After I saw Top 14 Most Common Band Names this morning on Invisible Oranges, I wrote a script to list the most common words in those 75,000 metal band names.
Here’s the top 20:
Dark / Darkness – 649
Black – 637
Death – 574
Blood – 320
Dead – 318
Hate – 221
Eternal – 218
Dawn – 210
Silence – 186
Soul – 181
Hell – 175
Funeral – 168
Pain – 162
Chaos – 154
Evil – 153
Angel – 146
Fear – 142
Beyond – 139
Flesh – 138
Fire – 137
We did the RPM “write and record a record in a month” thing again this year. We actually needed to finish tracking midway through February because I was leaving town, and because I wanted to give Greg more than a few days to mix.
We set up shop at glamorous Turk Street on a Friday night, then wrote and recorded basics over two long days of gear failure. Things that fucked up: my recording laptop, my backup recording laptop, Pace’s Ampeg, my VTM60, the Laney Supergroup we borrowed, two mic stands, Cubase, a 1spot power supply, my 2-ch A/D converter. On our first afternoon I was sitting in Jeff’s car, installing Cubase on a borrowed Macbook Pro while we drove back to the space. It’s like Abbey Road around here.
Gear problems or no, we got basics done. We spent the next few days writing and tracking vocals and guitar overdubs in my basement whenever we could find time. I uploaded a gig of files to Greg the night before I left town, and listened to his mixes on headphones in a hotel room. I thought the roughs were really good, but Greg just killed on the mixes. Next level shit. How does he do it?
Anyway, here’s the result: Ten songs about bigfoot(s). Narration by Friday the 13th author Victor Miller. Mix desk manned by a genuine Grammy winner. Mellotron. Riffs. Feel it.
- White spraypaint
- Adidas “Overtime” large wristband
- Tiny Alamo amp which totally rules
- Kowloon Walled Bunny (Ben, the LED is too damn bright)
- SF Guitarworks
- Japan and the Greco Jazz that was made there
- Snailface
- $100 Avantone ribbon mic
- Washburns, all of them
- Zebra pickups
I finally replaced my antique Movable Type install with a current WordPress. (and for now, a customized version of the fspring theme.)
That last design, the MT one, was pretty tweaked out and hand-written and sucked to write, but it lasted six years. Actually, I still like it. But I was never going to migrate it; it was stuck with that specific version of MT.
While I was gutting things, I jettisoned about 90% of my blog archive, which dated back to 1999(!). Nothing anybody will miss.
RSS will probably hiccup, but hopefully redirects are working such that my thousands of readers will continue to never miss a post.
Right. Hello.