Okay, so really a computer upgrade, but hey. The geeks are gonna love this.

So, prior to X-mas (pronounced Ecks-muss, thank you Futurama) I was rocking a nigh 5 year old computer. Here’s what it had

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz 
8GB DDR2-800
Nvidia 8800 GTS 640MB

Here’s what I’m rocking as of 11:48pm MST, December 25, 2011:

Intel Core i7 2600 3.4GHz
16GB DDR3-1600
AMD Radeon 6870 1GB

It’s so stinking fast by comparison. The RAM and processor upgrade are actually what I’m most stoked for. They’re gonna make recording that much easier.

The video card just helps Skyrim look stunning. Gah, omg, it looks amazing. I loves it!

Anyway, I’m kinda geeking out over this as I put my studio back together after a fresh format. I didn’t realize that a few updates to Sonar X1 had come out, so I’m working on that too. Glee!

Hope everyone had a good holiday. Here’s to 2012. Live like it’s your last year… even though it’s not. Silly Mayans.

Rargh. And other such onomatopoeiae. So, I’ve made small progress on the album. As you may have guessed, it’s not coming out in September… if you haven’t guessed, either you didn’t catch the blog post where I said it would be out around September, or you don’t really have a concept of what order the months go in. I can’t really fault you for either. Regarding the former, not a whole lot of people read my blog. For the latter, you’re not at fault, the education system is, which is just a whole ‘nother can of worms entirely. Seriously. I think it’s critically flawed.

But I’ll write another blog about that some other time. If I remember to blog. And when/if I remember to blog, I’ll probably forget to blog about that. I’ll probably go on another socio-political rant. Like how fervently I support gay marriage. The recent bill that allows Americans to be detained indefinitely if suspected of terrorism. Or bullying. I’ll go on a mini rant on bullying. Bullying used to be a symptom of the bully. It just meant that that particular person was slightly less of a human being. He hadn’t evolved all the way to civilized society, so was still harboring some cro-magnon instincts. I punch harder, therefore, I’m superior. Even when I was a kid, which was not that long ago (I’m 23, do the math) bullies were just jerks. Now-a-days, it’s being treated as a societal problem. An epidemic of sorts. We have to stop bullying. The War on Bullying! Up there with the wars on terror and drugs. Newsflash: Bullying is going to happen. You can’t stop it. It’s part of growing up. They’ll eventually learn in the real world that bullying in the traditional sense doesn’t get you far. In fact, it gets you fired and kicked out of places. As for the people being bullied, unless it’s something so traumatic that it causes mega social issues, they’ll probably turn out fine. I did. *twitch*

Anyhow, micro-rant over.

Music. Yes, music. I’ve been playing acoustic shows at the local Crown Bar (Corner of Lincolnway and Carey Ave, Cheyenne, Wyoming) and having a blast. I’m there every Friday from 6pm-9pm, and play primarily covers. It’s the thing I look forward to most every single week. I live for Friday. ^_^

I’m also starting to write lyrics, which is odd for me since I relate more with instrumental music, but I want to get my lyrical chops up and start playing original music at these shows.

On top of the acoustic shows, I’ve also been playing more and more shows with my band Steel March. Those have been getting better and better, and we’re looking forward to getting back into writing mode again. We released our CD “Damage Done” back in July, and we’ve sold quite a few copies (I don’t have an exact number at this time), but only one of the songs on there was writting by us as a band. Everything else had been written by our singer and bassist Juliet prior to us forming Steel March. I came in and added my own guitar parts (which, on a few occasions were radically different from what previous guitarists had played, and I feel good about that) but we only wrote one song as a band: “You’ll Never Know.” It’s a blues song with bite.

As for the solo stuff, I wrote and recorded the first song since “Liberate Your World” about a month ago, “Eyes On Fire.” It’s got a very hooky melody that I’m pretty proud of. It’s not just guitar solos over guitar riffs like a lot of my previous work, and the structure deviates a little from my norm. A lot of my songs go ABCBCDBC, a being the intro. This one goes ABCBCDEBCDA. A is the intro and outro, B is the verse, C are little bridges, D is the chorus, E is the solo. I’m starting to focus more on interesting structures as well as interesting chord progressions. This one is actually pretty simple, but to keep things interesting, I alternated between a straight-up lead tone, adding wah, or adding the whammy pedal. Man, that pedal can add spice to anything if you want it to catch ears.

I have some time off from my day job coming up, and no gigs with the band for another week or so, so I plan on finalizing what few songs I have left for this CD, and possibly replacing one or two with more recent pieces.

Here’s to doing what we love for life. Signing out. :)