A few weeks ago I broke a long dry spell and began recording again. I was quite prolific for a brief time, but before I finished anything I got really stressed out from work. I began three things during that time, and none of them were ever finished. First I did an underproduced cover of Radiohead's "Creep" which I used to have uploaded to my profile. I began recording a song I wrote four years ago called "Never Been So Lost" which is my heaviest song. What I have recorded is going well, but it's going to take me a while to finish due to technical difficulties.

BUT I DO HAVE SOMETHING YOU CAN HEAR. It's the new track on my proflie called "DON'T SLOW ME DOWN". I sat on this guitar riff for a year but never made it into a song, so I decided to go ahead and record it and see what happens. It still isn't finished because I don't know what I am going to do with it. For now it is an instrumental because I don't have lyrics for it. I'll probably eventually lay down some lead guitar melodies, but I haven't figured out what to do yet. Right now it's just rhythm guitar, bass, and a drum track. It isn't completed or fully arranged, but I decided to let you hear what I have. I think it's pretty cool. Please listen to it and let me know what you think.

I had to remove my crappy cover of "Creep" from my profile to make space for this song. If you want to hear it please message me, and I will email it to you or something.

Thanks for listening, and keep rocking.

Aaron

At the time of this writing I am on vacation in Ohio visiting my sister Lisa and her family. (Or as they say in more civilized parts of the world, "on holiday".  And in less desirable company it's called "on leave".)  I'm having a great time here hanging out with family, especially my awesome two-year-old nephew Julian.  I desperately needed this time away from Nor-fuck and my job to do some soul-searching and also get in some much-needed relaxation.  Here's a pic of my sister and me.


My brother-in-law Dominic is also a musician.  (Check out his project The Art of Killing a Copy Machine on MySpace.)  Prior to coming here I had been very musically inactive for three months, but playing Dom's guitar and drumset has improved my technique and resparked my creativity.  Dominic is much better than me with the production/mixing side of making music, while I am a better guitarist and singer.  We probably won't have the time to record any music while I'm here, but we figured out how to collaborate later in spite of our incompatible software by emailing individual tracks as MP3s and mixing all the tracks into a single song.  I have two major demos which I started recording a few months ago but haven't done any work on recently.  When I go back to Norfolk I plan to finish recording those two songs (called "New Life Grows" and "Waging War with Mediocrity") and have Dom mix them for me.  I will definitely be posting the finished products on my profile.

In other news I am currently reading reknowned biologist and respected atheist Richard Dawkins' fascinating book The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand natural selection (by means of such diverse fields as mathematics, genetics, and geology) and the ancestry of the human race.

Lastly, in the unlikely event that anyone actually reads this, I have to give a shout out to my girl.  I love you, Jennifer!

I mentioned in my last blog entry that I am part of an online music community called MacJams.com where almost all of my music activity has been taking place lately. I haven't had a lot of time to work on music lately, but most of my musical energy has been going towards collaborations with other artists at MacJams. My first collaboration is a song called "Kick Some Ass" which I have temporarily uploaded to my MySpace profile until I get one of my own songs recorded to take its place. A guy called Skean who lives in Sweden programmed all of the music, and I asked him if I could put vocals on it. While I'm not entirely satisfied with the final mix, I do think I did a good job singing it. I wrote the lyrics too.

My latest upload is a song called "Celeste" which I wrote a couple of years ago. This recording is basically live-in-studio. One microphone, one take, no overdubs, minimal production tricks.

I'm currently working on another collaboration that I am adding vocals to, working with a guitarist called QuickPick Records. I'm having difficulty writing the lyrics as I seem to have a bit of writer's block, but I hope that will be done soon.

I'm also still working on one of my own songs called "New Life Grows". This is my big project that I keep re-recording every time I buy a better microphone.

If I ever finish New Life Grows I plan to begin recording a song that I have written based on my friend Christina Bold's poem called "Midean's Last Wish".

I am part of an online community called MacJams that is for people who make music with Apple computers. One of the nice things is that since most people use the same software it is easy to collaborate with other musicians by sending files back and forth. A guy named Skean posted an instrumental rock song that I really liked, so I asked him if I could add vocals to it. I finally got it finished, and you can hear the results here: http://www.macjams.com/song/32535

It's been a while since I've been in my hometown Ridgecrest, CA or heard any news from there. I just found out that an old friend of mine Anthony Hersom died in January. I'm still trying to contact people to find out how he died. I found out on his band's MySpace. Anthony was guitarist for the death metal band Keruption (http://myspace.com/keruption) based out of Ridgecrest. I was a huge Keruption fan when I was still back home.

Anthony and I were never close friends - in fact we frequently didn't even get along - but we go way back. We first met in sixth grade when we were in the same class, and we went to school together until high school graduation (although we stopped hanging out after tenth grade). In sixth grade Anthony started a punk/metal band that went through many incarnations/name changes/personnel changes/style changes over several years. This band was very influential to me because I used to hang out with them all the time. For my entire life I had wanted to play guitar, but Anthony's band was the one that finally convinced me to actually do it. The first electric guitar I ever held was Anthony's Squier Strat. I didn't know anything about guitars, but I soon went and bought my own Squier which I have to this day.

Late in high school I pretty much lost contact with Anthony and his friends even though we still went to the same school. It wasn't until several years later when Desert Rhythm Records started promoting local bands that I ran into Anthony again at a show where Keruption was playing. For about two years until I had to move out of town I went to every Keruption and Laboratory Orphan show I could make it to. Anthony had definitely progressed as a guitarist, and all of them had accepted me as a guitarist by allowing me to jam with them once or twice.

My mental picture of Anthony: Long hair, shaggy beard, stupid hat, rocking on his black Schecter guitar, and singing backing vocals to "You Will Die". I don't know what happened to him, but I will miss him.

Repsect and peace.

EDIT: THE BAND HAS TOLD ME THAT IT WAS A CAR ACCIDENT.

You Will Die


Rage'n river of death

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"The Gonad Song" is an improvised throw-away track I did that has become my only hit. Due to popular demand I posted it here. I bought my computer a few weeks ago and decided to record some stupid little thing in an effort to learn to use the GarageBand program. I laid down a preprogrammed drum loop, improvised some acoustic and electric guitars, ad libbed some lyrics just saying the first thing that popped in my head, and programmed some lame improvised synthesized piano and bass tracks.

Admittedly it is a groovy track with funny lyrics and a couple of cool guitar solos, but it was never meant to go anywhere. I let some of the guys at work hear it, and they've been wanting to hear it every day since then. So by popular demand I give you The Gonad Song. Enjoy it now because as soon as I have four real songs recorded the Gonad Song is going bye bye.

As you've probably already seen and heard I have my first-ever demo song recorded and uploaded - "Desert of My Life". This is a song that I wrote way back in 2004 (music later in 2005). This song is very special to me, and it has become my signature song. You can read the lyrics by clicking the link in the media player. Also feel free to download the mp3. Hell, you can even distribute it to all of your friends just as long as I get credit.

I'm in the process of recording a song called "New Life Grows". It's a classical guitar sounding acoustic rock ballad that I wrote around the same time as "Desert of My Life". It is going to have a more lush and less raw sound than Desert, hopefully with a keyboard-played string section. This song is tricky recording though because I'm having to play all of the drum parts on keyboard rather than using preprogrammed beats in order to get the right feel. This may take a while.

I don't work particularly fast, and I don't have a lot of free time presently. But I'm hoping to have two new songs completed in the next week. If not I should at least have "New Life Grows" ready for your listening pleasure.

Here's a special bonus for those of you who actually take the time to read this crap. I'm giving you the secret link to my hidden track. This is a song that I improvised in 30 minutes when I first got my computer while teaching myself to use Garage Band. It is not a serious song, and it's not polished or arranged or produced at all. Just several layers of improvised multitracking. Even the hillarious lyrics are ad libbed. "The Gonad Song"

I plan to begin recording demos for a few of my songs this week.  I met a guy in the barracks with Cakewalk on his computer, and I'm going to start recording with him this week.  Stay tuned for a full metal arrangement MP3 of "Desert of My Life" coming in the next week or two.

If you are here I thank you for taking 5 minutes of your day to check out my music profile.  You are probably one of my friends.  As you can see there is nothing here yet.  And there's nothing at the new dharmalogos.com yet either.  You see, I'm tired of waiting for stuff to happen.  My music is very important to me, but I've always been waiting to find a band.  At the moment I don't have a driver's license, so it's difficult for me to get around town and jam with people.  I should have the license thing taken care of next week.  Also don't have my own computer yet or any recording software, but I plan to get that when I get my tax return.  Until then I'll have to try to make some more digital camera recordings for your listening and viewing pleasure.

There's a lot that I can't do right now.  I don't have a band yet, and I can't make a decent recording yet.  But there are a few things I can do now to prepare for that.  I can finish writing the 25 or so songs I have in various stages of completion, record them with whatever technology is available to me, and put up this MySpace profile and associated dharmalogos.com website in order to make the music available to you, my potential listeners.  I'm doing what I can to prepare for when I actually meet the people to start a band with.  By then I'll have lots of completed songs, a few demos, and a professional quality website.  

Thank you for being here at the beginning stages of a new era of music and of my life.

-Aaron