Blissful Misery

Let me start by saying that things are starting to go great music wise.

Last week I had a small brain storming session on ways to make the practicing / playing / recording experience better and easier.  What I came up with was another small rearrangement of the studio.  I basically ended up turning turning the singing area around 180 degrees, and putting my pedal board where the monitors were originally. Now all I have to do is uncover my board, plugin my guitar, and flip a few switches to be ready to play for any reason.  By flipping one more switch and turning one volume knob I can add vocals in as well. I can basically be ready to do anything within 2 minutes now.  It used to take me a good 30 minutes to get everything set up and ready to go.  I’m really enjoying this a lot.

Now that it’s so easy to just pick up and play I have finally started my new practice system.  My new method basically consists of playing Blissful Misery, Black Misery, and cover songs all in one big setting using backing tracks from the computer.  I also mix everything up as much as I can to keep it more exciting. Currently the practice list is as follows: Black Misery: The Demon Within, Carnival Of Horror, Angel Incarnate; Blissful Misery: The Madness, Remembering, Dead To The World, Twilight; Covers: Nightwish: Nemo; Breaking Benjamin: So Cold, Home; Metallica: The Unforgiven, Fade To Black, Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters.

Now I’m going to get back to that Blissful Misery section of the list.

• The Madness is still being practiced a lot, and the vocal melodies are still in the playing around trial and error idea stage.  I do still need to work on relearning the solo, but everything else music wise sounds great.
• Remembering is another old tune that I love.  I recently had a request to play the song, and decided to add it back to the practice list.  I am going to keep the music the same for the song, but may also add a few string parts.  I have actually started writing a vocal melody for this song, and hope to have it done soon. It feels so good to play this song with the full backing track.  I can’t get enough of it.
• Dead To The World is a song I wrote years ago, but I never got around to playing it much.  It’s a fairly simple song to play guitar wise.  However as I practice it I am also changing it little by little and adding the other instruments into the song.  The song is still a work in progress, but I hope my new method of practice really helps the writing process as well.
• Twilight is currently just a guitar song, but I’ve been working on writing the bass a little along as well.  There are currently no lyrics, but there will be at some point in time.  I absolutely love the guitar for this song, even though it’s fairly hard to manage to pull off a complete full song during practice right now.  Just so every one knows this song has nothing to do with those shit movies and books.  I probably wrote the original guitar parts for this before those books were even dreamed of.

I’m planning on relearning as many songs as possible as fast as possible. This includes all of the Blissful Misery and Black Misery originals, as well as most of the covers previously played by Blissful Misery.  There truly is nothing like playing your favorite songs yourself. During this time I also plan to work on at least one unfinished or new song at all times.

Before I end this I do have one thing to say about the studio.  Currently I have decided to not worry with studio stuff at all until I have pretty much relearned a decent amount of songs.  While I don’t care to record more than one song at a time, I love learning as many as I can at once.

That’s all for now, but I should be back on here to give updates more often now that things are going so well.

I worked on a few things in the studio this week, but wasn’t able to get any of the guitar parts recorded.  Instead I ended up doing a little more planning and brainstorming for the song.  I think in the end it will pay off too.

I won’t be in the studio for the next two weeks at least, because I have an extremely busy schedule.  After that I should be able to finish up the song fairly fast though.

Unfortunately today was a scorcher, and the temperature easily reached 100 in the studio.   It’s just now starting to cool off a little, but it’s still too hot to boot up the guitar recording equipment and do anything.

I will work on the vocal melody as much as possible today, but it looks like recording guitar is out of the question.  I hope that tonight / tomorrow morning will be a little cooler.  The electric guitar tracks shouldn’t take too long to record, but all of the processing may take a while once the takes are done.  The acoustic guitar parts, if put in the song at all, will be a more direct approach as they won’t be processed as much.

I am still hoping to find a 12 string acoustic sometime soon that I can at least rent to record the chorus and maybe verse parts with as well.  This song sounds so good with all of the guitar parts layered properly.

Tonight marked the start of the bands venture into the studio to record The Madness.  I used my usual methods to record both bass and drum tracks.  I also managed to set up a nice tone for each as well.  I may still tweak the drums sound, but for now this will work.  If I do end up tweaking the sound it will only take a few minutes to have it back and ready to go once I’m done.

During the days this week, if I get the chance, I’m going to be working on writing a better vocal melody for the song.  Everything else is written and ready to go.  However, with the bands restart came a slight change in solo policy.  From now on I will be using written solos as guidelines only.  Those written guidelines may even be rewritten completely as well.  I feel that the music as well as my skill at writing has evolved greatly over the years.  While I love playing flashy solos I want to convey the mood of the song more than anything.  Sometimes flashy solos still convey the emotions, but more often than not a total flash solo just doesn’t make the song feel complete.

The next three nights I’m going to be working on recording guitar tracks.  There will be a total of four electric layers of guitar, and may be two or three acoustic layers if everything goes right.  I’m dying to put a 12 string acoustic into this recording, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it.

That’s all for tonight I’ll be back at it tomorrow. Stay Blissful…

I wanted to jump on here and give a small update. Lately I’ve not been able to do much work on music due to several reasons.

1. I have another damn ear infection, and can almost hear nothing in my left ear.
2. It’s been getting a lot hotter in the studio, and my body can’t deal with the heat the way it used to.
3. Due to the heat as well we’ve had a few electrical problems, and I’ve had to keep everything in the studio cut off until we can get it fixed.  I am hoping to have this resolved soon.

I will be working on some rewrites and vocal melodies as soon as I can get back in the studio.  I may just work on the stuff out side of the studio and go on and get it done, but what use is a studio if you don’t use it for everything?