Yo!

First bit of news: Finally decided to start posting work from my indie metal album. Gonna trickle the songs out as they're done.

This album is a little weird. Titled 'Warcrimes', it's actually a concept album that stems from the player characters in a huge 10 person DnD campaign I started running in 2018. In 2020 I decided to write a song for each character just as a thank you to my players. Originally I just sketched out some rough demos for each song and planned to leave it at that. But I wasn't very happy with where I left most of the tracks and decided to go back over and re-record/polish mostly everything. Over the past 4 years I've very slowly re-recorded and mixed what I could, working on a song for a couple hours every week or so. But unfortunately I've also had 2 computer crashes and lost a ton of the original recordings and couldn't fix a lot of problems I wanted to.

But it's been a while since I posted anything so I decided... screw it. I'm going to post both the album versions as well as the demo tracks. In my experience some people will like those more than the album versions, occasionally a first draft has some kind of raw essence a "final" or "finished" version doesn't. Some tracks don't have these demo versions because they've had major revisions/complete rewrites.

In short: It's gonna be a mess.

Tonally the album varies between a total meme and something more serious. While most of it is metal, I tried playing around with various styles and genres throughout. Almost every track has vocals and and while I drastically improved both in performance and tone over time even to this day I'd say I'm only a 5/10 singer, hitting maybe a 7 at my absolute best moments. But god dammit I had some fun doing it.

I'll organize it all here and update this post with links over time.

TRACKLIST:

1 - DREAMER OF LIES

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)
• Demo Version
• Demo Version (Instrumental)

2 - ICON MAIDEN

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)
• Demo Version
• Demo Version (Instrumental)

3 - HAMMER DOWN

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)
• [Previous Version Proto Demo]

4 - AIN'T STOP SHOOTING

• Album Version
• Demo Version

5 - THE HUNTRESS

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)
• Demo Version
• Demo Version (Instrumental)

6 - CAT

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)

7 - COUNT ON INSURRECTION

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)
• Demo Version
• Demo Version (Instrumental)

8 - EULOGY FOR A SUCCUBUS

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)

9 - LOST AND FOUND

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)
• Demo Version
• Demo Version (Instrumental)

10 - SCALES OF FAMILY

• Album Version
• Album Version (Instrumental)

11 - THE NAN THEORY (INSTRUMENTAL)

• Album Version
• Demo Version

12 - THE LINK (INSTRUMENTAL)

• Album Version
• Demo Version

13 - LITTLE BROTHER (INSTRUMENTAL)

• Album Version

Also, I made a few dumbass Youtube dub videos for fun cause I definitely know how to use my time wisely.

Also also my podcast Eric Hates Dragonball Z is starting up again, going over Dragonball Super.

And now that I feel sufficiently gross about plugging my random projects, hope y'all have a great day!

I've been planning on releasing a SHITLOAD of music this year, just trying to figure out how to make it all happen.

First, I have an album's worth of tracks written for the Tales of Nowhere podcast. They did an arc that covers a few IP's and I had a chance to write some stuff in those styles (specifically Pokemon, Star Trek and Warhammer 40k). I'm excited to share all that because I had a HELL of a lot of fun mimicking, then mixing and matching the different styles. That'll probably come first.

Second, I have an actual real metal album I'm currently finishing. It takes inspiration from a tabletop campaign I ran and each song is about a different player's character from the campaign. I tried making each song a different variety of metal but some of them definitely stray from that. There are vocal and instrumental versions for each track because I know some people would rather just hear the instrumental bits which is totally cool with me. I'd say 80% of the songs are done being written but I still need to remaster the whole thing.

I plan on making a new post with links and a tracklisting when I have everything done so it's easier to navigate. Still not sure when I'll start putting stuff out but we'll go with SOON

But thanks for checking me out in the first place! And if you dig what I drop, I appreciate you even took the time to listen!

UPDATE: I figured out how I'll release the first part since I already have all the files for it. I'll just release 1-2 per day for about a month or so. I think I have ~30 tracks so I should be able to keep it going for the entire month starting tomorrow!

Let's talk about Virtual Guitar Plugins!

So I just put out this song that took me roughly ~9 hours to complete from start to finish... But that's not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to discuss are virtual guitar plugins.

I don't play a single instrument in that track. It's all VST stuff which suits me just fine. The distorted rhythm/lead guitars are Shreddage 3's Hydra which you can hear sounds pretty gnarly. The acoustic and bass parts are some layered discountware samples from AIR "Xpand2!" that sound pretty bad but that's not a dedicated instrument plugin so it's not applicable to what I'm going to say next.

I'm well aware of the bad rap virtual guitars get with actual guitarists and... As a pretty fairly decent guitarist myself I love them. While they can certainly sound mechanical or unrealistic, with a focus on articulation I believe they make a fine substitute for the real thing***. I can understand the concept of "earning the chops" or "virtual guitars are cheating" but I completely disagree with people who entirely discount their use or their place as sample libraries.

First off, speaking to "earning the chops" the only thing I couldn't have played myself in the track is the solo section (which I intentionally made a little ridiculous to stretch what the plugin could do). In fact I wrote the structure out on my own 6-string before converting it over. In honesty it's partially why I can rationalize using a virtual guitar, because I don't feel as though I'm cheating myself of the experience/practice of playing it. So why didn't I just record that instead? Well, that leads to my next point.

Second, it's FAR more cost effective and less time-consuming for my purposes. I will be a metalhead until the day I die but at this point in my career I'm a composer first. Sometimes I want to add some depth and grit to my tracks without having to break out my own guitar, tune it, set up my amp/DI box, record the section, fiddle with distortion settings, re-record anything I fucked up, place it all in time and edit through any mistakes in the recording later. Not to mention it's cheaper to purchase a $150 plugin (Technically $450 altogether if we're including what I paid for Kontakt a while ago) than to buy a high-quality guitar and amp. Mainly the benefit for me is the time-saving aspect. Were I to have gone through recording each and every part individually with actual guitars this track would have probably taken me 50% longer than it did (~4+ more hours). There's certainly an argument to be made here about what that could have added to the track itself, but for what it's worth I don't believe that extra human element outweighs the benefits. Which leads me to my final point.

Third, and I know a lot of purists are going to hate this... But plugins have gotten REALLY good over the past 5 years. I agree that they can certainly sound robotic depending on the sample pool/depth or attention to articulation. Using the above listed track as a reference, knowing there isn't live playing makes it easier to spot the midi-lead tempo consistency in the track itself. But if I hadn't said that (and be honest with yourself), would you have even known during some of the rhythm sections this wasn't a raw recording? I know some people with damn good ears might but for the average listener who didn't know... Probably not. Especially considering how heavily and tightly edited modern metal is today, specifically the djent/melodeath subgenres where the mixing goal almost seems to be to emulate a bloody VST anyway, I don't believe the mechanical nature of having a plugin play pre-chosen notes using different pre-recorded samples is too far away from that.

Anyway that's my heavily anecdotal and subjective take on virtual guitar plugins. I just wanted to toss my 2-cents out there to the metal community on why virtual guitar plugins aren't the end of the world to me. There will always be bands that play a damn good live show and have real tight studio albums that should get the respect they deserve for their skill and talent. And while I don't believe bands that play live should use plugins on albums for some folks it's simply a better solution.

But I'm happy to hear counterpoints because I love hearing other perspectives :]

***In context of the track I listed, I'm specifically talking about the articulation of the rhythm guitars. I didn't try to mask the acoustic or bass samples from being mechanical because Xpand2! isn't a fully realized virtual instrument; Every note only has a single sample. I did humanize the acoustic a touch with reaper's midi editor tool but the samples themselves are such poor quality I felt it was unnecessary, especially since they're layered with other harp samples anyway.

I've been posting music tracks here on NG for a little over 10 years now. Which is... Just insane to think about, at least from my point of view. It's been awesome to go from "Just learning" to "Actually pretty okay" and I mostly have everyone here to thank for that. This community, as fucking strange as it is, is incredibly supportive and helpful for new artists and I'm honored to have been a part for as long as I have. Because of NG, I've been a part of so many awesome projects and still continue to record things to this day.

I recently posted some tracks from a joke EP I made for the Tales of Nowhere Podcast, which I help produce, edit and write the music for. If you'd like to check it out, it's a tabletop roleplaying podcast where we take one cast of characters from different games and rulesets to tell one epic story. We're almost to the end of Season 1 and it's been a hell of an adventure so far.

I also just started a new podcast with one of the people from Tales of Nowhere called Eric Hates Dragonball Z. It's a DBZ rewatch podcast where myself and another host are re-watching the entirety of the original Funimation dub of DBZ and then explain it to our buddy Eric who HATES the show. It's just a goofy little thing we've been having fun with and we'd all genuinely appreciate it if you'd check us out.

But anyway I wanted to take a second and reflect on all the ups and downs over the past 10 years and at the center of it all was this crazy community. All y'all are great and it's been my pleasure to be supported by you.

Sup everybody who still comes around these parts! 

For the last while I've been working with an incredibly talented cast of roleplayers on a podcast called Tales of Nowhere, a tabletop RPG where we take one cast of characters through multiple games and rulesets to tell one epic story. We just publicly released yesterday on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher and others! Or you can stream the episodes directly from our website. 

When I was first asked to join on and write some music, I was suuuuuper skeptical. But after 20 minutes, all doubts faded when I realized these people are FANTASTIC entertainers. I promise I wouldn't be plugging this if I didn't believe it was worth your time. Because it absolutely is. 

My role in the podcast is to provide Audio Engineering stuff and some background music. The team and I would be beyond appreciative if you could give us some time to win you over.

I've put out two of the character themes I made (Hondo and Thane) and should be following up with more if I have the time to get some done.

Either way, you're awesome and you should feel awesome.Thanks for your time!