Pictured above is my "new to me" Gibson Les Paul Axcess in Iced Tea Sunburst. Another of my Craigslist scores, this came to me profoundly cheaper than the going price on eBay - suffice it to say profoundly means "less than half". This is a Gibson Custom Shop model - implying some Gibson craftsman here in the USA at least touched it in some way. Came with a beautiful hardshell case. Pickups are the 496R and 498T - I just replaced the strings which I think were 11-46s down to 9-42s, for me they made this guitar so much easier to play, and except for needing to tweak the truss rod and adjust the bridge pins the guitar still has decent output with good sustain. Needless to say, I find this to be a dream come true guitar for me - something I've aspired to owning for a very long long time.
New project: a Pink Floyd Fan Tribute project spun up by Ed Unitsky and Alex Grata - I was invited to participate and contribute guitar solos to the project. I've since sent some early improvised takes based on a stem sent along to me - I also thought to insert some additional material into the stem to lengthen the song somewhat. The song I heard is a mashup of material from Wish You Were Here and The Wall - it's a very nice piece of music with opportunity for great things. More info to come as we dig into this deeper.
New potential band: I've met up with MichaelQ (guitars) and will be meeting with KeenanM (bass) over the next few days to get a feel for chemistry and such. Michael is a really good guy, recently relocated from the east coast of the US to Seattle for work. He has a nice portfolio of songs he's demoed, and has great skills as a player. Keenan is a very versatile and AWESOME bassist with jazz training in performance, composition and theory. John and I are very eager to meet with these guys and jam - I'll be reaching out to Paul this next week and look to schedule something for the following week.
Ongoing Remixes: I've been working on Lady in a Cage for over a month now - getting drums and bass to sound their best and in sync took a while, but that's done now and I'm onto the guitars/keyboards tracks. I will need to make some adjustments to the timing and bring the keyboards in particular into the groove of the rhythm section. Locked into the work here - acoustic guitars have been redone, electric guitar rhythm tracks are 90% complete as well. Electric guitar solos are about 75% done - I have rewritten three of the four solos completely, with the one that's in Part 3 just paraphrased in places to accent different note choices. The solos will be reamped shortly or just essentially replayed through the guitar amps since the writing of them required printing the effect from the TC Electronics Nova guitar processor to get the performance I wanted to assist in writing. Part 6 is the dreaded Dream Theater section of the song - that needs a new keyboard melody for the lead line, and rerecord the drop D Electric guitars as well. By the time I finish, I don't think this section will be very recognizable anymore - which is more than fine with me. Vocals will be the final process with the song getting a complete facelift as a result.
Next up after Lady will be Tahoma and The Sound of Thoughts - I'm going to try my hand at playing drums on these since they're very standard 4/4 and I'm very capable of playing them. I'll continue the rewriting efforts for these songs giving them a face lift, which actually could become profound face lifts for both.
A Fine Line Between will get more remix than any instrumental recording effort. Vocals would potentially get attention but all the instruments are more than fine IMHO. As mentioned before, I'll be mostly thinning out the mixes and getting more focus on the primary instruments in the songs. Drums will get more attention - they already have with Zsolt's and Andy's drum mixes being fixed up in earlier previews. NDV's tracks will get their turn as we approach the end of this effort and by then I'll have a release date for both projects.
Finally, I'll get back to the Onion release - this will require brand new session work since the original projects are long gone missing. The material is relatively simple though and should be a quick effort to recreate. I plan on making modest changes to the songs, but nothing so profound as what's been happening with the Sound of Thoughts tracks.
Final thoughts: The time spent on the old projects and relearning material/rewriting solos/etc... have been eye opening for me in many ways. I foolishly believed that I still had a good portion of my skills and dexterity even though I hadn't really spent any time or effort playing guitar or keyboards. What a shock when it came down to crunch time and I was failing badly... I've since put in some extra effort doing some essential woodshedding, and also trying to incorporate styles and skills I wasn't familiar with into my solos, and as a result I've actually caught back up and surpassed in many ways where I was at back in 2009. It was pretty frustrating, but the end result is a renewed passion for learning which has also influenced my day vocation greatly. I'm continuing to learn new skills and proving that the human brain is indeed a very plastic thing - there is no such thing as a time when we are no longer capable of learning and improving, and so long as you continue to demand more from yourself you will continue to grow and achieve more the longer time goes on. This is one of the great fears I have in life - that we have absolute limitations and once you hit that boundary you have nowhere to go. Nonsense! The moment that you stop learning is the moment following your final breath on this plane of existence - and who's to say that we don't continue learning after we pass out of this plane into the next one?
To you the reader - thanks for visiting and checking out my activities and thoughts. Having this venue as a sounding board has been incredibly valuable to me in many ways - I hope that you gained some value at least in entertainment value if not more. Cheers until the next post!
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