Let me start by saying that things are starting to go great music wise.

Last week I had a small brain storming session on ways to make the practicing / playing / recording experience better and easier.  What I came up with was another small rearrangement of the studio.  I basically ended up turning turning the singing area around 180 degrees, and putting my pedal board where the monitors were originally. Now all I have to do is uncover my board, plugin my guitar, and flip a few switches to be ready to play for any reason.  By flipping one more switch and turning one volume knob I can add vocals in as well. I can basically be ready to do anything within 2 minutes now.  It used to take me a good 30 minutes to get everything set up and ready to go.  I’m really enjoying this a lot.

Now that it’s so easy to just pick up and play I have finally started my new practice system.  My new method basically consists of playing Blissful Misery, Black Misery, and cover songs all in one big setting using backing tracks from the computer.  I also mix everything up as much as I can to keep it more exciting. Currently the practice list is as follows: Black Misery: The Demon Within, Carnival Of Horror, Angel Incarnate; Blissful Misery: The Madness, Remembering, Dead To The World, Twilight; Covers: Nightwish: Nemo; Breaking Benjamin: So Cold, Home; Metallica: The Unforgiven, Fade To Black, Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters.

Now I’m going to get back to that Blissful Misery section of the list.

• The Madness is still being practiced a lot, and the vocal melodies are still in the playing around trial and error idea stage.  I do still need to work on relearning the solo, but everything else music wise sounds great.
• Remembering is another old tune that I love.  I recently had a request to play the song, and decided to add it back to the practice list.  I am going to keep the music the same for the song, but may also add a few string parts.  I have actually started writing a vocal melody for this song, and hope to have it done soon. It feels so good to play this song with the full backing track.  I can’t get enough of it.
• Dead To The World is a song I wrote years ago, but I never got around to playing it much.  It’s a fairly simple song to play guitar wise.  However as I practice it I am also changing it little by little and adding the other instruments into the song.  The song is still a work in progress, but I hope my new method of practice really helps the writing process as well.
• Twilight is currently just a guitar song, but I’ve been working on writing the bass a little along as well.  There are currently no lyrics, but there will be at some point in time.  I absolutely love the guitar for this song, even though it’s fairly hard to manage to pull off a complete full song during practice right now.  Just so every one knows this song has nothing to do with those shit movies and books.  I probably wrote the original guitar parts for this before those books were even dreamed of.

I’m planning on relearning as many songs as possible as fast as possible. This includes all of the Blissful Misery and Black Misery originals, as well as most of the covers previously played by Blissful Misery.  There truly is nothing like playing your favorite songs yourself. During this time I also plan to work on at least one unfinished or new song at all times.

Before I end this I do have one thing to say about the studio.  Currently I have decided to not worry with studio stuff at all until I have pretty much relearned a decent amount of songs.  While I don’t care to record more than one song at a time, I love learning as many as I can at once.

That’s all for now, but I should be back on here to give updates more often now that things are going so well.