Music

Mytopia

After I finished Hansel Vs. Gretel [HVG], I made another album called Mytopia. Jon Finn makes an appearance on two songs – Jonny and Pull My Finger and Get Me a Beer. The recording quality isn’t much better than it was on HVG, but there wasn’t much time in between albums to learn a whole lot. Just making the two albums was a learning process. It is a bit more ambitious and compositionally-oriented than the first album, if I may say so.

This album has a much more serious tone than HVG, though I don’t know if I’d say this album is any better. There certainly are some very strong songs, like Rough Slumpy, Jonny, and Modarius Suite Mov. 2, but there’s a lot of crap, too (Timmy Goes to the Market, Pull My Finger and Get Me a Beer, or Drummie). I was 17, young, and still learning. Even if the music ain’t so great, the experience was wonderful.

There are a couple of songs that I think are fodder for re-recording. I’m excited at the idea of that. I put a lot of work into Mytopia and I think it shows on some of the tracks. Symphony No. 40 was particularly difficult because I didn’t have sheet music and picked the whole thing out by ear. The whole process of committing parts to memory and recording took about 6 months, since I was still in high school and had to maintain some sort of scholarship. Unfortunately, I got lazy and inconsistent. You can hear edits and guitar changes throughout that entire track. Since we didn’t have Pro Tools or anything like that, we (Dad and I) had to mix on the fly from our awful 8-track Mackie mixer direct to stereo via the A/V card in our Power Macintosh G3 tower. Ah, that was a trusty computer. Anyway, the songs don’t sound very good, but I’ve since bounced them into Pro Tools sessions and might re-mix them at some point.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy some of this music. I think the new album, Within, is going to be leaps and bounds beyond this stuff. Considering all the experience and knowledge I gained working for Steve Vai, all the other experience from recording music since I was 17, and the advancement of technology since then, there’s going to be a huge sonic difference between Within and these two albums.

  1. Welcome
  2. March of the Damp
  3. Drummie
  4. Last Year’s Song
  5. Modarius Suite Mov. 1
  6. Modarius Suite Mov. 2
  7. Modarius Suite Mov. 3
  8. Tappie
  9. Rough Slumpy
  10. Jonny (Featuring Jon Finn)
  11. Make You See
  12. Scary Spooky
  13. Stringent Quartile
  14. Taste My Hand
  15. Pull My Finger and Get Me a Beer
  16. Timmy Goes to the Market
  17. Mozart’s Symphony No. 40