Jenna Williams at TheScreamQueen.com recently caught up with IN FLAMES guitarist Björn Gelotte. An excerpt from the interview is available below:
JW: When you’re writing an album, or recording, how do you really try to incorporate some of that energy that you get from doing a live show into the album?
Gelotte: “I think the important thing is to find the right dynamics in the song because you can’t keep all that energy up. I mean, in the music; it’s not like we’re running around doing back flips and stuff like that. But it’s within the music and that comes through good arrangements, I think, or really well thought through arrangements and dynamics of the song, and of course to add some hooks in there, melodies that people remember, that helps too.”
JW: Like ‘The Quiet Place’…
Gelotte: “Yeah, exactly! And trying to invite the audience up on stage, basically. I mean, in a mental sense, you know? I think that’s important, and it gives us the most pleasure if we manage to do that in a proper way because that gives so much back.”
JW: As you said, you try to invite the audience on stage, how do you do that exactly, or how does that happen?
Gelotte: “We love what we do, we really do. And that’s why there’s always huge smiles on our faces when we play. Music for us is dead serious. But you should be able to have the (inaudible) in the eye or whatever. You should be able laugh around it, have a good time. I think that shows up and that’s one way of inviting people. And also not trying to be behind, like I am right now, sunglasses or a huge image or something. We’ve never had that. And we kind of focus more on the music than looks, you know?”
Go to this location for the complete interview. Check out BW&BK’s interview with Gelotte and In Flames frontman Anders Friden here.
Sounds Of A Playground Fading is out now. The tracklist is as follows:
‘Sounds Of A Playground Fading’
‘Deliver Us’
‘All For Me’
‘The Puzzle’
‘Fear Is The Weakness’
‘Where The Dead Ships Dwell’
‘The Attic’
‘Darker Times’
‘Ropes’
‘Enter Tragedy’
‘Jester’s Door’
‘A New Dawn’
‘Liberation’
Legendary extreme-metal drummer Gene ”The Atomic Clock” Hoglan (DETHKLOK, FEAR FACTORY, TESTAMENT, DEATH, DARK ANGEL, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD) will take part in a drum clinic presented by Pearl Drums Monday, October 24th at Sweetwater in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Admission is free.
The clinic is described as: “Learn how to supercharge your drumming technique – from a metal master! Acclaimed for his incredibly tight, technical, and powerful drumming skills, Gene will demonstrate his killer technique, discuss his projects, share tips and methods, and answer your questions.”
As previously reported, Gene will be joining Bay Area thrashers TESTAMENT on the road for select dates on their upcoming co-headlining run with ANTHRAX. Gene will join Testament from October 28th through November 13th. He issued the following statement regarding the upcoming tour:
“As many of you know, I just played on the new Testament record, Dark Roots Of Earth, which went amazingly well. The dudes were kind enough ask me to join them for a couple weeks on this tour with Anthrax and DEATH ANGEL. I’m super stoked to do the shows. It’s going to be a great time. Just so everybody knows, I will be selling my Drum Instructional DVD, The Atomic Clock, at the shows (shameless plug). If you can’t make it out to one of the shows, buy it on line!”
With regards to The Atomic ClockDVD, Hoglan offers the following:
“It’s two hours of super-duper fun. I tried to make it entertaining for all. I wanted to make it something that was for more than just drummers and musicians. It’s for anybody who wants to spend a couple hours in front of the tube checking something cool out; that’s what I designed it for. It’s pretty darn entertaining, and it is chock full of information.”
And Hoglan is a good guy to go to for information on drumming. The DVD (available at Hoglanindustries.com or Reversedrecords.com in Canada) will reveal many of the man’s unusual quirks and attitudes towards bashing the skins – something he’s been doing as a career since 1989, so he knows his stuff.
“I have some unorthodox approaches and philosophies to drumming,” says Hoglan, “so there’s a lot of stuff on there you’ll probably be hearing for the very first time.”
Unlike a lot of instructional DVDs, The Atomic Clock is extremely user-friendly. Hoglan didn’t want to create a DVD that made people feel uncomfortable in any way, as he feels a lot of instructional DVDs actually end up alienating the viewer.
“Absolutely,” he says. “You’ve got this guy with great chops, he’s a killer player, and he has absolutely no personality. It kinda feels like he’s talking down to you, like you’re receiving instructions from a high-school teacher. Who hates you.”
And like his unorthodox playing style, his style for filming a DVD was pretty off the beaten path. For example, with the exception of songs that Hoglan plays along to, all of it is improvised, and the same goes for the “script.”
“All of it is ad libbed, all of it is off the top of my head,” says Hoglan. “Even the drumming on it is completely ad libbed. Except for the songs that I play to a pre-recorded track, every lick on there is pretty much me coming up with it on the spot.”
Source: Bravewords
Guitar legend MICHAEL SCHENKER (MSG, ex-UFO) is featured in a new interview with Ultimate-Guitar.com. An excerpt is available below:
UG: How do you think your playing style has evolved over the course of your career?
Schenker: “It has been a long period of development for me. The principles more or less have stayed the same but I have had lots of different solos. For example, when I started with the SCORPIONS the first album I did with the group, I was fifteen years old, Lonesome Crow. I started playing when I was nine and was picking stuff off the radio and a tape recorder and anything on the charts. But when I was eleven years old, my brother asked me to join the band, which was the beginning of The Scorpions. Then I went to another band and kept developing my style but really, but the most amazing thing that happened to me was when I heard distortion guitar for the first time from players such as JEFF BECK and JIMMY PAGE. Then I reached a stage where I just wanted to go into the studio and play just improvised lead breaks. So as I began to work on projects, I just went straight to tape as I was playing on the spot, and played one song after another until the whole album was done. So in general my early approach was; with slow solos with harmony I would write them while with fast rock solos, I would improvise them, but I would also improvise slow solos too occasionally. After forty years I now have different approaches to things that basically today, I have come full circle and am at the point where I feel I am exactly where I was when I was sixteen, where I had huge waves of development in a major way happening. So now I’m playing at my best in the same way as was when I was playing with UFO.”
UG: With The Scorpions planning a retirement, are there any plans to collaborate musically with your brother Rudolf?
Schenker: “We have been talking about doing a Schenker project for quite awhile now and you know whenever the time is right, for these kinds of things, we’ll do it. But they are working on doing the ultimate and final farewell tour where Uli and myself will join them at some point on the tour to kind of give it a good happy ending.”
UG: It is well known that in the course of your career you declined offers to join AEROSMITH and OZZY OSBOURNE. Do you think that if you had joined either of those acts, your musical path would have been remarkably different?
Schenker: “That is very hypothetical and I can’t really answer that because you do what you do, and you are today because of what happened in the past. But I would say the answer would be no.”
‘Intro’
‘How Long’
‘The End Of An Era’
‘Saturday Night’
‘Fallen Angel’
‘Hangin’ On’
‘With You’
‘Miss Claustrophobia’
‘Scene Of Crime’
‘Lovers Sinfony-Speed’
‘Stormin’ In’
‘Speed’
‘Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead’
‘How Long’ (Guitar Battle Version)
‘Remember’ (Bonus Track for Japan)
“The Temple of Rock is within me”, says Michael, “where I create since I was introduced to the amazing invention of the distorted guitar which is for me the most enjoyable and the best possible way to express myself. The rock guitar sound that I fell in love with, mostly expressed as lead breaks, is what I have nurtured and treasured all of my life. Combined with the infinite spring from within and the amazing musicians around me I keep expressing an on going development of my art (being).”
“With Temple of Rock”, Michael adds, “I am entering a new stage of my life, a new level of existence enjoying life more than ever, reaping the joy of all sorts of developments from the past. These days I just want to go out there, play and have fun. Also, it seems to me that collectively, with true expressive makers of rock music, we have been building the external Temple Of Rock for many years and have now come to the point of putting on the roofing and celebrating the almost completion of the Temple. All generations of this period are meeting all over the world on one stage it seems celebrating an era of “hand make rock”, which will never be the same again due to invention of new technology but of course New Temples and New Wonders will arise to enjoy expressions in new ways”.
Lineup:
Michael Schenker – Guitars
Michael Voss – Vocals
Herman Rarebell – Drums
Pete Way – Bass
Wayne Findlay – Keyboards
Also featuring:
Schenker Brothers
William Shatner (Captain Kirk from Star Trek)
Leslie West (MOUNTAIN)
Michael Amott (ARCH ENEMY)
Doogie White (ex-RITCHIE BLACKMORE, ex-YNGWIE MALMSTEEN)
Robin McAuley (SURVIVOR, ex-MSG)
Don Airey (DEEP PURPLE)
Paul Raymond (UFO, ex -)
Simon Phillips (TOTO, MSG, ex-JEFF BECK)
Carmine Appice (MSG, ex-Jeff Beck)
Chris Slade (MSG, ex-AC/DC)
Chris Glenn (MSG, ex-ALEX HARVEY)
Neil Murray (MSG, ex-WHITESNAKE, ex-GARY MOORE)
Brian Tichy (Whitesnake)
Elliott ”Dean” Rubinson (Owner of Dean Guitars, MSG, Michael Schenker)
Schenker’s new song, ‘Miss Claustrophobia’, from the upcoming Temple Of Rock album, can be heard in the YouTube clip below:
Doug Elfman from the Las Vegas Review-Journal spoke with JUDAS PRIEST singer Rob Halford recently during the US leg of the band’s Epitaph tour. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:
On the hazards of touring: “In rock n’ roll, you definitely are pushing the limits when it comes to the excesses of travel. But as long as you’re alive at the end of the show, that’s all that matters.”
On the subliminal message trial: “A piece of music hasn’t made anybody kill themselves. A movie hasn’t made anybody kill themselves. People are very susceptible to pointing the finger and laying the blame onto an outside source of their own creation.”
Despite being gay, some women still tell him they want to jump his bones: “Even though I’m a gay man, they still try to do that. God bless my female fans!”
MLB.com has uploaded a three-and-a-half-minute video clip of former SKID ROW frontman Sebastian Bach reflecting on the 2011 baseball season and listing his metal and non-metal moments of the 2011 season. Check out the footage below.
Bach‘s new album, “Kicking & Screaming”, sold 6,600 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 73 on The Billboard 200 chart. The singer’s previous CD, “Angel Down”, opened with 6,400 units back in November 2007 to debut at No. 190.
Released on September 27 via Frontiers Records, “Kicking & Screaming” was produced by Bob Marlette (BLACK SABBATH, SHINEDOWN, ATREYU, FILTER) and features young virtuosic guitarist Nick Sterling and drum pro Bobby Jarzombek (HALFORD, RIOT, ICED EARTH). The follow-up to 2007’s “Angel Down” was mastered at Precision Mastering in Los Angeles with Tom Baker.
Bach stated about his new solo material, “This CD will follow along the lines of ‘Skid Row’, ‘Slave To The Grind’, ‘Subhuman Race’ and ‘Angel Down’. If you like rockin’ guitar riffs, high-energy songs and performances, deadly drums of doom, and ear-shattering screams, we got your rock right here!” He also described the songs as “heavy, interesting, classic sounding, modern sounding, completely rock ‘n’ roll — just how we like it!”
Rob Cavuoto of Guitar International recently conducted an interview with singer Biff Byford of British heavy metal legends SAXON. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.
Guitar International: The thing that I love about your new CD, “Call To Arms”, is how you managed to recapture your sound and vibe from ’80s. What was your secret?
Biff Byford: We have a good team in place on this CD. The drums were recorded straight with no samples. All the guitar songs were organic. We went back to a more working-class sound. We intended to get back to our roots and got into that mindset from the beginning.
Guitar International: Many bands from the ’80s have given up on making new CDs and just go out as nostalgia acts. Why do you continue to make and release new music?
Biff Byford: We are still climbing mountains because they are there. It’s just within us to create new music and we are fortunate enough to do so. To write songs, put them out, and have people still find them relevant is exciting is a great feeling.
Guitar International: Tell me about the significance of the CD’s title and artwork?
Biff Byford: We originally had all the songtitles and once we finalized them we could have used any of them as a CD title. I really liked “Call To Arms”, and it goes with the flavor of that song with the First World War. It’s also a rallying cry to our fans as well. It works on two levels.
Guitar International: You voice is every bit as good as it was back in the ’80s, your still a powerhouse. What do you attribute that to?
Biff Byford: I stopped smoking a while ago so I’m sure that helped. I guess I didn’t abuse myself as a young man with liquor and drugs. We were too poor for those things, so that might have worked in my favor.
Guitar International: How do you keep yourself satisfied with touring after all these years? So many bands get tired of it at this point, but SAXON keeps going. How do you keep something that’s so “old hat” fresh?
Biff Byford: We have a good chemistry in the band and we play quite aggressively. We aren’t just standing up there. That keeps you on the edge and we are quite adrenalized on stage. We are playing all the big hits and always changing the set list a bit to keep it fresh. We are playing five new songs off “Call To Arms”. We also play a couple of songs also off “Power And The Glory” since that was such a big LP here in the states.
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s ASA unveil the long-overdue release of "Collective Failure" + first music video for title-track! Check it out and stay tuned for more news! Click image to watch the video
Kimmo Kuusniemi’s SARCOFAGUS return with a Historic 2010 Concert Video Premiere on YouTube! Click image to watch the video
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