the latest update from JAMES MURPHY:
Update from James:
10:04am September 3rd, 2004
Hi all,
I'm sitting here in front of the computer drinking my morning coffee and reflecting on the events of yesterday... and speculating with no small amount of anxiety the oncoming storm of Hurricane Frances. This potentially killer storm has already had a detrimental effect on the project I'm currently immersed in, namely the Within The Mind tribute to the music of Chuck Schuldiner: Yesterday myself, my brother Stephen and assistant Nick carried a mobile recording rig over to Ozzfest at the Tampa Amphitheater in order to conduct several pre-planned mini-recording sessions for WTM.
We arrived reasonably early and got things going right away by setting up and recording a solo spot from Darkest Hour guitarist Kris Norris. Everything went very smoothly with Kris and he laid down some excellent lines to pay homage to one of his primary early influences. In fact all of the Darkest Hour guys were very gracious in allowing us to set up the mobile rig in the back lounge of their bus in order to record all of the performances, even those of guys in other bands, that we had intended to record.
(NOTE: For those interested in the technical side of things: for guitar and bass we are capturing the guest performances with a Line6 Pod 2.0 amp modeling processor and a high quality direct box, the Radial JDV mk3. The signal recorded via the direct box is an exact representation of the signal coming directly from the guitar pick-ups and will be used later to feed the input of an actual guitar amp that will be mic'ed up and recorded in a conventional studio situation, a process known as "re-amping", sometime before mixing begins. When this is done properly, which we are taking great care to do, the sound captured is exactly the same as if the guitarist/bassist were present in the studio and playing live through the amp stack.)
But, right after we finished with Kris, we received word that the final Ozzfest tour date in West Palm Beach had finally been cancelled due to Hurricane Frances' inexorable progress toward Florida. With this news most of the bands various tour managers began to quickly round up their crews and band members and get them to their busses in order to head north as soon as possible. I did manage to get together with all the guys I had planned to record before their respective busses hit the road in order to work out alternate plans for getting their performances.
We stuck around to watch Black Sabbath (awesome!) and headed home to begin hurricane preparations for the second time in less than a month. I'm happy with the progress made yesterday, everyone has been re-scheduled and things are moving forward nicely... despite Mother Nature's impending rage. The rescheduled recordings include performances by Mick and Paul of Slipknot, Willie Adler (L.O.G.), and the newly added Buzz of Unearth who is a modern day shredder of the highest order with strong roots in Chuck's music. Welcome aboard Buzz.
More updates to come soon.
~James Murphy
to see pics, go to the official death tribute website:
http://www.deathtribute.com/