Quite a silly title but it was the best I could do.

Another kickass session last sunday. Worked on the new track which is coming along nicely. Just a great cruising track with some cool hooks in it. Next week we plan to continue the work and possibly tinker with some new or revisted material. Also, my new guitar setup will be coming along at some stage. It’s in the testing phase at the moment and is looking promising.

Rock on. Rob.

After a week off we were all pretty anxious to get back into it, and get back into it we did. We spent the hour or so before lunch working on our second new song, Behind Closed Doors, and somehow it got better during the prior two weeks without any of actually doing anything. Since we finally wrote the end to it last time, the song really has a feeling of being whole now, which helps us determine what changes we need to make it into a great song. My vocals need a fair bit of work on this one, but I’ve been working on it during the week and I think I’ve got a better feel for how it should go now.

We also started a new song and got the usual verse and chorus done right away. We’ve gone in a slightly different direction than we’re used to on this one (Rob actually used a major key!) but it’s coming together well already so I have high hopes for the finished song.

Rob made the foolish mistake of sending me the recording of this weeks band practise, so I’ve decided to put up a small taste of what we’ve been working on. The guys wouldn’t like it if I put up any full tracks, we’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to go about releasing material on the website, but I don’t think they’ll mind if I play you this small excerpt.

This is from Rising From The Flames, and I think it’s the section that that really makes the song rock:

I’m sad to report that my Engl amplifier was not repairable from it’s fault condition. After searching high and low for the schematic diagram with no luck I had to attempt a reverse engineering of the circuit. Alas my knowledge only stretched so far and in the end she couldn’t be saved. I did however modify the combo box into a kickass little extention cab with it’s quality timber, joints and tone machine of a Celestion Vintage 30 driver living on healthy and well. The actual amplifier parts will be divided up with half sold on eBay and the other half going into my next rig of noise (toneful noise of course). What could it be next …?, a new approach, naturally… as it seems that not even handmade German equipment lasts much over a year these days, disappointing but I’m happy she appeared on a couple of recordings at least.

Megadeth tonight at Festival hall, and beer… ja

One and all of us are getting a little lazy as far as the “weekly” update goes. Since we all neglected the duty last week, this entry shall cover the last two weeks. A lot has happened and we have been fairly productive despite both sessions suffering the usual shortening that comes with us all having jobs, family, friends and other considerations that sometimes get in the way.

Last week I was unable to start as early as usual because I decided that working Sat was too good to refuse, money is handy you know. So after starting at 3:00, we had to make do with a relatively short rehearsal and despite that little hassle we were still able to get some work done towards the song we are currently writing, taking that one step further towards the foundation we were able to work from today.

During the week a few exciting things also happened. Janine and I celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary on Monday. Yay for us.

Ben, Trev and I went to see Arch Enemy, Trivium and Machine Head at Festival Hall on Wednesday for the Black Crusade Tour. Arch Enemy put on a really good, heavy and loud show. Trivium didn’t impress me but I never expected them to. Trev and I have a difference of opinion as far as those guys go, and what made it worse was that half the crowd seemed to be there exclusively to see them, as they all left after their set and totally missed Machine Head’s set.

I spent all of Machine Head’s set in the mosh pit going crazy with my metal brothers, it was madness in there, shoes were going everywhere. They played an amazing set, they even dressed up for halloween. Adam was dressed as Steve Irwin and did an excellent impression during the set. Phil was dressed as a catholic school girl which was fuel enough for a few laughs and Dave was dressed as Gene Simmons. I don’t know who Rob was supposed to be as he changed outfits a couple of times. During the set they got a few audience members up on stage who had also dressed up and they were given the go ahead to jump off the stage into the crowd, which would have been pretty cool as they were also able to meet the band. The band also played a version of Tenacious D’s ‘Fuck Her Gently’ which was good for a laugh.

Apart from the gig I also had a great night because we met at the pub for a drink before the show and met another guy who was also going, had a good chat and all went to the show together.

Thursday morning I woke up early, sore and tired to go get tickets for Janine, myself, Rob and Trev to see Ozzy Osbourne at Rod Laver Arena next year. I was third in the line and was trying for tickets on the floor at the front of the arena but they’d unfortunately all sold by the time I got to the front of the line; anyway I got four tickets for the back half of the venue on the floor. We are all happy and excited to be able to see the crazy rock legend next year, can’t wait.

Anyway, back to the important issues, this week was another short session as Rob had a family commitment he needed to attend. Aside from that, I think we were very productive. The song is 95% finished, the main structure, transitions, lyrics and everything else is set in place. We just need to work out a few of the kinks and add a little polish and then we can go onto new things during our next session.

Next week we are having a break because Rob is going away for the weekend. From the following week we will be regularly rehearsing on Sundays instead of Saturdays, as it allows a little more flexibility for me to work on the weekends and for us to have longer rehearsals and get more work done on our songs.

Anyway, that’s enough from me, see you next time.

Jay

Check out Kurodust T-Shirt designs at www.redbubble.com, if you have trouble finding the designs just search for Kurodust, KurodustStix or Jay Stark. While you’re there you can also search for Boof or Janine Conigliaro-Stark to see some of my wife Janine’s designs.

Howdy y’all.

Another week is done and dusted. For the first time in quite a few weeks I actually feel happy with what we achieved this week. It was another shortish session again but that can’t be helped. I would’ve liked to have spent a little more time working on the song we’re writing, especially since we had a little more momentum going this time around. Unfortunately we all have busy lives outside of the mighty Kurodust.

Last week was another good session but since Ben was away it wasn’t quite the same, but I do feel that we achieved a lot as far as developing some ideas which we were able to revisit in more detail and with Ben’s involvement again this week.

All the main ideas for the intro and the music for the choruses and some ideas for verses were already planned and this week we were able to spend more time working out the structure of the song and writing new lyrics as well as coming up with some more fun little transition parts that I personally think will be very effective and hooky when the song is complete.

Yes, it’s true we have had quite a few false starts in recent times, abandoning ideas on an almost weekly basis, and this song hasn’t entirely escaped the chopping block. I think we all pretty much agree that this song isn’t going to work where we had originally planned to position it on our next offering, scheduled for release in the very distant future by the way, and we’ve also decided to rethink the theme. We are now writing from a much more personal direction than the heavily political direction we were going for previously.

Anyway that’s enough of a teaser from me, until next time.

I’ve been the guy who is always on the throne.

Jay

Hi all, thought I would send some ‘in-progress’ images of my amplifier modifications. Not giving any hint as to what it will turn out as, you can see that it is indeed a work in progress.

What can I say ?… Danger Danger, High Voltage !!!

It is a long way from complete but should kick ass once finshed. ciao.

Bits and pieces
What a mess

Just pointing out that I have enabled comments on all posts and have added a contact form to the top of the page, so anybody who’s been busting to tell us how great/awful we are, you now have the means.

Hello all.
Yes we worked on the music for the intro of the new song and also experimented with how we might shift from the chorus to verse and back again. The intro is sounding better I think, we have come up with some good drum ideas and timing for the pauses, etc… Ben will of course have to wait until next week to hear it for himself ;o).
All in all though it was a fairly relaxed session, we had a bit of a laugh as always and made fun of Trev.
Until next week…

Hrmm, I guess we all just thought somebody else would make a post last week.

A funny thing happened when we tried to finish the song we started the week before: we didn’t want to. It seemed like we could all see exactly how to finish the song, and we already weren’t happy with the end result. So we didn’t, we started something new, and I think it was a good idea because the new song has much more potential. It’s going to be a challenge, but it will hopefully end up much better than the other song was ever going to.

So, we decided to slightly deviate from our plan of action. We would write the music for the chorus first, decide on a subject or theme that suited the chorus, but then write the actual lyrics for the verses before writing the chorus. The reasoning behind this was that we need the chorus to be the memorable part of the song that really sums up the whole idea, but when we write we tend to write in a detailed form first. So by writing the verses we can get our main ideas out on paper, then take a step back and try to write the chorus based on that.

That was the theory anyway. We ended up finding a few lines in my notes that fit the chorus riff quite nicely, so we went on to write the verses based on that anyway. So it was a nice idea, but this stuff doesn’t always work out the way you plan.

So, last I’d heard we’d kind of worked out an intro, we had some lyrics for a verse and a chorus, and they’re very loosely tied together. I say ‘last I’d heard’ because I ditched the guys this weekend to get my geek on at the Armageddon Expo, while they decided to work on the song a bit more. I’ve yet to find out how they went, so maybe one of them can add a post with some updates