New WorX - Old Becomes New...

New Project - actually equals old songs given new life, ... again, ...

Since I was very pleased with my "I Am Become Daevel" album, which was actually a bunch of old songs that I never recorded properly until recently, I decided to attempt the same thing with more unpublished material from my "archives".

Way back in 2000, I ended up recording FOUR Albums as pure MIDI/Synth - i.e., no real guitars. Yup. FOUR of these buggers exist. All played or programmed solely with synthesized instruments on an old Casio keyboard, which sounded surprisingly "okay" for Casio equipment. And some of the songs were actually pretty cool. I did a lot of really really fast "virtuoso"-type songs, very progressive, almost neo-classical, ... very influenced by Dream Theater, Symphony X, and a lot of other bands that play waayyy too many notes.

So now I've been listening back to some of these and wondering, "What if I actually tried re-recording these with my new drum samples (Toontrack rules!!), newer SONAR software, better symphonic samples, and REAL guitar?"

Not that I can actually play a lot of these songs note-for-note, ... (far from it), but I can play most of the rhythms and some of the "note-riff" sections. And a lot of the really really fast sections can just be played by the computer as synths anyway. Kind of like having Rick Wakeman or Jordan Rudess help me out with the keyboard parts. Plus, I can finally add some guitar solos (these albums have PLENTY of open spaces for actual improvisation).

I am going to try to go right thru each album, and maybe get rid of parts that didn't work, add some new stuff - in general, breathe new life into these old songs.

I'm actually kind of psyched up and can't wait to dig out the old files. these won't be done in a week or so, though. This might take a while, but I now have a goal. With the bar set very high.