The Current State of My Music Life

Hello all,

Just want to share a short blog post about my music life lately. To start, I am now heavily into recording and I don't do so much live guitar playing anymore. I also don't have easy access on guitar gear as I used to be so I don't buy new guitar stuffs as much as say last year or even the year before; I am much more laid back now and I don't have too much GAS going on in terms of guitar gear or music stuffs.

I also don't spend as much time playing guitar as I used to be, not because I don't have time, not because I love guitar less than before, but simply because I now spend more time creating small snippets of riffs or rhythms or melody ideas rather than just practicing on a song that I already know. I would then play those riffs after I'm done writing them but playing and practicing those riffs don't take as much time as regular practicing or playing over a record.

I now started to have some kind of instrumental songwriting sense. I shifted gear more toward music production rather than just focusing on guitar by itself. This doesn't mean that guitar is no longer important; in fact it's quite the opposite, I'm always trying to compose something that will make my guitar tracks sound more important on the whole context of mix and composition.

Looking back to my older gear posts, I now don't lust over Nitro vs Poly, Tube vs Solid State, DiMarzio vs Seymour Duncan, true bypass vs buffer, or the ultimate drive pedal. I simply don't think they are as important nor as significant as I thought they was. When you started recording and mixing stuffs, they just don't matter that much especially these days in the digital era. I can just insert an EQ plugin, some compressor going on and add some delay and reverb from free VSTs and all of a sudden I have a very nice sounding guitar track that I crave long time ago!

Heck, I can even just put a LePou amp simulator plugin with some Cab Impulse Response as opposed to real amp and cab, add some effect plugins from GuitarRig, and all of a sudden I have a very decent high gain tube amp sound! And the best part is, nobody knows that I'm not using both tube amp and real effects! How cool is that, eh?

Anyway, this is just my little reflection over what I've become now in my music life. I hope you enjoy this post, and I will post more!

Cheers and God bless you :)

UPDATE: JUST POSTED A NEW ORIGINAL SONG

Hello people, I was busy coming up with the follow up song for "Edge of the Mind". I spent the whole September to perfect my new song and ended up with a final version that I really like. The new song is called "Decisive", it is basically a Progressive Metal song with some experimentation of sound that I added in the song. I am particularly happy with how the rhythm turns out.

Apart from writing the song, the mixing was quite challenging. I have never dealt with so many tracks in one song before that I had to be extremely careful with the EQ and panning to avoid instruments clashing each other.

Talking about the gear being used, I am very happy with my new Ibanez GRX720 7 string guitar that I acquired earlier this year. I recently put DiMarzio D-Activator 7 string on the bridge as well as Blaze 7 on the neck and the change of tone is quite drastic to be honest and now it sounds very good for metal and rock. Palm mutings have never been this tight, sustain has never been this long; however, the pickups punches the amp way too hard and makes it distorts very easily so I have to back down the gain a little bit to avoid oversaturation.

I also used my beloved American Standard HSS Stratocaster on this record for the middle part of the song. It is still configured as it was previously with DiMarzio Virtual Vintage Heavy Blues 2 and AirZone.

Effects, I am using MXR Dyna Comp coupled with Boss CS-3 as well as Boss GE-7 and Boss NS-2 to get a very pronounced pick attack and then run them into my old trustee Radial Tonebone Hot British and BB Preamp in front of a clean Mesa TA-30. Delays and reverbs are coming from DAW plugins from Reaper.

Anyway enough talking, here is the new song:


I hope you enjoy this song and please help me to share this song to your friends. Cheers for now! God bless :)

Stay tuned for my next post soon!