Very excited to report that the whole band has secured tickets to see Iron Maiden in Feb of next year !!!, I’m especially excited, Maiden being my all-time no. 1 hard rock act… got a lot of respect and admiration for those dudes… they opened my eyes to the epic solo and the value of hard earned song writing. They will also be playing a rare 80’s retrospective set, which is just what the fans want.

In other news my Engl guitar amp will be in the work shop for a while, I’ve ordered the schematic diagram from the states and will be working on it over time.

rock on.
Engl in pieces

Time was against us this week due to circumstances out of our control. I had some errands to run and after arriving a little late my guitar amp decided to pack it in…. hmm, *rethinking his product endorsement*. I’ll have to have a look at that when I can. We did however manage to get a nice little short song done and dusted in the time we had available. The more complicated track we have been working on will probably have to wait for a bit until we feel we can do it justice. Hope everyone had a good week !!!.. and Happy Birthday to Trev !!!

If we started writing songs about internet memes and filthy humour, we’d probably get a lot more written…

Actually, we were quite productive this week, and the pieces of our new song are falling into place. I feel like my melodies still need quite a bit of work, but then I always feel that way in the early stages of a song, and they generally get a lot better as I get used to the song and it’s structure.

This song is going to require a lot more emotion than our other songs so that is going to be a challenge; hopefully I can do it justice.

No rehearsal next week as it is our friend’s bucks weekend, but we’ll be back to writing the following week.

The video and audio from our gig is now up, take a look!

With the gig completed, we now have the opportunity to relax a bit and get into writing mode, something we have all been looking forward for some time. We only had a few hours for band practise this week for various reasons but we made sure they were put to good use and, instead of jumping straight back onto our instruments to bang something out, we sat down and had a talk about the way we write songs and how we want to go about writing in future.

The summary: we want to have an idea of the emotional arc we want each song to follow before we write any music or lyrics for it, to give us something to aim for. We used the example of the song we wrote for Kynan’s gig as a song that we feel really hit the mark: a pumping, high energy party song. Sure, that mark was set relatively low, but I think we achieved it well. (Having realised that, it would be a shame for that work to go to waste, so we will probably pull that track out for any future celebratory gigs we do, changing the lyrics to fit of course)

So we spent some time drawing out an emotional map of the next song we are writing, which has some much stronger and more personal themes associated it. We completed an initial pass of the first couple of verses, as well as jammed out some good stuff that will hopefully make it into the song. Nothing is locked in yet, my melodies in particular will evolve greatly over the process of writing, but we were all happy with the way it’s going so far.

Look out for the video and more photos from the gig within the next day or so.