FatherAlabaster

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.

Don't worry too much yet, you know; just ice, elevate, take some anti-inflammatories. See how it goes. I have a torn meniscus (near as I can tell) from working in landscaping, which shuts me down sometimes. My real problem right now is that one of my ears is horribly clogged up and I can't work on my fucking mixes. But on the upside I think I've got another song done!

Cool stuff, man. I picked up on a lot of bands from my local equivalent when I was a teenager - "Chainsaw Rock" came on local college radio at midnight on Fridays, usually presided over by "The Unholy One" - a DJ named Tom who would growl every comment almost unintelligibly. I heard Naglfar and wound up buying a Nevermore CD because I couldn't tell what he had said... The one other thing he'd do would be to sell a lot of his CDs on consignment after he played them for a little while, which is how I wound up with my first copy of Opeth's "Morningrise", back when it wasn't being distributed over here.

Hi, welcome. There are actually some great (and pretty long-running) recommendations threads here, and that's been probably the best thing about this forum for me so far: getting introduced to some great bands I'd never heard before. My first metal show was Metallica as well, though that wasn't til 1991 or 92... you're making me feel like a spring chicken.

The AIC you're thinking of was probably the original Alice 'N Chainz (not the same band), and there was even an early band called Sleaze that I think Layne was a part of - but their demo material as the band we all know and (insert feeling here) was the stuff that wound up on Facelift, and they had a few songs at that point that they wanted to put on the debut, scrapping the older material, but that wound up on Dirt because of label pressure on Facelift. At least that's what I gleaned from interviews, etc. Hard to call anything on Facelift "glam" or "sleaze", it's more just rock with a lot of blues influence. I only really get into the first half of that album anyway, but I don't think one can say that their "roots" are glam. Pantera, yes; AIC, no. Either way, if you don't like it, I mean hey, whatever. You're not alone. Don't know if you've ever heard Truly, but they had one album that was pretty cool, oddly atmospheric 50's inflected grunge. Their vocalist couldn't really sing, but that was kind of ok...

Neurosis has their high points and low points too. I know people who like their older stuff, and it's growing on me, but my all-time favorite of theirs has to be Times Of Grace, followed by A Sun That Never Sets. It took me quite a while to get into the vocals, which I still don't totally love - they sound forced and overly mannered on a lot of their material.

For Suffocation, Efiigy Of The Forgotten tends to be the "cult classic" but I prefer Pierced From Within - especially the title track, still one of the heaviest death metal songs I've heard. After that album they fell off for me a little bit. I'm not a huge Vader fan but I know plenty of people who like them. They're often lumped in with Decapitated and Behemoth because, you know, they're all Polish... I've actually never listened to Hate Eternal! Which I should do, I've heard good things.

Most of the metalheads (and most of the musicians in general) who I know really like Alice In Chains, Nirvana, and Soundgarden. But then most of the metalheads I know are from the USA, and a few who grew up in the UK, and we're all between 28 and 40. Which is why I keep saying it's regional and generational. Go figure. If you guys think the songwriting is "lazy", you'd only be doing yourselves a favor by learning to see beyond the song structure and figuring out how those songs actually work. Even a simple song with a simple melody can have a lot to offer. And just because a metal song has more moving parts doesn't make it any better, as I know you know. The phrase "lazy songwriting coupled with bad vocals and pseudo-aggression" could also be applied to lots of metal bands, including some bands we all actually like.

Rush - Chemistry

I think, if something like that almost happened, he should almost write a book about it, and we should almost care.

He's a "dualist" at heart... For me it's the sound that expressed what I couldn't express with words when I was growing up. So far beyond "Fuck you" that there's almost no comparison. Now it just sounds like "music" to me, and everything else sounds like... meh, everything else. There are times when metal as a whole gets on my nerves, but I always come back to it. And the act of writing metal songs lets me involve my anger, my enjoyment of puzzles, my need to understand my overwhelmingly negative emotions, and my love of melody at at the same time. It taps into places in my head I couldn't access otherwise. It's a conduit I couldn't do without.

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Tool's "Holy Gift", right? I've seen that on youtube. I'll check it out. I've actually been listening to Lateralus more since your response in that thread. It's growing on me. I bought it the day it was released and was initially really disappointed by it, and I've only put it on infrequently over the years. 10000 Days has yet to make a positive impression on me. For that matter, Soundgarden's "Down On The Upside" only has three or four songs I like, the self-titled Alice In Chains has only recently begun appealing to me (though I love the unplugged MTV video), and though I think Pearl Jam's first two albums are amazing, I think most of what they've done since then is garbage. The point I was trying to make is that, regardless of whether or not someone personally enjoys those bands, I don't think anyone could say that you're "supposed" to hate them in the same way that anyone in polite society is expected to despise, say, Vanilla Ice or Hootie And The Blowfish.

I'm impressed that you manage to run the forum without a home computer. Smartphones are insidiously addicitive. I didn't even realize how frequently I looked at the thing until it died. I still find myself glancing at it every so often. Behavioral conditioning. Unfortunately, in NYC, they're the lifeblood of professional and social circles. I miss having the camera to take pictures of my kid when he does cute stuff. And I used it as my mp3 player, so I kind of miss that, but I shouldn't use earbuds for a while anyway. I have something wrong with one of my ears - it keeps filling up with fluid, especially at night. It sucks because I'm close to finishing my recording and I want to have my ears fresh for any mixing tweaks that need to happen. No way I could pay a pro to mix the stuff for me.