The Incoherent Ramblings Of Victor M. Ruiz

It has been a while since I’ve posted anything here. It has been a while since I’ve posted anything anywhere except for Facebook. Too many things going on, the birth of my second son, working on getting the restoration of a house completed, and oh yeah, I’m working on recording an album. Although the latter may come as a surprise to a lot of people, I have actually been documenting this on the Talking Metal Forums for a while. Since the Forums are shutting down, I figured I’d post updates on this site since it has been well, somewhat dead! Do I think anyone will pay attention? Probably not, but if there is someone out there keeping score, they can come here and check out what has been going on with the recording process.

Long story short I’m recording 10 tracks with producer Jose Cuenca of the Spanish band Marlenne. My choice to work with him was easy, he gets results out of every band he works with. Are the bands he’s produced world famous, part of some huge tour? No, but he get’s a certain sound out of bands that sounds like a world class recording, just check out his work with his own band, the bands Wayne, and Cuming Soon. I had been talking to him for a while with regards to recording material, but I kept putting it off, mainly because I was sort of stuck, and had a massive case of writers block. For years I had been thinking how unmetal some of the music I was coming up with was. How can I put this out, when I have a metal podcast, and I’ve reviewed, and criticized others in the past. Then I watched the Foo Fighter’s Back And Fourth, and came to the realization that as long as I like the music, and it’s rock, who cares what subgenre of rock it might be or metal or whatever. Chances are a handful of people will listen to the tracks and that’s it, I have no disillusion of grandeur, don’t think I’ll sell a copy of anything, there will be no world tour (hell their probably won’t even be a single show) and I will probably just post the entire album here to stream or download.

So once I realized this riffs, and lyrics started flowing out of me, I’d say I was going to work on my new house, but had secretly setup a room with an amp and a Les Paul where I would just jam, and record on my iPhone whatever I thought sounded halfway decent. Some days I’d be there for 20 minutes, others for four hours. At the same time I was working out the drum tracks in my head, for those of you that know me from way back I was drummer first, so I figured, ok this will all be a piece of cake. Wrong, I would jam away, and the computer would run out of memory, my recording software would stop detecting my kit’s brain, etc. It was a nightmare. So I decided, screw it I’m using Superior Drummer to convert my electronic set’s sound to the sound of an authentic acoustic drum set, why don’t I just program the drums with Superior Drummer? So that’s what I’ve done, it kills me to not record the drums live, but the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. I also injured one of my ankles, which made it impossible to play for the most part, so that made the decision even easier.

From there I had a vision, ok, these are the foundations of the songs, but they need to improve, they need to get better. So I set out to contact people that I had interviewed both here in Spain, and in the States. Response was luke warm at best, I tried to explain “look this is a rough demo, the end product will be a million times better”. Some people balked, some people asked for money some saw potential, and others came on board and have been working with me on tracks for the last two months. I don’t want to name anyone because I want it to be a surprise and don’t want oh it was only him? Or who the hell is that come up. I want people to objectively listen and say wow I do or don’t know who it, but track ended up sounding really cool.

One of the other issues I ran into was that I purposely wanted to make an album with various styles of music. The album format is dead, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that no one records sold albums anymore. If you’ve heard the best track off of the album everything else is a b, c or d version of that song. There is no more originality. I’m not saying that my material is original, but I’ve tried to make it entertaining, and make is so that it’s 10 different courses of food, not just one long drawn out boring meal. That’s also why I don’t think I’ll ever play these tracks live, because it would be very difficult to put a band together that consists of musicians open enough to want to play set of tracks so varied.

There is still quite a way to go to finish everything up, some of the tracks are close to 100% others are closer to 80%. Some lyrics have to be re-written, some melodies have to be modified, and Mr. Cuenca is the perfect man to get the best vocal performance possible out of me. My voice is where I lack the most confidence, and also where the most amount of work needs to be performed. My soloing leaves a lot to be desired, but I think I’ll have most of the solo’s covered by guest musicians. The bass will be handled by guests as well, some guitar parts, and some backing vocals.

I know I’m going out on a limb here, and one man’s treasure is another man’s turd, but here are some snippets of five songs, note that these are basic demos, the mix is off, the bass is not present on some of these tracks.

The Talking Metal Forums are shutting down. The Forums are where I first met Mark Strigl (co-host of Talking Metal along with John Ostronomy), who gave me the kick in the ass I needed to get my podcasts going. I’ve also met so many cool other people on the forums as well, it is a shame they’re going away. But with the changing times the forum platform is almost dead, sites like Facebook have taken over, so I will continue to visit Talking Metal’s Facebook page and comment on music there.

I hope to post a lot more updates and podcasts here in the near future.

-VMR