In my humble opinion, rhythm is the most important element of music. And this has to come
In my humble opinion, rhythm is the most important element of music. And this has to come from the early days when the natives where beating on stones or pounding on whatever. Later on, intellectuals added melodies, harmonies, techniques, etc... I've always been into rhythm guitars and to me that is the essence of METAL.
My favorite metal albums of all time are Rust in Peace by Megadeth and Painkiller by Judas Priest. So I had to play tribute to the gods of metal; Judas Priest.
The hardest thing to accomplish playing this song was finding the right drummer, but Pete Parada as always was down and ready to go before I said; "Pain...". Ronny Allen my buddy bass player did a really good job with the bass and back-ups. And as a Judas tribute I needed another guitar player so the guitars would be double layer thick; enter Chris Cardenas. Once we had this going I went to my friend and singer Tommy to seal the deal and we where off and ready to go.
I love the way we are playing pocket in this song, the rhythms are very tight and most people probably don't realize that this is extremely hard to do. It's like a machine when all the elements are in perfect sync. Most musicians don't even know what pocket means and I couldn't even start explaining what it is. All my riffs are played by doing downstrokes which gives it a special attack but Pete started this song a bit faster so I was hurting. This song is all about rhythms; I could care less about the solos. I did try and follow the same melodic lines Glenn and K.K. did, but what I wanted to do with this song was play a very aggressive rhythmic metal song in front of the school of guitar intellectuals. The arpeggio part is lame but as I said; rhythm is where it's at guys.
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Added: 2 months ago
Views: 561
I've know CAM since 1996 or something and he's been a major influence and always recommend
I've know CAM since 1996 or something and he's been a major influence and always recommends amazing books. He's a real brother and I love him. He's also an amazing artists and a spiritual soldier.
He's done all my TATTOOs, and this is the "Seed of Life"..
http://iscream.org/
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Added: 2 months ago
Views: 78
Yellow Moon was a song Chris brought so Subculture could have another song to play live. C
Yellow Moon was a song Chris brought so Subculture could have another song to play live. Chris brought the demo of Yellow Moon where my friend Franco Lama played the guitar on. So there's a few melody lines I had to copy from the demo because Chris wanted the parts to sound the same as his demo did. I enjoyed playing this intrumental because it has a bunch of awkward rhythms, breaks and licks that where nicely tied up together. This song was the hardest (of our songs) for me to play because it wasn't mine so I had to learn the melody lines, progressions and arpeggios.
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Added: 3 months ago
Views: 180
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My first demo was a tape called "Demo-Lition" (1992) and a bunch of my friends at GIT had
My first demo was a tape called "Demo-Lition" (1992) and a bunch of my friends at GIT had copies of it because I was always passing tapes around. Everybody seemed to like the "Endless Chase" so it's the first thing Subculture worked on and also because Pete and I where playing it before Chris joined us. My demo had about 90% of what became the Subculture version of the song, and I wrote it one night in my apartment in Franklin Ave. It started out as some economy picking exercise but it evolved into more than that. It was really cool to see this song evolve from a simple idea on a piece of paper to arranging, rehearsing it and playing it live in front of people. This was the second time (and last, I believe) we played Endless Chase live. That last note sucked!
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Added: 3 months ago
Views: 105
At M.I. I had to play tribute to another one of my guitar heroes, Steve Vai. I don't think
At M.I. I had to play tribute to another one of my guitar heroes, Steve Vai. I don't think I would've done this song if I hadn't met Fire. Fire had seen me play a few times, but I had only seen him playing bass sight reading "Big Band", so I really didn't know what to expect. Everybody was telling me I had to hook up with Fire, and once we hooked up and started jamming I was completely blown away by his style. Fire loved Billy Sheehan, so we decided to do Shyboy. Pete was always up for the challenge so we rehearsed it a few times and went for it. I don't think I did that great of a job, but it turned out OK, I guess. Some days you're on it and some days you're not so on it. Anyway, it was an excuse to get up on stage and have fun so what the f...I don't take it that seriously, so I hope you don't either. Would you get up on stage in a guitar school in front of a bunch of guitar players and play Shyboy? And then put it on youtube?
Jim Pastorio, George Jorge Felipe Montaldo, Fire and Pete Parada
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Added: 3 months ago
Views: 1,294
As one of my final performances at M.I., I had to play tribute to my biggest guitar influe
As one of my final performances at M.I., I had to play tribute to my biggest guitar influence, Jason Becker. Also, it was the graduation party audition so I thought it was a cool idea to do "It's Showtime!" since we where all coming into the "real" world and it was showtime for all of us. This solo was a real challenge to play (and I could never play it like Becker) because it was all hybrid-picking (chicken-picking) and a very fast shuffle. I learned it almost note-for-note and to this day I still play this solo now and then just for fun and to keep my chops up. I can't post the complete song because the back-up vocals are so out of key I can't stand listening to it. But the solo came out decent I think, so here it is.
Jim Pastorio, George Jorge Felipe Montaldo, Pete Parada and Ronny Allen.
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Added: 3 months ago
Views: 488
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To me, the live performances at M.I. where simply fun because I could hook up with differe
To me, the live performances at M.I. where simply fun because I could hook up with different musicians and play the songs I wanted to play and expose our versions in front of the school. Most of the songs I played where tributes to my guitar heroes, and that's why I had to pay tribute to the master "Edward Van Halen". The reasons I decided to do "Hot For Teacher" are many, but first of all, it's a fun shuffle to play. Secondly, Fire is an amazing bass player (one of the most outrageous musicians I've met) and we had a really interesting chemistry because he couldn't really speak English, so we just spoke music. He had a crush on Coreen Sheehan (who didn't?) a vocal instructor (VIT) and he also loved Michael Anthony so, this song fit perfectly. The other reason I decided to go with this song was Doug's back-up vocals, because he makes it sound just like those Michael Anthony back-up vocals. Besides cutting short the solo a few bars, my guitar went way out of tune when I did the final Van Halen 2+ tone bend at the end. Oh well, its only rock and roll!
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 1,367
I was already into Ministry before going to GIT, but I never really thought about performi
I was already into Ministry before going to GIT, but I never really thought about performing one of their songs until Ronny had his boom-box blasting Ministry's Hero outside of M.I. one day. It wasn't hard to gather up the gang to play this song, and we decided to play it at the Vocal Performance LPWS (Live Performance Workshop). This was interesting because the Vocal Performance LPWS was meant for vocal oriented songs, for people to showcase their vocal talents. You could hear Jazz or Abba and stuff like that at this LPWS, but we thought playing Ministry would show them...
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 192
Jim asked me to do this song with the remains of the band Spooge (Jason and Bill) and I as
Jim asked me to do this song with the remains of the band Spooge (Jason and Bill) and I asked Chris to join for the performance. This was the first time I played live at M.I. and I broke a string on my second solo so I had to ask my friend Marcus for his guitar, which he gave me without a strap so I had to sit down on the floor. We did this at Rock Performance LPWS (Live Performance WorkShop) ran by Tim Bogert between 2-4PM TUE/THU at P-100 auditorium. This was the most popular LPW and the place was packed. The idea was to break the time limit playing a bunch of nonsense and cacophony at the end and see if they would cut us off. We told the video guys to go off and I added some cuts of a VIDEO-8 shot by my Japanese friend Hitoshi taken with his camera. You can hear Tim at the end expressing his frustration at us...
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Added: 4 months ago
Views: 675
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