After quite a few years of acquiring skills in the art of recording and playing music. I finally got brave and released this one called blue. I was 4 years out of HS (though honestly that shocks me, I still felt like a kid.) and just starting to get good enough at this stuff to get something presentable. There are a lot of things a person could say that's bad about it. But I'm not rich and I don't have really great equipment and I don't have big industry producers working on my stuff. No one ever tought me how to do anything when it comes to playing instruments, mixing sounds together, recording etc. except what you can read in magazines. That is still true to this day. Therefore, one thing I'm proud of here is that you can hear it as I get better.

There were a lot of interesting things that went into recording this album. For one thing, many of the kick drum tracks are actually coming from a yamaha keyboard. (probably an $80 keyboard, from sometime in the mid 80's. The same keyboard was used for any flute sounds, music box sounds, organ sounds, etc you may hear on blue and Contagion.) I'm a bit of a tech freak I'm sorry to say, so I rigged this up myself. What I did is take two potentiometers (volume knobs basically) and put them inline with one another so that one controlled the sensitivity of the other. I then mounted them on my kick pedal using some tape, a bit of tin, and a socket from a socket set. The socket went over the bolt on the pedal, which in turn spun the first pot. The second pot was used to control at exactly which point in the swing of the kick pad the resistance became low enough that the keyboard was triggered.

So I took the cover off the keyboard and soldered some computer tape wire (the flat stuff - like an ide cable) to the board connecting the circuit that would trigger the "bass drum" key. If you touch those two wires together, the keyboard would do the kick sound. So then attaching them to the pots I could make the kick sound happen at exactly the same time the beater would hit the actual acoustic drum.

See, the problem was that retro 1970's set really was not at all glamourous. In fact, it sucked. The kick could not be coaxed into sounding decent no matter what you did to it. I needed some help. So I got to work and wired it up. Actually I think it sounds pretty good!

I'm not ever afraid to be creative and so you never know what will turn up.

For those that are actually reading this, I had bought a new kick head by the time Contagion came out and so no I didn't use the same set up for that album.

There were two different drummers who helped on this album, since I was really new to drumming and really couldn't play to save my life most of the time. Nate Thompson and Rob Willardson each added their own pieces to this album and I thank them.

Nate went on to be the drummer for Big Sucking Moose, if any of you ever heard of them.

Rob is quite talented in his own right and last I heard he was still working on his own album - on which he played drums, guitars, keyboards and sang. He was going to Utah State, so maybe you know him or can look him up and check his stuff out. It's pretty good.