Con Review: Megacon 2014

Fun Fact: The chair is also balancing on top of something...
Photo by Brittany C. Horne Photography!

About 95% of my time at Megacon this weekend was spent from behind the table of my band's merch booth but I still feel like I have quite a lot to share. Let's start with some stats: This year Megacon grew exponentially from a normal, state-sized convention to a nationally epic 85,000 person super-convention! There were countless guest artists, special guests (including Stan Lee), and vendors which occupied the Orange County Convention Center's South Concourse (a move from the smaller West Concourse). To clarify: the line to get in on Saturday was so incredibly large that people literally wrapped around the convention center (exceeding a half mile of total line, but more likely a literal full mile of line i'm told!), cell phone reception in areas of otherwise good reception slowed and ceased altogether due to the extra 85,000+ people, and the halls were literally packed so tightly that it was neigh impossible to walk through without constantly touching or bumping into someone. The costumes were amazing, the people were friendly, there were cool things in sight every step of the way, and Megacon was better than ever this year!

Waking up at 4am on Friday

My story begins on the Friday morning of the convention at about midnight, packing my car full of my band's merchandise. With the assistance from my good friend Peter I was able to pack the car with over 1000 cd's, shirts, hoodies, stickers, posters, and all of the other merchandise that a band would need. This weekend I would be representing my band, Random Encounter. I slept for about 4 hours, woke up around 4:40am on Friday, and drove to meet with our guitarist Konami to pick up a few hundred copies of an album he forgot to bring to the last band practice (or just didn't have room for). We met at a shady gas station at around 5:20am, exchanged packages, drove our separate ways, and by 7:30am I found myself at the Orange County Convention Center loading docks. Moose (our drummer) arrived at around 8:15, about the time the doors opened and exactly the same time I got my exhibitor badges from the loading gate. We loaded in, set up the booth, he headed out, and I took a few minutes to look around the convention center.

LIFE SIZED RANCOR!!!

The amount of traditional vendor booths this year felt about the same as last year, with some natural growth of course. This year saw the return of the giant collection of robots (Literally. R2-D2 style robots, Daleks, etc), a series of star wars set replicas including a Rancor, a giant Lego area, a significantly larger artist alley consisting of up-and-coming artists, a larger guest signing area, and wider alleys for people to walk through. In the final minutes of my only real free time to walk through the convention center (before I had to go back to the booth to relieve Moose, so he could go home) my eye caught sight of a print that looked remarkably like something Charles Vess would make. Since he more or less stopped making prints YEARS ago I was in disbelief and started talking with the couple that owned the booth/company known as Chimera Publishing. We talked for maybe 10 or 15 minutes about art and artists, having a really great time. I learned that the image I saw was indeed a Vess print, and that they also had another print of his as well. Lacking a last minute birthday gift for my girlfriend (a huge Vess fan) I got both and victoriously returned to my booth, comically enough numbered "666." I'm not superstitious, but the number certainly helped people remember which booth to find us at. It also got me a lot of advice from superstitious individuals.

The 8am line on Saturday was said to be a MILE long,
extending well outside the entrance!!!

The doors opened and a flood of people came in. Over the course of the morning I gradually positioned my chair precariously atop the band's merch tote box and played songs while people walked by. I talked with a bunch of people, made friends, made fans, and made people smile. I think that's what I enjoy most about conventions, making people smile. I gave out stickers to kids and played music based on what people were wearing (Doctor Who was huge this year). I talked to pretty much everyone who walked by my booth regardless of ethnicity, age, or attire, and I've found over the years that some of the most interesting and friendly people are those you never thought you'd want to talk to: gruff punk rockers, the extremely Satanically inclined, older folks walking by with scowls on their faces. I really like cheering people up, entertaining them, and it was a pleasure to be the first accordionist ever seen by many I talked to. I caught up with old friends, played music, chatted, and gave my sales pitch nonstop until the doors closed. By the end of the day I was completely exhausted and fell asleep in a room (at a friend's house) that I was later informed contained a half dozen decomposing rabbits.

Among my favorite costumes of the weekend...

Day 2 was similar to day 2. Waking up at 7am to insane traffic; a blur of a day playing music, meeting with people, and selling merch. I forgot the cash box half way through the drive to the convention center and had to go back for it, waking up everyone in the house on accident. At the convention I watched as a "very straight man" hit on a "very cute girl", only to realize when she opened her mouth that she wasn't a girl at all. As Forbes Magazine suggested in their article on Megacon, geeky things are now becoming mainstream and as those people who would not refer to themselves as geeky are gradually introduced into this new world things like this will become more commonplace and "normal" folks will gradually find themselves liking things that were formally thought of as being reserved for the extremely geeky like anime, comic books, and (if I have anything to do with it) video game music. The future looks fun!

My chair only slipped once the entire weekend!

Cave Story: Download it for FREE NOW

Throughout the day I gradually got higher up on the chair, still recklessly balanced atop the tote, sold stuff with the help from a few friends like Peter Pepper, Kat, and Loki, and saw dozens of friends and fans from cons/shows past. Being my 4th year as a vendor at Megacon I've made quite a few friends and was pretty nostalgic at points through the weekend. There were more insane costumes, new friendly faces, and literally THOUSANDS of people walking by the booth every hour. At the end of the day my band played a show (the Ongaku Overdrive Megacon After Party) with Shammers, Sci Fried, and Marc with a C a few blocks away which I felt was a grand success. I slept on the sidewalk before the show started, was utterly exhausted before/after the show, and did my best to give a high energy performance and sing, despite having just played for maybe 8 hours a day for the past two days on no sleep. It was a great night and we didn't get to Moose's place to sleep until 2am, this time in the room NEXT TO the room with the decomposing rabbits.

Friendly faces at the rock show

I woke up on the morning of Day 3 feeling off. Undaunted, I got to the convention center by 8am, but I still felt sick, shaky, and tired. By the time the doors opened I phoned for backup and did my best to sell merch with Kat's help until Konami and Rook arrived. I played one final round of Ren and Stimpy's: Happy, Joy with a man dressed like Powdered Toast Man who stopped by the booth and was utterly exhausted. My bandmates took over the booth from there as I packed up and took the long walk back to my car. None of you will believe this, but I was able to spot Waldo again this year. I just wasn't fast enough to snap a good picture before he ran off and blended into the crowd. I was unable to find him again on my way back to the car. Traffic at 1pm was still pretty bad for Orlando traffic but it was nothing compared to the insanity of the Saturday crowd. 

Voltron anyone?

Megacon was an extremely fun time this year. It's grown a lot and and I feel I've personally grown with it. My only big regret this year is that I could not have been there longer but I am extremely grateful for all of the awesome people I was able to meet, and for having the ability to play a show within walking distance of the convention center this year! I'm already signed up for next year and can't wait. 

Who is awesome? This guy!

Feel free to share your stories from this weekend here or post pictures (or links to pictures/videos) in the comments section below!

Creative Update: February 2014

The last few months have been busy at best and I've accomplished much. While I have a few Video Game reviews I could post this week, with the start of the new year a quasi self-reflective post on things I'm working on seems healthy.

Photo by Tiffany Mueller

Random Encounter has evolved so much in the last two months that it's barely recognizable to me as being the same individuals or even an offshoot of the band I started so many years ago. I'm extremely proud of my bandmates as Rook has taken to professional bass lessons (far surpassing any skill I once may have had on the instrument), Kit got a huge promotion at work (I'm really proud of him) and has significantly increased in his recording abilities, Konami has really picked up a lot of the "band leadership/motivator" role & writes/arranges with me, and Moose is rapidly improving as a drummer, far surpassing the physical limitations of what he once thought was possible. We've become extremely organized... for us... We have some extreme goals for 2014 we intend to accomplish which I can't really share for awhile but we have some really exciting upcoming shows across the state, and at the shows we've played so far we've been very in-sync with one another to the point where I feel extremely comfortable in our performances... Something I never feel as a solo performer, and don't feel performing with other musicians. Sure everyone in the band (but me) is catching a variation of the MAG-flu, but all in all this will be a great year for Random Encounter, though I don't expect we'll have anything to show the public for our efforts for quite some time beyond live shows.

Careless Juja is also chugging along nicely. We're well into production of the Layton album and while many would find 4 hour recording sessions stressful, I really enjoy them in this creative outlet. Where Random Encounter is something that HAS to sound professional, I am not under the same self-imposed stress with CJ and can experiment as much or as little as I want to. To explain, I'm not particularly concerned if I don't become popular here so the only person I have to really please is myself (and Juja). My goal with CJ is to record music I want to hear, the way I want to hear it and I get that other people might not be interested, which allows me to try new things which I ultimately allow me to really grow as a recording musician. Most of the tricks I used for LMTYAS were things I discovered on accident while recording stuff for CJ. As CJ, when it stops being fun I stop recording, and when I run out of ideas I do something else. Juja's much the same way, we like the same things for the most part, and though we have a specific goal in mind that would seem taxing, recording what's left of 34 tracks in three weeks, I'm glad that we'll soon have a quality product of our musical friendship that we can share with the world.

Early Character Concept

The Liberty comic book series has seen its greatest developmental growth over the last two months than it's seen in the six months prior. There have been a lot of changes, so I'll start from the beginning... The comic book story takes place hundreds of years after the planet "Atrius" was colonized. Adam (the co-creator) and I sort of set an arbitrary marker for the "present" as being "roughly 600 or 800 years", what we thought was enough time passing to justify the social changes that would be required to make our story believable, but we didn't really have any idea or framework for the events that took place between the "present" (year 713) and the initial colonization of the planet. To fix this, and also to clearly compile a list of all government organizations that would be required to make the totalitarian Inner City function (with their respective job functions, key personnel, and jurisdictions) I put together a book called A Citizen's Guide to Atrius. The intent of the book was to paint an outline to the city's events and a (now very colorful) history over the course of 50 pages while giving bios for key figured, places of interest and the like, without giving so much detail as to make writing future books or comics about those events seem excessive. It's sort of like how I read the Wikipedia entry for the Crucible and was still captivated when watching it performed at a local theater, being genuinely surprised with the outcome of the trial despite knowing how it was supposed to end. The Citizen's Guide is effectively written (taking up most of my December), being edited by someone with a working knowledge of the Chicago NB format. The illustrations for the book should be done sometime in March and if there's enough interest we might do a limited self-publishing run, but I'm skeptical anyone will want a background book to a story that hasn't been published.

Recent Character Concept by Adam

With the sudden existence of a detailed history we had a make a large number of revisions to the comic book script to ensure that continuity existed between the history book and the script itself. As we've not published anything we're thankfully free to make revisions unlike authors like Tolkien (who i'm told desperately wanted to go back and rewrite the Hobbit), or Lucas (who everyone was angry at for revising the cannon of the expanded universe) which took the bulk of my January to accomplish. While I was working on this Adam developed a line of "standard issue" firearms for the Inner City, departmental color schemes, and a general color scheme for the comic, settling on an uncommon color scheme we think will be most visible on a comic book store shelf. We also added a dedicated cover artist for the entire series to our creative team, which we're really happy about. In the short-term we are also working with concept artists to create a unique sense of fashion in the world, a designer to create logos for each governmental division/department, and an archaeological illustrator (my girlfriend) to create a legit archaeological illustration of one of the city's key buildings, as well as an awesome 3d rendering. We're also working with someone who designs advertisements and logos as their full-time job to create a title for the series. I'm finding each of these individual processes to be fascinating, and working with professionals in each of their respective fields has been quite an experience. I hope to share some aspects of the creative process in the coming months but for now it's a bit too early to really get into.

On a final comical note, we had a rough revelation last week whereby we concluded that the amazing back-story we'd written for one of the main characters (which is periodically referenced throughout the script) could have never taken place within the confines of our world's history. Instead of rewriting what he have, we sadly concluded that it's all true... in that character's head and that s/he's simply delusional.

Travel Journal: Day of The Florida Music Festival

By the time this posts, I'll be driving in a car, well on my way to Spectrum  Live. I will have been in the car for at least 5 hours by this point (and an extra 9 nine hours on the first day), listening to Brom's The Child Thief, with no end to the driving in sight.

I know this is completely off topic but it was a pretty interesting Friday a few weeks ago... And a picture is worth a thousand words or something... 

Awake. I started my carrier job, moving goods from one side of town to another.

I passed motels

some artistic buildings

and got closer downtown.

"Downtown, where everything's better."

I made the delivery

and had breakfast.

Then I worked for a few more hours.

On the way to the tour van I passed the airport

and the farms near the van.

I didn't realize at the time that the tour van was out of coolant, that two tires were low, and one tire was pretty much empty. I spent 15 minutes filling the tires and was behind schedule.

The heat indicator started to go crazy about an hour from Orlando, so vented the heat on MAX to keep the gauges low. It was already 85+ (f) degrees outside and I was going to be late if I stopped.

Struggling from heat exhaustion and lack of water, Orlando traffic was an unpleasant sight.

I met up with the band and Moose showed me how to put coolant in the van. I think he hates this picture but I'm posting it anyways.

Showed up to the Florida Music Festival and set up. It's blurry because we were in a rush to set up.

We rocked the FMF.  It was fun. Once again Moose looks unhappy and I look like an accordionist-Shiva. (Photo by Kat Coffin)

I immediately left for the Tampa Intl. Airport to catch a flight to Atlanta for a wedding. I slept in the van until the terminal opened.  What a busy Friday...

Music/Creative: A Recording Guide: The Making of Unavenged

"Live For Revenge!" (photo by Tiffany Mueller)

This is kind of a continuation from the 'Making of Self Titled'... Aka: My personal growth as a recording musician, or a cautionary tale of things to think about before going to a studio... Aka: The ghost of Credit Cards Past...Due. 

So where I ended the last post it was 2010, I was close to $7000 in debt from recording an album, my entire band had quit, and I was just about to quit my semi-public career as a musician. Somehow, less than a month after the band played its last show I was optimistically performing shows with a final and present incarnation of the new band of the same name. I'll skip most of the details here, so just accept that Rook, Moose, Kit and I were enthusiastically performing as the band Random Encounter (occasionally with our friend Konami) for about a month when we decided to start recording a new album that represented us, as opposed to the previous 'Random Encounters.' Our goals were well defined and fairly simple: to record all of the tracks we performed on an album called 'Unavenged!' So I called up the local recording studio again and explained that I had a new band that would actually show up to record their parts; No bs, no experimenting with arrangement for 4 months. We booked weekends at the studio for a solid month and a half.

A New Band is Born!

The recording process for Unavenged was fairly straight forward. The band (driving together from Orlando) showed up, recorded parts, and went home. We were all there for moral support, discussed what we wanted on the album, and even made lists for each bandmate of "things to record" and "things to re-record" until we were happy with how it sounded. It was insanely fun and I personally remember that we (the band) started to really feel like a family of sorts. Notably I also wan't the only person putting in money either (the unemployed in our number sold blood plasma to help contribute). It was a really pleasant experience and the only strange thing about recording the album was the fact that we didn't actually know how to play all the songs before we started recording, nor had we finished really experimenting with them. There's a grey area between waiting too long to record something (stunting the growth of a new band) vs recording too soon and while we definitely could have recorded a better album had we waited a few months I don't think we would have had as many good opportunities if we'd waited, so I'm still happy with our decision. It's also worth mentioning that you should trust a professional engineer to make what you have sound good (setting up mics, mixing, etc) but you ultimately should know your equipment (and what you want to sound like) better than anyone else. Don't let someone else dictate the FX/EQ settings on your guitar, bass, or amp if you have a specific sound you're going for or else your preferences will just become what the engineer thinks sounds good... Which can be really generic.

In The Studio, Late at Night

When it came down to my parts it was similar to the experience with the last album in that I went to the studio alone with the engineer, recorded, and edited for (a few) days on end. There were some things that we were ultimately unable to change due to time constraints (I wanted the album done in a very short period of time) such as: Re-recording the first pass of -72 hours-, which i'd originally thought would be hilarious at 72bpm only to discover that it felt too slow (for me... that and no one seemed to get the 72bpm, 72 measures joke), or that we forgot to record an introduction to Gerudo Valley (which I had to personally make happen), or the way I'd sort of envisioned Still More Fighting's intro. I also reached the same point as I'd reached in the last album, where I noticed that we were pretty much done recording but felt like something was missing... However, this time we were prepared.

Rook's Lucky Doll Head, Masha

A month or so before recording we preemptively requested assistance from a few friends to record parts with the anticipation that we'd need help to reach our deadline. The biggest contributor was Konami (the same awesome guy who later joined as a regular band member). He was insanely busy at the time helping NASA or something but graciously recorded parts for more than half the album on his guitars to help fill in some of the gaps. It wasn't that Kit couldn't learn and record the parts, it was that Konami already knew them (because he performed with us) and could record while we worked on other parts of the album, further helping our very restrictive schedule. Other guest musicians on the album included Elaine Li from Select Start, who drove 4 hours to the studio through a bad storm, was involved in a car accident on the way to the studio, and still showed up 10 minutes early to deliver some of some of the best performances on the album! It's also very much worth mentioning that Moose enlisted Sir. Dr. Robert Bakker from The Protomen as I enlisted Johnny "On The Spot" Frank to record parts on some really intense acoustic guitar tracks (Gerudo Valley and Unavenged respectively) from their respective states while the band was in the studio in Florida. The sound engineer and I also recorded a fun "Clank" sound for Boletarian Syndrome by smashing a piece of iron with a 2 handed mallet, which is technically a sort of guest instrument. The only other guest-oddities of note are that I'd started working with "The Great Juja" and "Auriplane" shortly before the band disbursed and re-formed (in 2010) on a Sonic medley called "The Sonic Suite" (The drums were recorded by Adam "One" during one of the self-titled recording sessions and accordion was recorded at my home using a slightly nicer vocal microphone than the $50 one I started with), which found it's way onto the album. In an effort to tie our album into the previous Random Encounter incarnations we also re-recorded the Introduction Theme from Final Fantasy 6, using it as a 'starting point' of sorts to (somewhat personally) acknowledge that previous incarnations of the band existed but to signify that the name had evolved into something different. We used the original piano track from Neo Symbiance (recorded years earlier by Helios!) to complete it. Lastly, we included a pleasant piano track Helios had recorded and forgotten about (but that I got permission to include) called "Miss You," which I found burred in an old computer he'd asked me to scour for specific data before formatting.

Sound Check

Back to editing: Around that time I'd started taking private lessons for rhythm (specifically snare drum) to improve my sense of timing and also saw a dramatic improvement in detecting if something was 'off rhythm' in the editing phase. The ever-developing "ear for editing" was also kind of a curse because there's no way to turn off the ability and I annoyingly found things I wanted to "edit" when listening to music recorded by other artists I'd previously found soothing. It was a feeling akin to discovering that movies are shot in multiple "takes", as opposed to all at once, and now being conscious of continuity or dubbing errors. The sound engineer also expressed that he experienced the same thing and made a game out of finding mistakes in songs on the radio. In short, I became a significantly better editor during the project (practice makes perfect) and started coming up with creative solutions and "fixes" that the engineer didn't even think was possible. I started to think I was pretty awesome until it came to the part where I had to record vocals...

Kit Enjoying my Vocals

 From day one I immediately loathed working on vocals, especially my own, and there were some big moments during the project where I'd strongly considered stepping down as the band's vocalist altogether. Atonal vocals? Fine. Happy Joy? Fine. Songs with vocal variety were another matter altogether. In working with Melodyne (a program that shows you exactly what you're singing on a grid, kind of like Rock Band), I saw that I knew nothing of how to sing on pitch. To make matters worse, early exports of the vocal tracks I'd shared with a friend got me the single brutally honest criticism of "you sing with no emotion whatsoever." He was correct though, and accepting that fact was invaluable to my growth as a musician. I started taking vocal lessons to improve my pitch and during the recording process I did everything to try and sing "with heart" in the studio. I thought good thoughts, brought pictures of pets and loved ones to the sessions, and ultimately sacrificed some pitch for emotion (Worth noting: I was also still revising the lyrics to -72 hours- and Unavenged during the recording sessions) because I wasn't able to start vocal lessons until after the recording sessions had begun. People have since seemed generally happy with the vocal tracks (or at least didn't comment negatively on them) so I feel a lot better about my vocal abilities (and limits) but I was very upset during this process. I also found it frustrating trying to sing notes you've never heard sung before, pitch-perfect, like when you're writing a new vocal melody. A final note on vocal recording is that I recorded the vocal 'harmonies' during some of the chorus sections on the spot, completely improvised, just for laughs and (surprisingly enough) kept most of them. Looking back I should have thought the vocals through more, practiced them, and recorded them at a later date but we were able to make many of the backing vocals sound passable through the magic of editing.

Fall 2010

After what felt like a month or so of recording and another month of editing (I kid you not, we were billed for exactly "72 Studio Hours" of recording) we sent the tracks off to Rob Kleiner. I can equate the experience of sending our tracks to a true industry professional to the story of the princess from Rumpelstiltskin spinning hay into gold. I only had a small understanding of how professional mixing and mastering worked but even then the differences were easy to hear. While this was being done the band sat down and had deep discussions about our branding, back story, and "age rating." I feel it's worth mentioning that once again we cut the new set of extremely explicit introduction tracks I'd recorded and again cut 'What's Up People', which has allowed us to share our music with a lot of (very young/old) people I wouldn't have thought possible over the years. We also agreed to produce a high quality album on a jewel case (as opposed to "sleeves" or a digital-only release), because we felt strongly about wanting to present ourselves as professionals. While I worked on finding a printing company, Kit worked on our Kickstarter, Moose scheduled an album release show, and Rook worked with Dennis Hansbury on the album art.

Original Album Concept by Rook

Somewhere in the all the above chaos the band had commissioned our friend Dennis Hansbury to make the album art without much of an idea as to what we wanted. Did we want video game iconography, to focus on the Russian monster-hunter mythos, or something else entirely? During a brainstorming session at Yogurt Land while Rook and I were gushing about the Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, (my memory is hazy as to how, but) we finally concluded that we wanted to recreate a sketch Rook had drawn of the band, in a style similar to Bilibin's, focusing on the band's conflict with Koschei the Deathless. Moose mentioned he wanted dilapidated buildings and someone (Kit?) said that profiles might be cool. Dennis gave us some alternate concepts of Koshei, took reference photos of the band members, and eventually the drafts we received quickly evolved into our album art, despite Dennis fighting a rather horrible cold at the time. My favorite piece is definitely the disc art/backing with the needle-egg-duck-rabbit-chest-tree. It just fit really well together.

Rock Party, Fall 2010

Where Self Titled was released quietly and kind of fizzled, Unavenged had an album release party complete with guest musicians, Protomen, and home baked goods! We also got a mention on BadassOfTheWeek.com and the opportunity to introduce people to our album on an east-coast tour of the U.S.! On a financial note, even if you technically 'break even' on the cost making an album, the sheer amount of effort involved with getting your music in front of people (shows, driving to shows, gas, interviews, promotional stuff, giveaways, the great migration from Myspace to Facebook, and your tour van breaking down every other show) comes at a large cost. At the risk of sounding like a corporate tool I'd still like to say that the tools we found most helpful on the post-production side were Kickstarter (crowd-sourcing which helped cover some of the costs associated with making the album), Bandcamp (which helps us conveniently share our music with people who can't afford our album), and CDBaby.com (which puts your music almost everywhere music is sold and has really solid reporting/remittance).

Random Encounter Photo Shoot (Fall 2010, (photo by Tiffany Mueller))

This certainly isn't a Disney success story by any means but it's the journey I've undertaken to learn more about how recorded music is made. I hope that my misadventures are amusing and perhaps insightful. I also can't wait to write one of these about the upcoming Random Encounter album I'm currently working on! ...speaking of which.

Full Band (Photo by Ben Trivett)

Music/Creative: A Recording Journey (2003-2010)

A Recording Journey

The Making of Neo Sybiance, Brick,

& Random Encounter (Self Titled)

A boy and His Electric Accordion

When I started playing the accordion 10 years ago I had no idea what multi-track recording was, what 'editing' entailed, or that effects weren't always something that proceeded a cause. I generally played and practiced by myself on a 43 pound electric accordion, recording in 60 second increments using the MS Record feature found on my laptop via usb PS2 headset. There was no mixing, no editing, no tweaking, just hardcore "play it perfect and don't forget to save as a Wav file when you're done." There was no way to cue in, there was no way to record in parts (to my knowledge). Things were just pretty Rough. So, when Random Encounter formed two years later, I still had no idea about Multi-track recording and made a demo EP with the guys in an afternoon we called "Neo Symbiance." To accomplish the task we used a single vocal microphone, the MS record feature (looping back-to-back 60 second fuses to allow for more lengthy tracks). As if to match some sort of theme I used MS Paint to draw the EP's cover. The idea for the EP was to give venues an idea of how awesome we were... But due to our limited recording knowledge it generally had the opposite effect, despite how good we might have sounded.

Random Encounter, October 2005

Fast forward 4 years...

The new band of the same name (and completely different membership) had long stopped giving out Pogo-sticks, pie-crusts, and Ramen Noodles at our concerts. Adam "One" (actually Adam the 8th in his family bloodline) had joined us and explained what a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) was and that almost all modern music is recorded one instrument at a time using a DAW... This was pretty revolutionary to me and answered the question I'd often wondered where bands like They Might Be Giants had found people to do their backup vocals that sounded so much like the lead singer (John or John respectively in the case of TMBG). In short, it was also explained that you could "cut in" or "cut out" of a recording, meaning if I played a part of the song correctly, I could record the rest of the song without having to start from the beginning. I didn't really understand much about how to DO any of those things, or what a BPM (beats per minute) was, but the idea that it's possible to make those things happen helped me find Accoustica Mixcraft (my DAW of choice because of its simplicity) and got us started on recording BRICK, what was to be Random Encounter's first album! 

Artistic Rendition of the band by Destiny Burch, 2007 

Random Encounter, September 2007

Brick was going to be 33 VG cover tracks, everything the band knew at the time (and a dozen things we didn't know), recorded using a $70 vocal microphone, edited together by me (no mixing or mastering) with the cover art being a photo of a brick wall with our logo spray painted on it. So Adam borrowed an extra microphone (one for the set, one for the kick drum) and we spent a full day laying down the album... Sadly, despite the tracks being played flawlessly, the recording quality of the tracks was laughable and we were ultimately unable to finish the album because the entire band (except Adam) quit or was forced to resign from the band in the coming weeks. Adam, being a stickler for quality, also realized that there was nothing we could do to make the drum tracks sound good... That we knew of... We later converted one of the tracks into an entry on the VGM4A's "Welcome To World 2" album, somehow professionally/painstakingly recreated a track for the upcoming Careless Juja Professor Layton Album, and re-recorded half of Brick for Self Titled. The other songs (like Metal Slug - Windy Day, FF Tactics - Sweegy Woods, or Perfect Dark - Credits Theme) will likely never see the light of day because the recording quality is not even remotely decent without more money/time to edit them than I can afford. Period.

Random Encounter, April 2008, Standing in Front of a Brick Wall

It wasn't until July 2009 that the new, new band of the same name (in which I was the bass player of as opposed to the accordionist most of the time which made us rather generic due to the birth of several more talented VG cover bands) finally agreed collectively to undertake the recording of a studio album, and booked some time at a real studio in Sarasota, FL (my hometown)! I hadn't really learned anything about recording since Brick and (at Adam's request) still hadn't mentioned Brick to anyone since it was recorded. Adam and I booked an entire weekend, two 8-hour days, to record drum tracks for a whopping 22 songs! As we drove through the shady industrial neighborhood, past a mysterious barbed wire fence covered in toys I remember feeling completely excited. Heck, I wasn't even going to do anything that weekend but I felt ready to lay down tracks for the entire album that day and couldn't stop talking (a sign of nervous excitement for me similar to how some people shake with excitement) to Adam, who is admittedly not one for extended non-purposeful conversations.

Random Encounter, July 2009

As we walked into the studio space three times the size of my apartment, the sound engineer greeted us and gave us a brief tour. Adam set up his drums while a session of the DAW "Cubase" loaded and the engineer set up 6 or 12 different microphones around the drum set. All I did the entire weekend was pay him the cash, sit back, watch, and take in everything that happened. I picked up on much of how the basic recording process worked, asked a few questions of the engineer here and there, and observed him do something called "edit" the tracks, which I'd never personally attempted, and "punch-ins" where you start recording a track from the section you screwed up in the previous recording. The engineer repeatedly complemented Adam on being a metronome perfect drummer (which I didn't really understand) and because of this precision Adam seamlessly recorded the entire album in 12 hours... That's about 2 songs an hour(!) and with the extra time I asked Adam to record a few "special" tracks I had in mind... Some inspiration for originals I'd intended to write, as well as a rendition of Katamari on The Rocks, and a Sonic medley I'd later use. The engineer was thoroughly impressed with Adam and that was probably the last time I'd see the guy smile.

Recording Self Titled

The following weekend the guitarists arrived to record their parts. Each one of them stuck around for single 8 hour day and recorded almost everything in their respective session. Ultimately, when it was discovered that one of the tracks was recorded by one of the guitarists in the wrong key (which we only realized the day after) we were forced to immediately scrap track 22: 'God Knows' and lost some of the work done to other tracks. Why the guitarists wouldn't just come back to re-record their tracks I didn't know at the time, but both flat out refused and suddenly expressed a strong disinterest in making the album. They wouldn't even discuss it with me and because we didn't have any upcoming shows, we didn't meet in person to talk about it. Still, 21 tracks seemed plenty enough, having personally put in ~$500 into the game (at the band's request), I figured that if I could just finish the album we'd have something to sell at shows and recoup the money.

Adam offered to help in lending a creative/critical ear, and created the album's artwork... I have no talent in creating visual art, and at the time had no understanding of effective cover composition, and though I had a few visual ideas at the time (basically to make this the "Brick" album) we ultimately settled on mixing pictures from our photo shoot with a cover he'd design. The end result was visually kind of like an amateur knock-off System of a Down album, largely because the printing company ran the print about 40% darker than we'd intended (partly our fault), making our text illegible.

Back to the recording part... So I spent the next month or two recording bass and accordion in 2 or 4 hour sessions (partly because I took my time but partly because I lacked the money for studio time), picking up more recording tips and tricks with each session. However, towards the end I discovered that even with my parts the album seemed dramatically incomplete. I sent the tracks to Adam he agreed. There didn't seem to be any immediate fix because the two guitarists already informed us of their complete disinterest in working on the album any more with the dismissive phase "you've got this," as if that suddenly made everything better... Which it didn't in case you were wondering.

My home for 6 months

So I looked at the audio engineer and started editing with him. The guy was a champ for sticking through the project with me. We added, we subtracted, we doubled, we went through almost every trick that he knew. I personally recorded guitar parts using a guitar someone randomly left in the studio one weekend using a giant Marshall amp (I think it was tuned but didn't know how to tune at the time, nor did the engineer) which actually wound up in the finished product in a couple of places. I also added glockenspiel, more accordion, more accordion after that, keyboard parts (in memory of the Helios, the band's founding member whom I still sorely missed), and a half dozen other small things that aren't worth mentioning that didn't work (like hammer dulcimer, banjo, and cheesy sampling). By the end of the project the engineer didn't like me a whole lot because of the sheer amount of extra work we had to do that could have been easily fixed if either guitarist would have shown up for an extra day.

A picture of Dinosaur Land, the place I wished I was at... when I was editing

It was now a full 6 months later in December by the time the album was done being recorded. We spent an extra month mixing and mastering and re-editing certain parts... Adam and I (pretty much the only people still talking about the CD I'd gone completely broke completing) finalized the album art and started to discuss the ESRB style "rating" of the album (and the "rating" of the band as a whole). We'd originally recorded some fun little explicit introduction tracks to each song, outlining in the harshest language possible how the listener's life was hollow and meaningless before they listened to our CD. It was hilarious, abusive, off the wall, but ultimately Adam and I agreed that we'd prefer to one day share this music with our families and friends under the age of 17. We were playing Video Game music after all, and with songs like Happy Joy from Ren and Stimpy so there was no sense in preventing younger people from enjoying the fruits of our labor. We also toned down the artwork on the album from "people being murdered by video game controllers and wires" to "guy non-aggressively plugged into the music kind of like in The Matrix." Random Encounter was suddenly an 'All Ages' band, which it had pretty much always been.

The Finished Album Art by Adam

By the end of the 7 month recording/mixing/mastering session I felt confident in my ability to record and edit music. I didn't know at the time how little I actually knew, but I understood the basics well enough and actually became a better sound editor than the engineer I was working with (two months prior to project completion he just flat out gave up and left me alone to edit for entire sessions). Completely snowblind from over-exposure to the music for half a year, I felt like i'd created a masterpiece, or fire on that island with Tom Hanks and Wilson. This album represented the last five years of my life and I was insanely proud of it. At the band's mutual decision I set off to license and order 1000 prints of the CD we dubbed "Random Encounter" (and later re-dubbed Self Titled by the next incarnation of the band). Sadly, because of my inability to license some of the tracks legally we cut 6 of the tracks: Big Blue, The Main Zelda Theme, Zelda: Labyrinth, Lost Woods, The Song of Storms, and What's Up People (the Deathnote theme), reducing it from 21 tracks to 15. I felt pretty upset about cutting those tracks but really wanted to do everything by the book.

When I left the studio I suddenly had facial hair and a broken nose

The physical copies of the album arrived in my hands at Megacon, March 19th 2010, literally an hour into the convention. By some form of miracle a UPS driver got out of his truck, ran through the OCCC, ninja'd past security, found my booth, and delivered the package. I gave the guy a very friendly tip and did everything in my power to share Random Encounter with the world that weekend... Sadly the world wasn't interested in a bunch of Final Fantasy 1 or 6 covers at the time. We sold nine the entire weekend and about a week later, a month after I put the licensing and print costs on my personal credit card, the entire membership of the band informed me of their decisions to quit the band, Adam included (so he could work on his personal music project). What I couldn't see at the time was how much I'd learned in the process of creating an album, and how in 6 months I'd spent significantly less than going to a sound engineering college for similar training/experience.

Below is a picture from Megacon 2010, representing my graduation from the school of hard knocks and the completion of my first album. It was a pretty victorious day and as much as I'll complain about the album spawning clones of itself, I couldn't be more proud of my accomplishment!