Breaking ground – The making of the first Fear Zero CD

I want to go back in time and talk a bit about the making of the first Fear Zero CD because it really was a great learning experience. I promise I will add more info about the new one I am working on next week or the week after.

In 1998 I had begun writing a lot of songs and had no outlet for the songs, other than playing them for friends that would go, “Wow, I had no idea you could write good songs!”

I had no idea whether they were good or not, you know how friends are.

At the very least, it gave me the idea that maybe I had a bit of talent at it, even though it still took a lot of hard work for me to get to that point.

I had auditioned a lot of singers by 2000 (20 in all I think), had tried out for a bunch of bands, nothing really clicked so I finally decided, “Hey, why don’t I sing and record these songs,” not knowing the world of trouble I was getting myself into. I had a little home studio and went about messing around with demos for the next year, year and a half.

Eventually I realized it is a lot harder to do everything yourself so I hired a guy to record me at his studio. Nothing came of it, other than the knowledge that if you are going to produce a CD, you really, really, REALLY, need to think about things you take for granted such as tempo, singing range, and recording techniques. Oh, and that anything that is in the rock vein sucks without real live drums. Remember that kids, drum machines SUCK!

Anyway, another year passed and I finally had this okay sounding demo, enough to get gigs and I auditioned a band and we played some shows and the reaction was pretty good but I realized I needed something to sell at the shows since the little EP was not worthy to my ears.

Enter a friend of mine, Shane J. a man of few words but much knowledge. Shane had just bought the brand new Pro Tools lite system and was looking for a project to practice on. This was in 2002 and little did he know it would take up most of both of our lives for the next year/year and a half while we battled through technical problems, arrangement problems, rewrites of the songs, everything that could go wrong went wrong but eventually we got it right.

Anyway, I am sure your eyes are tired so I will relay more about making the first Fear Zero CD next week.

Cheers!