Chapter 1

This band already has an odd history I suppose, and we've only been around for 6 months or so. I guess it all started my freshman year in college, Fall of 2003. I had wanted to play in a metal band for a long time, and I decided to get serious about finding other musicians and playing together. I put up some flyers calling people to start a metal band but not much surfaced. Actually, only one guy came by and tried out on drums. He was good, but he ended up dropping out of college and moving to LA before we got anything done. Anyway, at the time I realized that finding people wasn't enough. I didn't have any songs or lyrics or even a concept figured out. I knew I wanted to play progressive metal, something a little weird and pulling in lots of influences, but I had no clear plan. Even if I had found people, we'd all be starting from scratch.

So, I decided to start writing. At the time, I also got a Digitech RPx400 for my birthday, and it made recording very easy and accessible, so it gave me even more incentive to write. I learned how to sequence drums, albeit very badly, and began to think of riffs. I wrote a couple of songs in a week, and they were freaking weird. The first was a 10 minute epic with very little structure, and with horrible drums, since I was no drummer, and barely even knew what to do. The second was so difficult to play, I couldn't record it right. I kept going.

After a few months and a lot of sleepless nights, I had 17 songs, including a few covers. They were recorded with me on guitars, sequenced drums, and me on vocals. My growl wasn't developed at all, and those old recordings make me laugh now. At the time, I was very proud of myself though.

However, as most musicians know, you don't just stop thinking when a recording is finished, so I kept coming up with ideas for riffs. Eventually I decided to write, record, and produce a concept album all by myself. I had delusions of grandeur and figured that, hey, if it was good, I'd put together a band and we'd get big. Anyway, it took a few months, but the result was far better than my first attempt, and I had matured a lot in my song writing, drum sequencing, and production. This endeavour was called Death's Tale.

I kept looking for other metal heads, but to no avail. I could find absolutely nobody with tastes even close to mine. So, I kept practicing and kept writing. My next project was an album I called "Ashes". I wrote 10 songs. These were different from my old ones because they focused more on a traditional melodic death metal approach, and less on making something progressive and weird. The songs still had bizarre parts and harmonies, and most of the material was pretty technical (at least for me at the time), but they were also more straightforward and catchy.

And here is where it gets interesting. All the material for "Ashes" was written between September and December of 2004. I went home for winter break, and two days before I was coming back to school, I got a message on The Facebook, from some guy named Paul. :)

Paul was into a lot of the same metal I was, and he just wanted to find other metalheads in SB. Later it turned out that he was also a drummer, so naturally we decided to jam together, and I was psyched to start playing some of the songs I had written live. In a week or so, we met up in his dorm room and started playing. Paul had only been playing drums for a year, and my songs were still a little over his head, but we had a lot of fun, so I figured that with practice we could totally pull off some of my more straightforward stuff. So, I played Haloed Thorns for him and he started learning.

After a jam or two, it became apparent that Paul's dorm room was a bad place to play, since the noise caused a lot of complaints, and the close quarters made it very hard to hear the guitar over the drumset. Paul asked around and discovered that we could (ab)use a ballroom/dining room in the dorms as a practice space, because when events weren't scheduled, it was empty. So, we had a jam there. I think the very first time we played there we caught our huge break.

One of Paul's friends and another guy were walking by our practice room and noticed us jamming. They walked in, we said hi, and they listened to us for a bit. Paul asked his friend if he wanted to sit in on the drums, but he said that the guy he was with was actually a drummer. Of course, Paul and I asked him if he wanted to jam. This was of course Alex. He sat down, and me and him ripped through a hellish rendition of Metallica's Battery. This guy was good. REALLY good. We jammed for a bit more and then they left. Paul and I instantly decided that we wanted the guy for our band.

I forget the sequence of events here, but at some point around then I found out that Paul could do death metal growls. I think we might have been just walking around and he was going through some Edge of Sanity lyrics. I heard his voice and thought he was pretty good. So, naturally when Alex agreed to join us and it meant that Paul was no longer needed on drums, I asked him if he wanted to stay in the band as a vocalist. He agreed, and a band was born.