Music
Hansel Vs. Gretel
When I was 16—which was back in 1998—I decided it would be fun to make an album. So, with the help of my friend Todd Welstein, I did. It was a lot of fun, and now that I look back on it, I realize how little I knew about recording. It was a great learning experience, though, and it’s still a fun record to listen to. Some of the material is embarassing, yet some of it is really good. All I had back then was my dad’s 8-track Alesis ADAT-XT and a couple of 8-channel Mackie mixers (all of which has been sold on eBay).
For those of you interested in the recording process, it really was quite simple. Again, this was my first recording experiment, so I didn’t know a thing about music engineering. All I knew was that I wrote a few songs that I’d liked and wanted to lay them down on tape. A couple of the tracks were recorded on my father’s Teac 1/4” 4-track recorder! At the time, I had a Johnson Millennium JM150 amp, a Shure SM57 and Sennheiser MD421. Actually, I’m not even sure if I had the JM150 yet. In any case, I used pillows to prop the microphones up against the cabinet and learned a lot about puching in and out. Any song with keyboards was sequenced using Deluxe Music Construction Set on an old Macintosh SE/30 with an ADB Opcode MIDI interface hooked up to a Roland JV-880. Some of the better songs are: Come to the Water, Breathing Jupiter, Sarah’s Balance, Changes, Farewell My Commie Friends, and Night of the Living Carnies. The rest of the songs could be pitched, for all I care. It is what it is.
After I finished making this CD, I sold somewhere around 100 copies at my high school. It’s weird to think that there are still copies of this album floating about in people’s CD collections (assuming they didn’t throw it out). It was a pretty big success for me and I was very much encouraged by my friends’ opinions. I still listen to some of the songs every now and then and find the music to be enjoyable. Come to the Water was the first song I ever wrote and, of course, it’s in 7/4. How’s that for a King Crimson fan?
At some point, Todd came out to meet me in Arizona. We had met over AOL and have been friends since. Todd is an absolutely brilliant songwriter and I hope he releases an album of his own someday. Really, I’m not exaggerating when I say that Todd’s music is brilliant. Anyway, he let me steal a song or two of his and we recorded a bunch of stuff. When he visited, I took all the furniture out of my room and made it a guitar room. I had a fold-up mattress that I kept in the closet, along with a blanket and pillow, and made music my life. It’s funny to even remember that I did that.
I remember making a bunch of demo CDs, of which I still have a copy or two of, and the demo had Concerto in D, Come to the Water, and Sarah’s Balance. At this point, Steve Vai and I had met and I gave him a copy when I first visited him at the Mothership. I remember getting an e-mail from him telling me that I did a great job, but later found out from a friend that he thought it sounded too much like Joe Satriani. Oh well… I’ll still take the compliment!