I had the chance to see Rush at Jones Beach Theater over the weekend and just thought I’d share some impressions. Rush is my favorite band and this is not the first time I was seeing them, but I thought the show was enough of a stand out to warrant a little writing.

I cannot quibble with the guys performance. For a band that formed in 1968, these guys still seem to be at the top of their game. I can’t imagine they have many decades left to tour, but I also can’t see them quitting anytime soon either. They rocked the place and the crowd loved it.

On a less positive note, and I’ve seen this mentioned on the boards, there seemed to be sound issues. Before the intermission, I noticed instruments drifting in and out, sonically. They would never go mute, but the levels seemed to be moving up and down a lot, which was very distracting. Also, it seemed like Geddy’s keyboard had even more trouble, I think it was during the song Marathon (but I can’t find a Youtube video to confirm so it could have been another one). Anyway, it got so quiet you almost couldn’t hear it and he seemed really pissed and missed a vocal cue by a few bars, almost as if he was trying to make his crew notice his displeasure. Neil and Alex just kept playing, and I assume, waiting for him to start singing again, which he eventually did.

Later, Alex completely missed one of his vocal cues in the song Subdivisions. You could tell he was embarrassed but totally laughed it off with the guitar techs.

After intermission, they seemed to have fixed whatever sound problems had plagued the first half of the show, and there were no more sound problems. It was still a little too noisy to my liking, but fairly good. Of note was how strong the sub bass signal was, almost like being in a dance club with a really good system. Every bass drum hit or bass guitar pluck hit you squarely in the gut.

There were two major highlights in the show for me. One was the performance of The Camera Eye in its entirety. Since they were playing the entire Moving Pictures album, I knew this would be in the set list and that was a major motivation for me to attend the show. If you are not familiar with this song, it’s very New York and London centric, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking around the city when it comes up on the old iPod and I get chills. Anyway, Saturday night, Geddy seemed to put extra emphasis on the words New York and Manhattan and the crowd ate it up. I just settled in for the ride, and was a bit beside myself that they were really playing it after all this time.

The second highlight was the inclusion of La Villa Strangiato in the encore. Again, for those unfamiliar with Rush tunes, it is a super complicated song which they couldn’t even record in the studio the first time without first breaking it into three different takes. It was such a momentous recording, it cause the band to change their whole direction with the following album and lead to the development of the band I like so much. It’s also one of those songs I never expected to hear live, so it was a real treat to see them bring it back.

Neil’s drum solo was great. I didn’t see the Snakes and Arrows tour, so I don’t know if this version is new for the Time Machine tour, or if it’s what he played last time, but it was very different from any of the solos I’ve heard him do before, like he’s evolved it again into a new direction. Same quality as ever, but with a new composition.

As to the crowd, everyone around me was very well behaved. Others have noted the young kid in the second row, and I noticed him too, air drumming in unison with all the adults around him. One can’t imagine he’s had the time in his short life to get so familiar with these old tunes, but clearly he has. I’d love to know his story, but imagine one or both of his parents must be huge fans. Like me, lol.

It was a great show. I didn’t even mention the filmic bits that tied the whole time machine theme together, or the walk-on performances of the rubber chicken man or the Beir Madchen who were ‘moving pitchers’ of beer, or the updated video graphics used throughout the show, because that’s all just icing on the cake. The band played great, reaching deep in their catalog at the same time playing their latest releases and everyone seemed to have a blast, and I was one of them.

Part Two: Recording From Afar

Sadly, I live in a different place to John, Moe and Hilden. Very different, over 4,000 miles away different actually. I really wanted to keep an active involvement with the ZomBOOsical after heading home and we’d already tried musical collaboration over the internet before with the Shmopera and it worked surprisingly well.

So how does it work? Well more often than not I’d get a mail or something from Hilden with an mp3 of a rough track that they were working on with some vague ideas of what they need on the guitar and what bpm the track would be set to. As luck would have it, Hilden and I both use Logic Pro on the Mac so our process for recording and mixing is very similar, which made the process a little smoother. On top of the direct emails, I’d be chatting with John on a pretty much daily basis via Skype, MSN, Email and Facebook chat to keep up to date with what’s going on and input the occasional idea here and there.

My thought process for recording was to provide Hilden with as dry and raw a sound file as I could so that he could easily edit and mix later on to fit with the other things he had. This can be quite a difficult thing to achieve, you want to provide enough EQ to give direction to how you think it should sound but not enough that it limits or forces the mix in a particular direction. Electric guitar is also fun given that you’re generally talking about adding a truck load of different effects to get ‘that sound’ so another balance to hit for example was ‘how much delay and reverb’.

The way I approached these issues was to create a rough mix with all instruments included as a reference point to a) where my parts should be time-wise and b) a rough idea of how I’d mix it. That’s mainly where things sit in the stereo mix, how much effects I’d go with a rough EQ pass. Following that file I’d send each separate audio track with a small amount of EQ, minimal effects and no stereo mix.

One of the things that I wanted to make sure that I captured with the actual performances when recording was the ‘recorded on the spot with minimal thought process’ feel that we had from the first session. Thankfully, the way I approach recording guitar melody/lead work is to set the section I’m working on into a loop, hit record and improvise for a few runs. From there I’ll either find one of the performances that I already love or listen through them all and pick out the bits that I think worked and record what I call a Frankenstein Track, all the bits I like stitched together.

As a treat, here’s some of the guitar work that I did that didn’t make it into the final tracks…

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Phil Haymes joins us this week and once again brings the class and charm while we talk about Batman: Arkham Asylum, iMech and Dissidia: Final Fantasy!

Thanks for listening!

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SHOWNOTES

00:00-Show Intro
06:38-Drunk Dials
14:15-Mailbag
23:07-iMech Review (iPhone)
29:54-Dissidia: Final Fantasy Review (PSP)
36:47-Batman: Arkham Asylum Review (PS3)
54:42-Retro Review: Robotron 2084 (7800)
1:01:22-Feature Presentation: Philthy’s Guitar
1:21:28-Five Things
1:36:03-The Last Shot
1:37:53-Show Close

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DGR: 08.31.2009

Evening all, it’s been a long time. Due to the Writer’s Strike I have been on hiatus, waiting for justice, inspiration and the correct dosage of alcohol to return. And return I have.

So what have I been doing in the last – say – six months? Well the big thing is that after enough people kept telling me, I decided it was time to write my first album which I started probably around January/February this year and I’m aiming to get fully recorded by mid-2010. I also recently started up my own website: www.PhilHaymes.com which I’m using to promote my stuff, blog about the process of writing an album and learning guitar. The good news is that I’ll also be sharing some of this with the Robot Panic community too.

I’m currently about 30% through the writing of the album, I’ve got a few songs down in rough demo format and an overall structure/tracklist for the album. The title is ‘Bright Shadows and Dark Light’ which is based off of two tracks from the mid section of the album, cunningly called ‘Bright Shadows’ and (yep you’ve guessed it) ‘Dark Light’.

Ok so to give you all a flavor of things to come here’s a couple of videos of some of the rough tracks I’ve been working on:

This first track is lovingly called ‘Giant Enemy Pyramid’ (GEP for short) and it’s the opener for the album. It’s pretty shirt and this is an early version, the current one I have has a much better lead apart as well as a kick-ass synth solo at the end!

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Adding Boost to your Picking technique with F-zero. A couple of excercises that I like to do to improve my picking technique, speed and acuracy on a near daily basis. Both riffs come from F-Zero X which means they’re gonna have some serious boost…

Riff 1: Crazy Call At Cry (Port Town)
Riff 2: Driving Through on Max (Rainbox Road)

The trick to mastering this really is to start slow and work your way up to a decent speed. You need to make sure that you keep accurate technique at each tempo and that you don’t play any differently.

That’s right folks, today marks the release of a Metallica album that does not suck and so to celebrate what myself and John have decided should be named “Metallica Day” I decided to pick up the guitar and learn one of the new songs.

There are frankly a lot of very cool songs on the album but the one that instantly resonated with me was The Day That Never Comes, and so I set to work late at night transcribing like crazy. And whilst I don’t have all of the song down (I’m still working on the main solo) I wanted to get something out on this glorious day. So please feel free to watch this video of me late at night, wearing sunglasses when I clearly shouldn’t be and making what I hope is a half-decent first try of this awesome song.

Because I’m me, I’ve taken a few creative liberties in some areas so this isn’t an exact transcription…

Love

Philthy

So a few weeks back now I got a little stressed over several major things going on in my life and ended up going without sleep for over 5 days. I don’t recommend this as many strange things start to happen from about day three onwards. When you hit three days without sleep you begin to be in a constant position of being on the verge of sleep.

This isn’t too bad, I guess, and in my case a very strange thing happened. I was a few days beforehand doing a lesson with my most awesome guitar tutor Dave Weiner and we got into some great disscussions about different playing styles and improvisation. Now I’m pretty much a rock guy through and through and never really ventured too far outside the wide-area of rock But Dave challenged me to find as many random backing tracks from different styles that I don’t usually play and just keep playing until they started to click.

I went forth onto the internets using my clearly superior browsing skills and found backing tracks covering funk, disco, blues, jazz, fusion and even – dare I say it – country (the music of pain). I played over a few of these for a bit but nothing really clicked. That is until day three of no sleep.

I made a discovery, that when you hit day three with no sleep and you are at that point where you are almost asleep yet permanently awake you become far more creative. Ideas flow through your mind and you don’t need to think about it. Everything I was playing was gold; or at least seemed like it in this state of mind. I decided that it would be a great idea to capture this and the video you are about to see is the result.

I loaded up a backing track in the style of Texas Blues and let rip. I looped the track three times with the video rolling, the first time to work out the scale, the second time to get used to it and the third time is what you can see here. I’m frankly shocked and appauled at the results as I never played the blues before that day.

As it transpires, day four with no sleep is less fun. I do not recommend it in any way at all ever. When you hit day four things start to blur and you feel sick. When you hit day four, hallucinations happen and when you think you are happily typing away on your PC you suddenly realize that actually you are sitting on the kitchen floor doing pretty much nothing.

Day five is worse. Nothing more needs to be said.

So in summing up, there’s never a good reason to not sleep for several days and I don’t recommend it. That said, sometimes cool things can happen, if only for a short time. Insomnia is neither fun nor cool.

Seriously though, don’t try it at home kids.

Philthy out!

Last time we took a look at the main riff for the Black Mages track “Those Who Fight Further” as asked by reader Purple_Haze in our comments section.

He also requested Matoya’s Cave by the Black Mages so this week we are going to take a look at the main melody for that track:

Next time I’m going to show you how to add boost to your picking technique using some riffs from F-Zero X. Remember, you can request tracks or things you want me to cover by either commenting in this post or emailing me at: philthysack@drunkengamersradio.com

So I always wanted to hear the Black Mages (Nobuo Uematsu’s rock band) arrange this song for one of their CD’s and in lieu of that not happening on the latest release “Darkness and Starlight” I figured I’d do a quick mock-up of how I’d like to hear it. I had to make a pretty bad midi for some of the backing so the bulk of it is guitar driven rather than keyboard.

I mixed it up with some of the FMV’s from the game to give it a bit of context. Apologies on the dodgy finish but I was running short on time and the first attempt didn’t sync as well as planned…

Hope you enjoy it!

Philthy

Continuing my musical contributions to the site I present to you all my first remix of a Video-Game theme.

So I’d been playing around with a Macbook Pro I was trialling for work for just over a week now and realised how insanely cool the Garageband app is for creating backing tracks etc. I’d had a few requests recently to record a version of this track (Simon’s Theme – from Super Castlevania 4) so I figured now was a good time to have a play and learn how to use the laptop keyboard to record…

I added some drums and guitars on top and I think it turned out pretty decent!

You can download and listen here: Simon’s Theme

Philthy