A bit delayed this year (it’s hard to find enough time to record with a toddler running around the house :P), but it’s finally here. Please enjoy my yearly Christmas medley!
This time around I’ve mashed up “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Let It Snow” in a progressive metal extravaganza. Somewhat deviating from my usual medley style, this year already starts out pretty heavy and somber instead of the much quieter and softer beginnings of previous years.
Anyway, download it and listen to it. I hope you like it!
For the nerds, this year’s medley was recorded exclusively with my brand new Strandberg Boden OS 8, an 8-string guitar, my old Ibanez ATK-305 bass, and using my Roland TD-9 electronic drum kit. Software-wise, the DAW used was Cubase 8.5 Pro with a good sprinkle of various plugins. The guitars all either go through Peavey Revalver or Overloud TH-2 as amp plugin. The drum sounds are from Toontrack’s excellent Superior Drummer plugin.
Who would have thought that I’d actually pump out another song just shortly after last year’s Christmas Medley…well, okay it took two months, so sue me 😉
The rhythm track of this song was a single take jam session I did a few weeks ago that I was lucky enough to record (often times I’ll just jam something cool, not record it, and immediately forget it, which leads to me screaming profanities at my neighbors, housemates, and other random people that happen to walk past the house ;)). I re-recorded the song with a click track, added some solos and – taa daa – this is the end result. I admit, it’s kind of random, but it was still pretty cool to just come up with a 4 minute piece of music while jamming.
Since the music is so random I thought the title “April Weather” was appropriate because in Austria the weather in April is pretty random and the song reminded me of it 🙂
This is quite a heavy, short, instrumental shredding rock piece that I put together in a hurry. It was inspired by one of the video games I was working on at work at the time I composed this. That video game was an action game involving a helicopter flying around in the desert, and that’s what I had in mind when writing this little tune.
This is the karaoke (off-vocal) version of a song I wrote some time ago. Since I’m not that great of a singer I decided to record the vocals once I get a good vocalist to do the vocals properly. For now just enjoy it as quite heavy instrumental rock piece with some weird measure changes in there 🙂
This song was basically composed shortly after a heavy car accident I had on November 6th in 1998. I began to work again on the song sometime in March 1999 when I started to record the basic riffs. The solos were worked out a little later, sometime in April and May 1999, but were recorded in the end of July 1999.
The song turned out to be rather heavy and also I do more guitar shredding than in my other songs (at least that’s what I think, but judge for yourself). This is also basically the first song where I really use the full tonal range of my Ibanez Universe 7-string (going deep down ;-)).
