Busy?

Record Time just keeps getting harder, and this one will definitely be the hardest for me. During 1-5, I was either in school and pushing all my work aside, or unemployed and doing absolutely nothing. Now I've got a 9-6 job (with another 1.5 hours in traffic), leaving me with only a few hours each night to record.

My strategy? 30 minutes of random, unfiltered nonsense. Every time I do an album, I set out to make something really experimental and weird, but it never happens -- it all ends up reverting back to my usual wall-of-sound pop-metal stuff. I think I've developed a nice little style of my own, but I'm sick of it now.

So I'm going to force myself out my comfort zone by laying down 30 minutes of drum improv -- randomly strung-together beats with illogical tempo and meter shifts. Then just write everything else on top of it. I've always loved bands with rapid-fire changes like Mr. Bungle, Idiot Flesh, and Naked City...I realize they write those changes for a reason, but I don't have time for that! I also bought an incredible new electronic drumset a few months ago, so it'll be fun to have something a little more human-sounding than perfectly quantized drum samples.

Guitar tuning probably won't be a big deal to many other people, but I made the pretty huge decision to play in Eb standard this time. Every record I've made in the past 4 years or so has been in the ridiculous Open C tuning (CGCGCE) or some variation of it...I went down to Open Bb at some point. Strange as it sounds, I'm hoping standard tuning will make this music LESS poppy, since I barely remember how to play in it anymore.

As for lyrics, my tentative idea is to make this entire thing an experimental children's album. Have you ever heard a song about brushing your teeth in 11/8 time? If you have, then dammit.