So we wanted to let everyone know what’s actually going on around here a little more today.

First off Blissful Misery and Black Misery are basically combining once again under Blissful Misery.  Black Misery’s songs will not become ours as well.

I, Michael, will be playing lead guitar, and maybe doing some singing.  Jessica from Black Misery is joining the band as the lead or maybe co-lead vocalist.  We will be using our notation and studio programs to create our complete songs and then using them as backing tracks for whatever we happen to be missing in the band at the time.  We use a combination of 3 main programs, Power Tab, Guitar Pro, and Sonar PE to do this. In Sonar we use the Studio Instruments soft synths also by Cakewalk to get realistic drums and bass tracks, as well as some strings an key tracks.  We also have a lot of other soft synth instruments at our disposal that we use in studio and as live backing tracks.  At the current time I, Michael, am writing all of the music and vocal melodies, as well as a lot of the lyrics.  Jessica will continue to write lyrics as well probably.

So what’s on the agenda?

Yesterday and today I cleaned up the studio really nicely, and worked a lot on the studio computer. I got the computer running much better again, but may still have to do a complete restart on it at some point to get things to working better.

As for the website I will be working on a customized version of either the Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven themes for WordPress. I am going to try to get the site to look as close it’s current looks as I can.  The theme we are currently using I personally designed from scratch a few years back for the much older versions of WordPress. The theme has worked very well for us, but the advances in WordPress over the last 2 years has left the theme pretty much obsolete. By using customized version of one of these new themes we will be able to use many new features without having to have old obsolete plugins.  This may take us a few days or even weeks to finish. During this site development stage our site may go offline, look completely different, or even look completely screwed up.  In the end it will be worth it though.

Another change coming to our website is that we are going to be deleting our current forums located here on this server.  We may add or copy the forum over to the Unbounded Productions sever, but either way it will be gone from this server.  In removing the forums from this server we will be able to bring our fans more pictures and content even if they are streamed from the UP server.  As it is we are very very close to running out of room on this server.

E-Mail Updates. We do not use the blissfulmisery.com email addresses at all anymore.  If you for some reason get email from a blissfulmisery.com email address it’s most likely spam that we have no way of stopping.  The best way of contacting the band is via the contact form on the website in the community section.

Old songs and new songs will be played, written, and worked on. We have decided to not abandon anything we have done in the past, because we love playing and listening to those songs.  We may change up some parts of the songs, but we will still work on them.  However, our new methods may end up changing the site contents to only provide information on songs we’ve recorded, or contain information in different ways based on the song’s status. We are going to be working on The Demon Within, The Madness, Remembering, and probably one or two other songs. Also, we are going to be letting our fans pick 3 other songs that we don’t decide on to start with to work on as well.  We will give a list of the songs to choose from when we are at that stage.

Other things we are doing include fixing up equipment and getting things around the studio and office in better shape. My first project of this type is modifying my pedal board to include a second tier that will allow me to actually use the top row of pedals. As it is now the top row is lower than the back of my bottom row, and very hard to get to.  This will make things in practice and live situations much better.

For now that is everything I can think of.  I’ve had another great morning in the studio working on getting things setup, and can’t wait to get more rolling. I will be trying to post more updates and information as they arise.