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.

Living in the Russian Federation – 20/10/2008

So I arrived after a couple of fun flights… The first thing to strike me was how incredibly hot the women are. Incredible. I kid you not, there were two flight attendants who I’d consider to be pretty much perfect, and the lovely girl next to me on the flight was a dead ringer for Tricia Helfer (of BSG fame).Things bode well indeed.

Aside from the women, I have to admit to having a near panic situation when boarding the plane as I realised that a) I was the only English speaking person on there and b) EVERYTHING was in Russian. This was just the flight too. I sort of wondered what I had got myself into but the fear soon subsided when I was brought my first in-flight vodka (Yes, first – indicating that there were several more after that initial one).

Getting back to my apartment from the airport was pretty easy enough, although first impressions were that I’ve never seen traffic blocked like I did here. My driver Dimitri (who was a living legend) informs me that the roads just get conjested randomly through the day and night with no warning. Sometimes a 25 minute walk can take 3 hours in a car, although he recommends that the car is the better option!

Here’s a video of my first impressions of the hotel:

It’s already 11pm here so I don’t intend to venture out into the city until the morning. First day at work: 8:30am sharp – I’m looking forward to it.

Philthy