Hello everyone. First of all I would like to start off by apologizing since I have not been able to post a newsletter in quite a while due to technical difficulties as I apparently exceed the amount of characters required in a newsletter. The project is moving along slowly and I had hope that I had some material posted by these dates. However I fell ill (Nothing overly complicated) and my recording sessions were pushed back as there were other holiday related affairs that needed to be taken care of. In one of my previous posts I talked about my friend Edgar and how he contributed with his original drumming on the songs you are hearing today. I am happy to inform you that he has agreed to help me with this project and contribute with his amazing drumming skills. We talked and decided to start with live recording sessions. There has been a lot of support from you and constantly get emails or messages asking when I will have more material for you to listen, all I want to say is that this middle aged dude (Me) is trying as hard as possible to get this done. In the meantime, I posted some old material which was be available for a month or so where you can hear Edgar and me randomly jamming and improvising and also some solo work, since it received a very positive response I decided to keep them here for a while. Please keep in mind that these were just Ideas that he and I had and are not formal recordings (In fact they aren’t even finished songs). Now as promised in the last newsletter I wanted to dive in to the meaning of the songs, the reason of their weird name nomenclature and perhaps a bit of information on music stuff like their keys and general composition. So without further adieu, let me outline what I think is most important of the songs. (Since I exceed the number of characters I will do this in two parts) Butterfly Scream: This song was originally and intentionally conceptualized as the process of a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon. I lay awake one day and thought to myself what a woman might go through when in labor and bringing to the earth a new life, then I thought to myself what would a butterfly feel when breaking out of its cocoon? -“I bet that would be painful” I said to myself, -perhaps our ears are not designed to hear these screams at such a low volume. I grabbed my bass guitar and started playing, through no thought of my own I started playing the main melody that you hear today. For the next coming days, this song was the only thing I could hear in my head. I came back from my job and grabbed my bass and this was the only tune I could play for days and days. Later on in life I used this portion as an introduction to a song for one of the bands I used to play for in San Diego and they said that the intro reminded them of a soap commercial, then we affectionately called this introduction “Soap Song”, which was used as an opening and prelude to another song called where can I start. This song is played in the key of A Major beginning with an open string on the third chord. It was originally played with an Ibanez SR series 4 string bass (Circa 2001) and the EQ accents a slight mid boost to get the “push feeling”. Arrangements were made with my Frankenstein bass (I don’t know what brand it is) which has Gibson SG pickups and an Aguilar OB-3 preamp. This bass was equipped with Piccolo strings and tuned one octave higher. All of these were recorded off a Carvin R600 head DI output. Kids will stone you: This is a song which holds a dark past. During my childhood, I was a victim of bullying at school. Being educated in the northwestern part of Mexico where most activities are bi-cultural and bi-lingual I had a certain advantage since I learned to speak English at an early age and had nerdy interest such as comic books and documentaries. This however, did not sit well with the other alpha male kids at school and I winded up being bullied all throughout middle school. It got pretty bad, but not life threatening (I think). This one time a kid started kicking me for no reason. My father taught me not to retaliate and I heeded his advice, however one part of me thinks I was afraid and cowered in front of an unprovoked attack. In another instance, another kid punched me in the face out of the blue. Again, I did not retaliate nor sought vengeance. One part of me wished I would have fought back and stand tall, however I was not equipped for combat (Being a nerd and all) and chose to turn the other cheek. There was different instance where another kid grabbed a rock (about 2.5 inches in diameter) and threw it at me as hard as his arm could muster, this rock landed in my thigh and left a bruise for a couple of weeks, I realized then that if that particular rock thrown at such speed would have hit a different part of my body it would have caused some serious damage. This action unfortunately left a scar which is expressed in this song. Originally this song was called “Kid with a rock” which was the image I carried out for all these years, however I thought to myself; the rock was thrown and it hit me and no one else. Perhaps I should name this song as something everyone could relate to and changed the name to “Kids will Stone You”. This song is played in the key of B minor, using the same Ibanez SR series bass (Circa 2001) all EQ is set in middle ranges and was played live back in 2001 with my friend Edgar on a Carvin Red Eye R600 2x10 combo. It was recorded using an aiwa tape recorder. You might hear some weird effects in the background which is actually a car alarm going off due to how loud we were playing. Unfortunately this effect will be difficult to reproduce if we decide to record this song in the future. Next newsletter I will talk about a couple of more songs. See you then. Best regards Hiram.