To Anyone Still Out There Listening...

Sometime in late 2019 or early 2020, I more or less stopped playing guitar altogether. Stopped practicing, jamming, or trying to write anything. The chaos of the last several years, as well as work and home responsibilities, took a toll and I didn’t have the time/interest/energy to put into music. 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been participating in a fitness challenge that requires waking up at 5:00 to work out. After workouts, I've found myself with anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour every weekday morning before I need to start work, so for the last week or so, I've been practicing guitar again. Its amazing how much you forget when you haven't played in a couple of years.

Before I left my last band, our lead guitarist gave me this DigiTech RP300 effects processor. I never found a use for it until now - turns out it works great for early morning guitar practice while my wife is still asleep. (Somehow I don't think she'd appreciate me cranking up my "Wall of Doom" at 6:30 A.M. to run scales...) 

It feels great to be playing again.

Free Tool Alert: VSTs for Metal Guitar Tone

A few free tools I stumbled across on YouTube. The video below gives a great demo on how to use them. I'll be trying these out once I have more time to play guitar. Hopefully someone else out there finds these useful!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8EDqv3BvV0

NaLex Amp Sim Ninja - Amp & Preamp
https://nalexsoft.blogspot.com/2019/09/ninja-preamp.html

GVST Plugins (Noise Gate and Tuner used in video)
https://www.gvst.co.uk/downloads.htm

Ignite Amps NadIR - used as a cabinet simulator for guitar and bass (pre)amplifiers
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/nadir-by-ignite-amps

Artist Profile: Warprophet

Band Name/Pseudonym: Warprophet

Real Name: Brian Anderson

Instruments Played: Guitar, Bass, Vocals, Drum/MIDI Programming

Influences, Musical or Otherwise: The Sword, Coheed and Cambria, Thrice, Jethro Tull, AFI, Joe Satriani, Iron Maiden, Cloudkicker, Symphony X, and a whole host of other loud, guitar-driven bands that I find inspiring, Videogames, History, Nature, Comics, Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Bio: I’m from South Jordan, UT and been doing various musical things as long as I can remember. I picked up the guitar in high school and have been attempting to play it properly ever since (with varying degrees of success). I’ve taken lessons and classes here and there but am largely self-taught.

Thoughts on your experience participating in Silent Sci-Fi: This was much more fun, and more difficult than I had anticipated. In terms of my writing process, I watched the film, guitar in hand, recording software running, and played whatever came to mind over those two hours. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but also resulted in me having to divide my attention between film and guitar, which likely made me less productive than I would have been otherwise. Despite the added pressure, I still managed to get a couple of ideas I liked out of that process. I kept coming back to some of the first scenes of the film for inspiration, mentally hearing a determined, driving groove as the ship approaches this unknown planet and descends through the atmosphere.

I used Guitar Pro 6 to build the framework of the song, then imported the MIDI into Reaper, intending to use it as a scratch track that would be muted in the final mix. However, I liked the chiptune-ish sound of the synth so much that I kept it in. This was my first time using MIDI in this way in a project, and I enjoyed the way it made me change the way I worked.

Gear used included:

Brawley Threat

Gibson Explorer Gothic w/ SD Black Winter pickups

MIM Fender Jazz Bass

Egnater Tweaker 15

Fender Bassman 250

Focusrite Scarlett 2i2

Contact info: The best place to contact me is through this blog, the Silent Sci-Fi Facebook page, or at silent.scifi@gmail.com.

Other projects:

See Scott Grow

Nightmare Robot Legion

A Way to Survive

Artist Profile: The Guys from Ipanema

Name/Band Name/Pseudonym: The Guys from Ipanema

Real Name: Judd Ellis

Instruments Played: Guitar, Bass, Drum Machine, Keyboards, Sound Effects

Influences, Musical or Otherwise: Too many to count. Rush, Led Zeppelin,
Pink Floyd, Joe Bonamassa, Derek Trucks, Joe Satriani, Al Di Meola, Victor
Wooten, Michael Dowdle and lots of others in many different styles.

Bio: I’m the lead guitarist, keyboard player, occasional background vocalist, and
waffle-maker for the rock band The Guys from Ipanema (While my band didn’t
participate in the Silent Sci-Fi project with me, I’m still shamelessly promoting
them here). I love music in just about any form and play it constantly, whether
shredding some Rush tunes with my band or playing in a jazz combo, it seems
that I’m always playing music of some sort.

Thoughts on your experience participating in Silent Sci-Fi: This was a
really cool and challenging project! I had a great time looking for ways to take
inspiration from The Forbidden Planet and create an instrumental piece that not
only reflected my own artistry but pushed some boundaries for me. It was
definitely interesting to watch the whole movie on mute, and led to some great
bad lip reading moments, but there were also moments that just stood out and
were calling out with musical ideas. The final product that I came up with has
three distinct movements, each evoking its own imagery and ideas and inspired
by the open canvas of a muted 50s Sci-Fi movie.

Contact Info: My band (The Guys from Ipanema) can be found at our website,
guysfromipanemaband.com, which has links to our YouTube page, upcoming
gigs, and other info. Check back at our website soon; we’ll be posting demos
within the next week!

Artist Profile: Hardwire Steamcoaster

Name/Band Name/Pseudonym: Hardwire Steamcoaster

Real Name: Dave Comstock

Instruments Played: Guitar, drum machine, bass, GarageBand app on a MacBook

Bio: Frontman for White Collar Caddy, spends his spare time looking for goofy noises to bring to shows, and fry cooking at Harmons.

Contact info: Get ready for White Collar Caddy's first EP! "The Howling Garage" Coming sometime in August....

Artist Profile: Corsair to Midnight

Band Name:  Corsair to Midnight

Band Members:  Abby Anderson (piano/vocals), Scott Anderson (guitar/vocals)

Influences:  Andy Mckee, Jon Schmidt, David Lanz, Keldian, Symphony X, Collective Soul, Imagine Dragons, and many others!

Bio:  Corsair to Midnight is the sonic outlet of two lifelong music enthusiasts.  Enjoy. 

Silent Sci-Fi Project Notes:  This has been a great project to be a part of!  Writing an instrumental song inspired by Forbidden Planet (watched with the sound on mute) was a fun experience.  What a cool, weird, old movie!  Our song was inspired by the opening scenes, where an intrepid crew is riding along through space toward the “forbidden planet”.  There are some great views of stars and the planet as seen through a viewport on the spaceship’s bridge.  The interior of ship has some classic, retro-futuristic feel to it.  The only difficulty in completing this project was with my recording setup.  The last time we did any audio recording was in June of 2013!  Some software updates must have must have really messed things up on the computer we had previously used to record.  We used an M-Audio MobilePre 2-channel interface but it wouldn’t work properly for playback or recording.  So we had to install our recording software, Pro Tools 8.0.3 SE, on an older computer to get it done.  New to our gear collection is an ART Tube MP preamp, so that took a little fine-tuning to dial in.  But despite those technical issues, we’re very happy with the song we created.  We hope you like it too!

Band Links:

Listen to the title track of our album “Living Color”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cq_CSQlE8E

Music available for free download at https://corsairtomidnight.bandcamp.com/

 

Subscribe to our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDhcfCJ8YNAfjIx3hct494A