Sunday, December 16, 2018

Three years! Three years THREE YEARS, MAN!! THREE YEARS!!!

Dang...five years since I blogged. Sooo much change in that time. I'll give a run down of that shortly, but here's what's still the same: I'm still into guns and knives and all that, but I haven't picked up anything new in quite a while. Basically, if you have a duty quality firearm, you don't need a whole lot of them because they just don't break very often. I've pretty much standardized on 5.56 and 9mm, and got rid of alternate platforms; the MnP worked great for me but all my others are Glocks, so I sold it off along with its different mags and support gear.

So, the changes right quick. I don't work at ATS anymore, as of 2015. I've been working for the state of TN since 2016 and am in HR now. Music has become a huge part of my life again. In January of 2014 I picked up bass again, and three or four months later I got a gig with Christian rock band Threshing Floor. We did original music that was mostly in the post-grunge vein, did a little recording and didn't play out as often as I'd like. A couple songs are still out there on Soundcloud and the like, and some Yoot Ube clips exist as well. Due to life getting in the way that band ended in 2017. In reality it ended before that, but 2017 was when we knew it was done and accepted that. We're still friends and are still in contact with each other, which is as good an ending as there is for bands; they don't all end that way.

Over the summer I got contacted by one of the best musicians I know: Jonathan DePool, formerly of AVA, Exobox, and The Barbie Conspiracy, among others. He asked if I was interested in putting together a 90's cover band, which sounded like fun to me. A short time later he had a great guitarist on board, Chris, and we were searching for a singer. Oh, the saga of the singer situation. We spoke with 18 + candidates who expressed interest in doing this gig. Of those, we scheduled 9 for auditions. Not one showed up. Nine people and NOT ONE actually showed up to the audition they agreed to.

Because of the singer situation not working, Jon was playing drums and singing. After doing that for several weeks, he called and asked if I could help him take his drums to be traded in for guitar gear. So he went from being a singing drummer to a singing riddim guitarist and I took over the search for drummers. I posted on a couple musician finder groups on the farcebook and got 7 hits within a couple hours. Of those, one was able to make our next rehearsal. Bear in mind, this was Friday night. Rehearsal was Sunday late afternoon. He nailed the three songs we asked him to audition with, and then played the rest of our set. On top of that, he was a cool dude, and wah lah, we had Max on drums.

Our first show is likely going to be Feb. 9th at Autograph Rehearsal Studio in Murfreesboro. After that we're looking at a couple tentative opportunities that need to fall into place first. Overall, things are pretty interesting these days.

Maybe it won't be three years before I do this again. Ya never know.