Out of Pod Experience

Is it mean that i laughed really hard because i read his post then got to the bottom then realised his name. 2 guitars 2 hands doing some crazy stuff. Love the name :)

Been playing for about 13 years, been in a few bands, and the band I'm currently in is almost done with our second album. Band's called Skylab, a futuristic orchestral/black metal-ish/avant garde in the vein of Fear Factory meets Emperor. The story is strikingly similar to Eve, but I promise the first album was written before I even played Eve, hehe. It's more like a cross between Eve and Animatrix, where man becomes immortal in the same way we're immortal in Eve. The machines and cyborgs rise up to forge their own destiny after having been persecuted for centuries. Lots of polyrhythms, odd meters, and such...Buried's got a sort of jazzy feel to it with the drums, which are all live:

Buried

Goodbye

You can get the album on iTunes if you want it. Album's called Artificial.

After years of not finding anyone to play live with us, we decided to just make albums. The new album will be entitled "The Distance" and is gonna be much more introspective and melodic than Artificial was.

Anyway, I'm mainly a rhythm guitarist but I do like playing leads as well, just not shredding. Alice in Chains and Pink Floyd are more my style for solos rather than, say, Malmsteen. I grew up on thrash metal, so intricate rhythm playing and songwriting are my forte'. I've woodshed for months just like everyone else, studying theory and such, but in the end I enjoy writing songs instead of just practicing scales over and over. I get bored very quickly when there's no song attached to the melody. Scales are good practice, but that's all they are to me: practice.

I'm currently writing music for my own project, a cosmic doom/stoner project. It, like Skylab, will be a concept album...still working out all the details, however. It will be much simpler, more melodic with more groove. It's gonna be like a space western; I want to marry Firefly with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It will be heavy, of course, but more melodic and with a spaghetti western soundtrack feel to it, very much inspired by Morricone's work. I want that desperado, loner feel to it with the twangy, reverb-heavy guitar sounds for some instrumental tracks to set the stage and tell the story.

As for guitars, I have 3 Jackson 6-strings (1 Rhoads V, 1 DKMG, and 1 Kelly Pro Star, which is a unique design not available anymore...very strange and "metuhl" looking, but with a huuuuuge bottom end sound), an Ibanez Prestige 6-string, a Washburn 7-string, and a Fender acoustic which I hate. I hate Fender...love the sound, hate to play it. My friend and lead guitarist in one of my other bands build guitars and has his own guitar line called Sined guitars, and he's building me a custom Les Paul copy. It will be sort of a cross between a standard Gibson Les Paul model with the ESP Les Paul playability. He owes me a favor so he's making it for free. Can't wait to get my hands on it.

You know you're going to want to buy another one, Miromme. There's no known cure for Need a New Guitar Fever.

What mixing? Seriously, the entire thing was done on a shoestring budget, from studio time to mixing. It's the brainchild of my drummer; he's the multi-instrumentalist, played all the parts, sang all the parts, paid for everything. I joined the "band" right as he was going into the studio when he sent me a rough demo of it. I soon learned all the songs and ended up having to play and sing live while he handled the live drums and synths on the Mac (the Mac being, he just pressed the space bar and all the Reason tracks would play through the P.A., while he would sit behind the kit and I would play guitar and sing and tapdance with effects). Consequently, we decided that since no one was either able to play this type of stuff or was too much of a selfish prick to just shut up and play what we told them to, we decided to keep the band a studio-only band. We got a few really fantastic reviews from music magazines and webzines saying we'll be getting signed soon, blah blah blah, but it never happened, of course. It's just not a marketable type of music. We can't tour either because musicians are a bunch of dicks for the most part. It really sucks because we just got invited to a big electro festival in France (we live in Italy) this summer, but we had to decline because, although there are tons of great musicians here, they're all a bunch of prima donna posers who have no idea how a band works.

As far as the sounds go, the guitars, drums, and bass are all live and the effects and synths are of course done with Reason. The mix has a thin sound to it because he wanted that cold, inhuman feel to the album. We don't like warm sounds in this type of music; we wanted a cold, clinical, cyberpunk/cybernetic atmosphere. That's why the drums are so loud and the guitars are actually with the synth, and the bass is just underneath. Every album tells a story, and Artificial is an epic journey; there is even a short story we wrote for it but never put it on the site or anything. After years of struggling and trying new guitarists, new singers, I moved from guitar to guitar and vocals to just vocals and now back to guitar and vocals. If we play live, we don't want to compromise and we want it to be done well, not just slap anything on there to go around and be able to play. It's very difficult to play in a band like this because the biggest hurdle is simply the logistics of the whole thing. You need the right people who will focus all their energy on something like this, and that's just hard to come by these days. Everyone just wants to jump on stage, bang their heads, play a solo for the crowd and get drunk and get laid. We're not a death metal band, we want to make the live show an experience. We did it with just the two of us but it ended up being too much of a burden on both of us so we decided to just write for the new album.

For "The Distance", our upcoming album, he wanted more input from me for the guitar parts and vocal parts. I wrote a lot of the vocals along with him, but I quickly realized that since this is his grand vision that he needs to be the one to write the music. We complement each other, and we have similar styles for playing (us being big Meshuggah, Fear Factory, Anaal Nathrakh and Emperor fans), but I felt too much input from me would compromise what we were trying to achieve with it. Fortunately, I was right: The Distance came out ******* BEAUTIFUL. I can't wait to go into the studio and track vocals for it, and I can't wait to put some stuff on here for you guys to hear it. It's breathtaking. I even told him to play all the instruments. I'll come in with ideas and play off of him with guitar, but in the end, I'm learning the parts he has written. Like I said, I feel the band comes first and what we're trying to achieve as a whole is much greater than the individuals. The vocals will be much less black metal and much more of an aggressive clean sound with black screams here and there.

I just saw Meshuggah live last night, and although I'm a competent rhythm player when it comes to strange rhythms, meters and such, Meshuggah just completely humble you and make you realize just how much there is to learn. Emanuele (my drummer) is a perfectionist and a drummer first and foremost; however, I have learned so much just from playing with him that I now feel that more guitarists should learn from drummers. Since I joined Skylab in the beginning, I play cleaner, faster, and more precise than I ever have. I'm not talking boring-ass sweeps and Finger Olympics, I'm talking making the guitar sound PERFECT...every note, every accent counts and you cannot afford to make even a single mistake or else the rest of it goes to ****. I learned more about my playing from a drummer than any other guitarist out there. Of course, I've studied under a great guitarist who taught me so much about theory, harmonization, and improvisation, but those have all been a means to an end.

I wish we had the title track, "Artificial" on Youtube...it's my favorite. It's so very Eve. It's about the first man becoming completely cyborg, leaving his flesh and bone weakness behind. My favorite line:

Forget his name
He is the first one, a robotic dynasty
A monument to science
Made of synthetic fibers

He will voyage, he will look, he will hear he will remember
This new armored kind doesn't sleep, doesn't rest at all

--

A grey flame, it burns inside
In veins flows cold liquid fire
Weakness of man has been retired

My soul is stored internally
You'll find a man with human dreams but
This silvered heart was not born...it was built
Artificial

Um, yeah, haha!

Everyone goes on about how Tool plays impossible stuff, but that's due to people who either don't know anything about music, don't know anything about other bands, or don't know how to play an instrument. I like Tool, but from a technical standpoint, they don't deserve all the overzealous praise their fans lavish upon them. Meshuggah's technical prowess and ability makes Tool look like Nirvana. Meshuggah are perfect. It sounded like a cacophony because you weren't used to music not being played in 4/4 time and obviously never heard of polyrhythms or odd meters. The very same thing happened to me when I first heard them. In fact, I didn't know what to think about it and didn't listen to them until much later when I started playing guitar and delving into the instrument and other music styles.

Oddly enough, the base of Meshuggah is almost all 4/4, but the insane stuff they do rhythmically just blows your mind. The "nodding thing" they do is to help the crowd follow the beat. No joke.

Hehe, yeah..."those drums". He's an amazing drummer; precise and with tons of imagination. He also loves to blast, as you can tell on Towards, hehehehe.

I forgot we had a myspace page, . You can check out more songs from Artificial, including my favorite, "Artificial" here:

Skylab

If you look at our Youtube videos, you'll see one on the side called "Hypertunnels". This was a rough demo of a new song from The Distance that we put up as a teaser. It's basically a drum demo and still has a few kinks in it and no vocals, but it's indicative of the heavier stuff of the new album. New album is gonna be a bit catchier with a few more hooks, but still retain that avant garde vibe.

Cool. Ever hear of the band Coheed and Cambria? Their albums all build an epic story about characters in some dystopian sci fi far future. The story continues from album to album, with plot twists, revelations about hints from previous albums, etc. They did a five-part graphic novel on the story too.

Got to remember to check out your music when I'm on my home PC. I keep forgetting-- I just power up and by reflex log directly into EVE.

I think you misunderstood, my first comment was about myspace vid, drummer playing "Towards the remote future".
Second was about "Hypertunnels" on tube, can find only one from there (?).


edit: just saw this on news, really made me sad
R.I.P. Jeff
http://www.slayer.net/us/jeff-hanneman

Oh yeah I know Coheed...unfortunately they're not my thing. I like their grand storytelling, however.

Well i boughta Michael & Kelly patriot custom. +200 Recording equipment setup. Quite chuffed.

Problem was i wanted the telecaster so much more. I play it now and then but i cant keep away from my acoustic. Think i'll never change