Out of Pod Experience

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.