A day I thought might never happen. I finally hit 100,000 plays. It actually must have happened a couple days ago because I'm a bit over by a couple hundred. Really cool stuff. Thanks for supporting me all these years!!!

I finally hit 1000 friends! And I don't go adding people all willy nilly and random like. Almost every friend I have requested to be friends with me. That's cool.

Over the last few years quite a few people have asked me where the hell I came up with my nickname, "Sonic Clang". Well, as with every good nickname, there is a good story behind it. And as with every good nickname, it evolved over time.

About 9 years ago my brother and I bought a house together. I don't know if someone at the bank wrote my name down wrong or what, but I started getting mail for "Drian Kline", instead of "Brian". So my nickname at that point changed from Bob, to Drian. Then I went to Menards to get building materials for my studio, and the guy at the computer terminal asked for my name. It was kind of loud in there, and as I said "Brian Kline", I saw him type "Brian Clang"... I said "No! Kline!". So then my nickname became "Drian Clang". That didn't last that long, it was too long I guess, and it evolved to just "Clang". Then one night I was watching "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", which I really never did. A guy was going through the first few questions, which are always the real simple ones. Regis said "What is the sound a jet plane makes when it flies overhead going faster than the speed of sound?" and one of the fake answers was "Sonic Clang" (it's obviously Sonic Boom). Pete and I screamed and laughed! It was meant to be.

I first started using this name on the Quake3world.com level editing forums. In high school I used to make levels for games and I thought I'd try getting back into that. I put together a crappy level and decided to release it with my own music. I quickly realized that I was much better at music than I was at level editing, so I stuck with making music for other peoples' Quake 3 levels. When I did that, everyone assummed the "Sonic" part of my name was because I'm a musician, but it had absolutely nothing to do with that whatsoever. I always think things happen for a reason, and the crazy way I came about this nickname, and how I got into music for games and got pretty big doing that for a while, it was all meant to be.

So there ya have it.

I just uploaded a new song to my profile! This is a metal remix of the "Arenas: The Episodes" main theme song. I'm extremely proud of this song, and I consider it one of my best. I had my buddy Pete Ohlinger playing bass for me once again.

"Arenas" is a series of episodes about the back stories of all the Quake 3 characters, animated in CG by director Joe Goss.

Joe plans on doing two seasons, 10 episodes each. I'm a bit behind and Joe already has 5 episodes on his Youtube channel. These videos are so damn cool. The first one absolutely blows my mind!!! You think you're watching a video about Doom 3, and then BAM!!! Quake 3. Oh yeah. It's GOOD.

Check out his website at Tritin Multimedia. And his Youtube channel is located Here. You'll hear my song used at certain points in the videos. Right now you mostly hear it during the end credits of each episode.

Watch all the episodes and enjoy!!!

Anyone out there have food allergies? I never have until now. I've started developing what I believe to be an allergy to milk and/or dairy. I've been lactose intolerant for a number of years now, but through avoidance and minimizing the amount of dairy I eat/drink I've been able to live a completely normal life. But now it seems as though my body is moving beyond simple intolerance and I'm actually becoming allergic to milk/dairy.

Rewind to last summer. My daughter is 2 months old. I start getting a stomach ache every day after eating. At this point in my life cheese plays a large role in my diet. Come on, I live in Wisconsin! Not eating cheese here is a SIN. The stomach aches persist, and sometimes they're bad enough to make me throw up. I go to the doctor and he tells me to take Metamucil every day. I do that and eventually my stomach aches go away.

December: The stomach aches begin to return but they're not persistent.

January: One night I notice my mouth was very itchy. The next morning it was fine. Later that day though the itchiness returned. I didn't know what to do about it so I did nothing. That night though I woke up and my tongue was swollen with hives. I looked online how to cure hives and read that antihistamines are most commonly used to get rid of them. Thankfully I had some Zyrtec in the house because I have summer allergies from mowing the lawn. 30 minutes after taking the Zyrtec my tongue was fine and the itchiness went away.

I go to the doctor to talk about the tongue episode, and while I'm there my head is really red and itchy, but I had just gotten my hair done the night before. We both figured my head was red from the hair dye. We schedule an appointment with an allergist so I can get tested and finally know what I'm allergic to. Appointment isn't until March 9th.

February: The stomach aches are more persistent with vomiting almost once a week. At this point I'm taking Zyrtec every day to keep the hives away. Hives are almost constantly on the under side of my fore arms. If avoidance is key, I've had absolutely no idea what to avoid. I've been trying to think of everything under the sun I could be allergic to: Latex, lotion, soap, aloe, laundry detergent, new clothes. Because my symptoms manifest themselves on my skin, I was thinking in terms of things that contact my skin.

Last weekend: We were visiting my wife's sister's family. My sister-in-law is a cook and so we had a really awesome meal. About 30 minutes after eating, my head started itching. I pulled down the collar of my shirt and saw some hives forming. I took a Zyrtec right away. About 30 minutes later the hives were gone but I had a really bad stomach ache and had to throw up. I completely emptied the contents of my stomach and felt fine.

Tonight we had a breakthrough. My wife made Hamburger Helper. About 30 minutes after eating the same thing started happening. Hives followed by a bad stomach ache. I told my wife I thought I had it narrowed down to foods with milk/dairy, but hamburger helper doesn't have dairy. But wait, IT DOES! My wife told me the recipe calls for a cup of milk! AH HA! So I took a Zyrtec but then spent the next hour throwing up and having severe stomach pains. Now I can't take another pill because I might over dose, but the hives are horrible. This is most definitely the worst allergic reaction I've ever had in my life to anything. My head is on fire, my shoulders are itchy, and I've got red spots over most of my upper body. I took pictures if anyone wants to see :)

Sometimes great discoveries require great sacrifice. Tonight's episode may have been painful at times, and I might have hives for the rest of the night, or until I can take another Zyrtec in about an hour, but now my wife and I finally know what's been going on with me for the last 9 months. I never would have guessed my stomach aches from last summer would tie into hives forming on my tongue. But it's all so clear now, especially after doing some research. My name is Brian Kline, and I have milk allergies.

I finally hit 200,000 views between all my videos on Youtube! I've been watching it every day and it finally hit it today. Very exciting.

I've finally played Guitar Hero, something I thought I'd never do. Why would I want to play a game where I play a fake guitar when I can just pick up my real guitar and play? Just a few days after playing Guitar Hero World Tour, I played Rock Band 2. Both games are "full band" games; that is, they've got guitars, drums, and vocals. Before I pick apart which game I think is superior, I'll give my impressions about this style game.

Guitar: This is nothing like playing real guitar. If you got so good you were playing on expert, it would lend almost nothing to learning to play a real guitar. But if you can play guitar, I do believe it will help you play the game better. The big problem I see is, when the music is playing stuff that sounds like power chords, the game has you moving all around on the buttons. On a real guitar, you keep your fingers the same distance apart from one another and slide up and down the neck. Because of that, playing real guitar in some cases is easier than in GH. As far as I can tell, there's not much difference in the actual game play between GHWT and RB2.

Vocals: I personally don't get into singing, so I only tried vocals on a couple songs. As far as I can tell though, the game interprets the sounds into notes really well. I don't necessarily see anything wrong with the vocals in these games. If you can sing, increase the difficulty. If you can't carry a tune in a bucket, keep it on beginner.

Drums: Now this is where these games get it right on. I spent the majority of the time playing drums and I was surprised how dead on they are to playing real drums. I started out on beginner, which was stupid. The only drum you hit the entire song is the kick drum. That is actually really hard to do. Your foot gets tired and it's difficult to do the entire song. Next I tried easy. This was where I got really pissed. I kept yelling "What are they trying to make me play?! This doesn't make any sense!" So I quickly upped the difficulty level to medium and suddenly the drums started to feel like real drums. But it was actually more difficult because they have you trying to do partial fills. This is much harder than just doing the entire fill, so I upped the difficulty up to hard. Long story short, the higher the difficulty setting, the more realistic the drums are to reality.

The big difference I see between GHWT and RB2 are the drums. GHWT has 5 drums up top (5 colors) and the kick drum. Two of the top drums are dedicated to being cymbals. One drum is always snare, and the other two are always tom toms. The only problem with the GHWT drum kit is that the kick drum is not attached to the rest of the kit so it constantly moves around. They need to fix that in later versions of the hardware. You could make your own DIY crossbar out of a PVC pipe to fix that.

The drums in RB2 appear to be only slightly different at first glance. There are only 4 drums up top and then the kick drum. This means that two drums switch between being cymbals and tom toms. I found this to be extremely confusing. There are two things I liked better about the RB2 drums though. First is that the kick drum is attached to the rest of the kit. It stays in place, which is very nice. The second thing was that there are more spots in the songs to make up your own fills. I found that to be really fun. But those two things are not enough to make up for the fact that playing the RB2 drums is too far from playing real drums. Having two drums switch between cymbals and tom toms is just too confusing. When making up your own fill, it switches them to tom toms, so if you want to hit a cymbal, you're screwed. That's just stupid. Yes, you can buy a cymbal kit to attach to the drum set, but this doesn't add more drums, it simply adds redundant drums. So you get two yellows and two blues. That seems like a waste of money to me. It would be nice if future versions of the game could take advantage of more drums.

The bottom line: It's my opinion that Guitar Hero World Tour is the superior game. None of the other features matter (career mode, quick play, battle of the bands, etc…) if playing the drums isn't realistic.  Because the other two instruments are so similar between the two games, the drums in GHWT give it the edge.

Where they could drastically improve on these style games is by making new guitars with at least 12 frets, 6 strings, and a button at each fret, equaling 72 buttons. They could even go so far as to make the buttons touch sensitive to allow for sliding. The notes on screen would be more like tab, where the fret number would come down the screen. This would be much more like playing real guitar, and if people enjoy the game enough and want to learn real guitar, what they learned in the game would actually help them learn guitar. But that'll probably never happen.

Mystic Realmz just posted two new songs from the Quake mod "Nails of Chthon". What he did is actually quite amazing. His song "Lavasphere" is the sister song of Lava Storm. I wrote mine and then he took it to TOWN and made an atmospheric version of it, yet what he made is totally his own. And he did the same thing with the second song, which was originally supposed to be a song inspired by my "Beef Rock" song, but again, it can stand entirely on its own. One thing is for sure, this Quake mod is going to have quite a textured soundtrack. (by the way, please also check out his song "Guitar From Mars", you'll thank me).

So your next question for me might be, "Brian, it sounds like you and Mysic Realmz worked together quite closely on this music, when might we hear a collaborative effort?" Within the next week I'll be answering that with ANOTHER new song on my profile. This time MR did the writing and arrangement, then he handed it off to me and I recorded some heavy guitars. You're going to like this song.

Last night I decided to sign into my Dusk of Mind myspace profile and check our messages, something I like to do every now and then. I see an e-mail from The Rave, subject "Booking". The Rave is a really big music club in Milwaukee. National acts always come through here and I've seen a ton of shows there. So the body of the e-mail went something like this. "We'd like to know if you'd be interested in performing at the Type O Negative show on the 14th." Uh... what? Interested? That's a damn dream come true!!!!! There's only one problem, Dusk of Mind hasn't played together in over 4 years. The only reason we still call ourselves by name is because we're recording an album of the songs we wrote together, but there's a big difference between recording an album and playing live.

If you look at the Dusk of Mind profile you'll see we have Type O Negative listed as our first influence. I didn't just change that after getting this e-mail, I typed that in there when I first created the profile. That band was such a huge influence on my music writing when I was starting to come into my own. The melodic rock sound is what Dusk of Mind based our style off of. When people asked what we sounded like, if they didn't know who Type O was, we said "it's sort of a melodic rock". Hell, we even covered a Type O Negative song in DoM. In my previous band, "Greys", we covered "Black No. 1", which is about 12 minutes long, and no one knew it at our shows, but we loved it and had a good time playing it.

Dan and I saw Type O at The Rave two times in a couple year time span in the late 90's. Each time we went with demo CD's stuffed in our pants pockets, just on the off chance that we might get the opportunity to get one of those CD's into Peter Steele's mammoth hands. We just knew that if they heard our stuff, which was strongly influenced by them, we might get that break we had been waiting for. We've also always felt that their crowd would really dig our stuff! So now here I am, being asked to open for one of the most influential bands in my musical career, and my band isn't in the position to play live. It's truly my big chance that almost was.