rotting Christ away when they were on tour together. An odd bill...

Cenotaph - Voluptuously Minced (album via youtube) This is fucking old-school cool.

As you know, I love Pantera and Darrell was/is one of my favorite riffers... but there's no denying the huge bump in cultural status that his recordings got after his death. Having a gazillion crappy signature model guitars/pickups//pedals/amps with his name on them didn't hurt either.

That's where I found them after BFM's recommendation. I'm really excited to hear their older album, as I usually love stuff from that era.

Does this have to do with being locked in a basement for years?

Cheers to that! I'm spending most of my time at home watching my son as well, and working on my next album in my "free" time. Life could be worse.

Eating - just finished a lovely home-cooked meal Drinking - the last of our bottle of Southern Tier's "Pumking" pumpkin ale, thumbs up! Listening - Portishead - self-titled Doing - watching the cats play while my son roams around the apartment covered in food Thinking - he needs a bath; we need less cats; if I shoot myself in the ear it might remove this blockage

They really destroyed the vinyl? None of my business, but wow... wrong move in my book. I can understand being upset and even blaming the music, but to destroy whatever's left of what someone cared about after they're gone, to me that's like a kind of murder. I know if I died in whatever way, I'd want for my art and music to live on. Certainly not to be subject to active destruction by my family.

Welcome, good luck with your distro! I've never known how that side of things really works. I'm bad at promotion.

Good call on that, I'm listening to "Reincarnations In Gorextasy" right now and I can hear the similarity to Suffocation. It's more "brutal" than "tech" for those who give a shit. I'm enjoying this. Thanks.

Ok, my left ear has been stopped up for days. Even more stopped up than it would be if I had an earplug in. It's making vocals difficult and accurate mixing impossible. Fucking shit. I guess I like it quiet a lot of the time, so I'm getting half of what I wanted...

I've been programming drums on my albums for eleven years now, so I better say yes... Drum programming is an amazing songwriting tool that can help take a lot of the guesswork and miscommunication out of collaborative projects, and even guys like Chuck Schuldiner, who always had top-notch drummers working with him, would program drums for his demo tracks. On recordings it's a bit trickier. If you're going for an artificial aesthetic (like Godflesh or Gigantic Brain or Agoraphobic Nosebleed), great. If you're trying to fool people into believing you have a real drummer, or just trying to get a good sound that isn't overtly fake, then you've got a lot more work to do to humanize your drum tracks. EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer have made this a bit easier than it used to be, but I still hear tons of programmed drum tracks where every hihat hit is the same, every cymbal crash, etc. - and even when people pay attention to their velocities and timing issues, I personally dislike the slick, overly clear, top-end heavy drum sound. The cymbals usually give up the game. I've been using Fruity Loops since I started recording "seriously" in college, and it's clunky and cumbersome, but it lets me do what I want. I have something like 67 separate sample hits comprising a five-piece kit and six different cymbals, most of which I've taken myself from recordings I've personally done for my own bands, or from other bands whose drummers have given me permission to sample their kits. Getting a coherent sound is a pain in the balls, and then the process of programming can finally begin, and that takes hours per song because I do it hit by hit. At the end, I export each instrument separately and treat the tracks as if they were live drums. The end result? Not something that sounds completely real... but something I can be proud of, because I worked my ass off on it, did it all from scratch, and it doesn't sound like anybody else's drums, because they're MY samples and I did it MY way. Any sonic inconsistencies or other mistakes can also be laid at my door... A final word about recording is that so many things are sample-augmented or all out replaced and quantized and then room-effected anyway, especially in modern metal recordings, that it doesn't make too much of a difference who or what triggered the initial sounds. Always keep in mind that it's a carefully constructed fiction, which could be said of pretty much any recording ever. Live shows are an even bigger challenge. I've only seen a couple of bands even pull off programmed backing tracks (with a solid live drummer playing to a click) - Katatonia being one of them. Even with the bands that have artificial drums as an integral part of their sound, I personally, usually, feel let down when I see a group of musicians playing to programmed drums. I'm not entirely sure why. But I've always been much more impressed in a live setting by actual drummers, and especially by bands who make all the music themselves, onstage. I wouldn't want to play my material to a computer or CD, for that reason, although as I say, I'm not 100% sure why it's a problem for me if everyone is playing their asses off and putting on a good show. In any case I would absolutely support a band who chose not to use a real drummer, for whatever reason. I just hope they can pull it off.

...zucchini is a type of squash. I suppose I'll go with squash and keep my options open. Whiskey sour or gin and tonic?

Well, in a word, Gorguts. That new album really fucking rules. Maybe Gorguts in general isn't your cup of tea, which I could understand, but in my opinion the new album is fantastic. I don't hear any longing for "glory days" on it either. It's just, you know, another album. And a really good one at that. First time I've been that impressed by a new death metal CD in a long time, though, I will say.

There are a lot of fun things I reminisce about, though I don't miss having to rewind/fast forward, worry about your tape melting in the car, or having your tape deck eat your favorite album... But, while you only have one side on a CD (and don't they make double-sided CDs?), what I miss, and what I think the tape/vinyl format lent itself to, was a particular kind of album structure that you don't really hear anymore. Almost like two EPs instead of a full album. An intro, some heavy songs, an epic ballad or instrumental, flip it over, some more heavy songs, another ballad or instrumental, an outro. Not to say that you can't put an album together that way, but it's not really thought about anymore. And it broke the album up into 20-30 minute chunks, so you could have an easier time digesting it, and say, "oh, today I'm in the mood for side B." I'm actually hoping to structure my album in this way. Vinyl adherents will promote its superior sound quality, but I don't know anyone around here who has a nice enough sound system or vinyl in good enough condition to be able to hear a difference for the better. There is something cool about the physical object, though, and the artwork is more fun to look at.

It's grown on me a little bit, but I'm still not very impressed. Couple of cool riffs, vocals sound good, but it's not worth the hype by a long shot.

Yeah, and I got beat up by my great-grandpa for disrespecting his wax cylinder collection by bringing tapes into the home... heh... Tapes were the shit. I kinda miss 'em. Like vinyl, they had two sides. No one thinks about putting an album together like that anymore.

I bought that on tape when it came out, too. Still one of my favorites.