Tag: heat stroke

Random Blog Post #5

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I often wonder if my schtick is being serious about being unserious or being unserious about being serious. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe the concept doesn’t even make sense, but when I think about how I think about making music or art or whatever, seriousness is one of the big barometers that comes into play.

As an example, I will mention a track from my Heat Stroke album, “Novelty.” There are elements of that song that are too serious in my opinion. The ambiance with the rain and strange noises create a certain feeling that the lyrics and vocal delivery don’t quite mesh with, by design. I feel like if you took out all the vocals on that song and replaced them with some dark poetry and some sinister growling, it would be effective at being serious. I guess my point is that I don’t want to make “serious” music, whatever that means, because as I sit here attempting to figure out what that is, I’m at a loss. Maybe “pretentious” is a better word for what I’m thinking of. I don’t know. Continue reading “Random Blog Post #5” →

Random Blog Post #4

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It’s time for another random blog post! I’ve been posting about nothing but Punk Rebel Renegade for a while, so why not talk about something else for a change? How about some insight into the possibly boring parts of what I’ve been doing and learning lately? If nothing else, it’ll be a good way for me to reflect on what I’ve been doing musically for the last year or so.

Just production-wise, I’ve learned a lot. Ever since I started seriously recording music in 2001 or 2002, I made it a point to NOT look for tips and tricks on how to do anything. It’s kind of like how I approach playing guitar or singing or anything else; I feel like if I learn the “right” way to do something, I’ll feel like I have to do it that way and never experiment. There are some exceptions to this way of thinking. I mean, if I have a problem with a very particular thing, I’ll attempt to search out a solution. And usually there isn’t just one answer, so it’ll point me in the right direction to try some other things. For example, I was having trouble getting good recordings when micing a guitar amp. It turns out there’s a science to microphone placement. There’s a general area that is usually good to have your microphone placed in relation to the amp, but you can also try other placements to get different sounds. Continue reading “Random Blog Post #4” →

Heat Stroke Releases January 27th!

Here’s the announcement you’ve been waiting for. My new album, Heat Stroke, will be available everywhere January 27th! Really, everywhere. Buy the whole album. Buy a song or two. Stream all the songs to your heart’s content. However you want to listen to it, it’s going to be available. Well, it won’t be available on vinyl. It’s kind of risky to get those made unless you know you’re going to be able to sell a lot.

So I can’t do vinyl, but I want to do CDs, if all goes as planned. I would love to do a small run of CDs for anyone who would want one, as well as myself. But I don’t want to hang on to a bunch of my own CDs forever. The trick is that the more I get made, the cheaper they will be, technically. If I order 50, I’ll get a pretty nice deal. But yeah, can I sell 50 CDs? Would anyone interested in one? I would sell them for as little as possible. For US shipments, I could probably ship one for $10 including shipping costs.

Another plan I have is to throw out some codes to download Heat Stroke for free and/or a discount through Bandcamp. But I have to say I’m curious to see if I could make any sales, so I don’t want to give out free codes all over the place. Especially if I get CDs made, this whole Heat Stroke master/distribution project is going to cost me a somewhat large sum of money. I have absolutely no chance of even making my money back, but I wouldn’t mind getting a little back. I’m not looking to make a profit, in other words.

By the way, I have also created a digital press kit for Heat Stroke. It’s a password protected page with a streaming version of the album, some information about it, hi-res version of the album cover, etc. So if you’re in the biz of reviewing albums, let’s talk.

So yeah, just over 2 weeks until Heat Stroke comes out. I’m pretty excited. It’s officially in the pipeline to go to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Beats, etc. as of today, January 12th. So at this point, I’m probably more nervious than excited. There’s no going back from here.

Stay tuned for a cool retrospective on recording the album. I’m not sure what it’s going to contain, but I want it to be as thorough as possible. Maybe some outtakes, alternate versions of the album cover, live “rehearsals,” and whatever else. I’ve never done anything like that before, so I don’t know how successful a semi-elaborate retrospective would be. But, I guess we’ll see…

Get a Taste of Heat Stroke NOW!


So you want to hear some song samples from my new album, Heat Stroke? Well, you’re in luck! I happen to have a mashup of most of the tracks on the album. right here! Below you will find a streamable audio file that contains about 15 seconds of 8 of the 10 songs that will be on the album to tide you over until release. Why not all 10? The first track is a shortish intro that is hardly musical. And another one isn’t quite done in the mastering process. No other reason.


Continue reading “Get a Taste of Heat Stroke NOW!” →

Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 14

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It’s safe to say that recording for Heat Stroke is done. This STILL isn’t that post that I’ve been alluding to for months, talking about each song all in depth and whatever. But there’s still some meaty news to talk about, maybe, probably. I figured it was worth talking about the process of mastering and even the album art, since that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. Continue reading “Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 14” →

Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 12

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You may have noticed a delay in this going up. Nobody reads these things, but I’m sorry anyway. Last week, one of my eyes got super irritated from my contact or something and so I was half-blind for the whole week. Not being able to see inhibits my ability to see a computer screen. So I couldn’t work on music or even comfortably type about working on music. And to be honest, I haven’t done a lot of music-producing this week either, but I’ll report what I have done lately. Continue reading “Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 12” →

Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 11

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Apologies for this blog going up late, but there’s a good reason for it. Just to catch everyone up, I imposed a deadline on myself on recording. That deadline was the end of September. There were some reasons for that; some were reasonable and others were arbitrary. Regardless, one of the biggest reasons reared its ugly head about a month ago. And that affected everything about Heat Stroke: everything from the lyrics to my desire to finish it. I won’t get into all that, but I am going to talk about the results. Continue reading “Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 11” →

Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 10

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Here we are in week 10 of recording of Heat Stroke. In last weeks blog, I said it would be the second to last one in this Recording Heat Stroke series. But then I realized I plan on working on new songs until September 30th. So there will still be new stuff to talk about next week. It’s also possible that I will be completely done with everything by the time next Friday rolls around, and that will make for a more exciting post, maybe. Anyway, what have I been doing for the last week? Continue reading “Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 10” →

Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 9

Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 9
Alright, this should be the second to last entry in my Recording Heat Stroke blog series. Since last time I wrote in here, I touched up all of the previous songs, and more notably, I have started working on a new song, a sad one, If you’re not familiar with my catalog, then you might not know that I don’t do sad songs. I don’t even do slow songs really. So that’s why this is kind of a big deal. It’s kind of up in the air as to how good the song is going to be, but the fact that it’s sad sounding and basically against what I set out to do with these new songs is this week’s topic. Continue reading “Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 9” →