1. Clean
2. Organize
3. Love
4. Learn
5. Exist
6. Let go
7. Embrace
8. Die
9. Live

You can find Alice at www.ilikealice.com.

BASH - "The Pros and The Shawns" from Martín Yernazian on Vimeo.

Usually, the weeks and days leading up to a any sort of tour is filled with long hours, little sleep, and lots of stress. This time was no different, but each time that we do this it gets a little bit easier every time. For this tour, we will be sharing the MKIO van (named Atlantis) with I:Scintilla, who we are meeting up in San Francisco to play our first show at the Milk Bar tonight.

The last couple of days have been a flurry of rehearsals, packing, setting up rigs, etc. Here is a tidbit of what I did to prepare for this one:

• Since we have some new songs, I am in charge of essentially creating a live mix that we use as our backing tracks. Our backing tracks contain "electronic" oriented sound elements that we can't normally play live. I have a crash tested laptop PC that I set up to be exclusively in charge of streaming backing tracks, click, and MIDI. Most of these elements are piped into our stage monitoring system (or what we like to call "the Brain"). This system has a 6 channel monitor mixer that has passive splits built in, so that we can monitor the same exact signals that we are sending to front of house sound. Our brain also has Natasha's in ears mounted so she can easily tweak her levels and not have to worry about setting up her IEMs differently every time we play.
• Programming live keyboard patches for Natasha and consolidating her keyboard rig. She used to use an old and unruly Yamaha Motif keyboard for the live parts that she plays. I wanted to set up a system that provided more portability and better sound quality; ultimately, I decided to use Propellerheads Reason hosted on my MacBook Pro, with a Roland Edirol MIDI controller keyboard. I like to use the Combinator device within Reason to program patches because I've found that it gives me the most versatility as I can program multiple sound sources to create the exact sound that I'm looking for. As well, the keyboard controller itself weighs a lot less than the old Motif, and is about 20x easier to transport. This is a really important factor as Natasha has a bad back and can't lift anything over 20 pounds.
• Packing clothing, consolidating gear, double and triple checking everything. Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, etc. All very important things that would be sorely missed if forgotten.

Finally, the last thing that we took care was to get the U-Haul trailer hitched at 7am. It is only about $20 a day to rent a trailer, but U-Haul isn't as stupid to think that most people would just pay that amount. It happened that the actual hitch that we had from our last trailer didn't fit this trailer, so we had to buy a new one. Additionally, they wanted us to buy insurance as well, with the cheapest option starting at around $50. I quickly learned how U-Haul stays above their bottom line. After that, the band all met at my place for breakfast and we loaded up the trailer and set off.

Right now, we are closing in on Kettleman City which is somewhere in the middle of LA and San Francisco. It is 102+ degrees outside and I'm starting to feel the heat starting to seep into the van. We have about 40 liters of coconut water that Gordon picked up from Trader Joes, 3 bags of vegan cookies, countless amounts of grapes and cherry tomatoes, and our van is running in top notch shape. We'll be at the hotel at around 4:30 to pick up the I:Scintilla crew and we sound check at 6. Tomorrow, we have a day off in San Francisco; we've booked a band trip to Alcatraz for the occasion. Perhaps they'll finally lock me up for good.

BASH! has been playing here almost exclusively for 6-8 months or so, and we've definitely started growing into the songs. There is definitely something to be said for playing live; no amount of band practice or rehearsals can beat the overall tightness that you get from the excitement and pressure of performing.

I think it is for that reason that now, when Mankind Is Obsolete performs it feels like we're channeling a controlled storm; almost as if all we have to do is get on stage, switch on our gear and something instead our collective (band) decides to switch on at full force. And when it switches on, all thought drops away, and I can just focus on making each note count as passionately as possible, and make the sounds and textures interweave with the other instrumentation with as much breadth as I can muster.

I have what us crazy musicians would call "rocker neck", which is in fact, I would say, a form of whiplash. This usually creeps up after a good night of headbanging and flailing about on stage. It gets really bad after about 24 hours and subsides after about 48 (though yoga helps). When touring, there is a period of about 2-3 days that it hurts, but then it seems to go away as your neck muscles essentially acclimate to the thrashings.

The show last night felt really good. There was only a very small handful of people there (including my own family, which always rocks to have their support) and it was just all around good fun. Sometimes it's disheartening to play for such small crowds and hardly ever get paid, but I love it, and wouldn't trade it for anything. Which is why, for a band like Mankind Is Obsolete, for which we've played hundreds (if not thousands) of shows over the course of almost 10 years (of which I've been a part of it for 5) it is the most rewarding feeling to see the crowds starting to grow, and the venues and promoters willing to pay more to have us there. I know being a musician/performing artist isn't the most financially lucrative career choice (in fact, it is statistically one of the riskiest and lowest paying jobs in the US!) but it certainly feeds my soul.

There is an Alice show this Friday at King King's in LA, so I'm looking forward to playing again. Two shows in one week, not too shabby!

It's like this: being on tour is like being in a war-- you're essentially on the move 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are moments of rest when you show up to the gig or get the occasional off day, but otherwise it is a constant battle of survival. Little to no sleep, minimal amounts of food, almost constant heavy lifting, and of course, lots and lots of driving. The very fact that your life revolves around being on the road seriously puts your chance of death at a much higher percentage rate than if you were living a "civilian" life. On top of that, you have to deal with the elements: thunder storms, tornados, snow storms, ice and maniacal California drivers (for some reason road rage really flares up a lot on the west coast); and that's all just the tip of the iceburg!

I'm not sure how some people are able to party through it. Usually, those people start looking and feeling pretty road worn in a quick way (see picture). You know the look: sunken, glassy eyes, the unkempt beard or two, the malnourished and heroin junkie complexion, the constant smell of alcohol and cigarettes. Trust me, I've been there! But it's easy to fix by doing some simple things.

1. When playing gigs, it is all right to drink a beer or two of bar comps, but for fuck sake don't drink everyone's comps!! Maybe if it's the last night of the tour, or you have a couple of days off with the potential for lots of sleep it will be okay, but otherwise, your hangover is going to last about 2 days if you get utterly wasted.

2. When crashing at a fans' pad, it is okay to be polite and party with the group, but make sure to excuse yourself at a decent time (before 3am if at all possible) to go to sleep. Trust me, the difference between 2 hours of drunken sleep and 4-5 hours of sober sleep is night and day.

3. Have a physical workout routine that works with life on the road. When crashing at fans' and friends' pads, I would make sure to go to sleep as early as possible so I could get up and run around the local area, block, park, street, etc, even if it was for 20 minutes. Not only does it get your body back on track, you get to really experience the surroundings of the different cities and towns that you play in. (This usually isn't the case, as much as most people would like to think. Most bars and clubs look the same, and are in a similar enough part of town that most places begin to look the same).

4. EAT. Whenever possible, eat healthy. You've seen the guy who ate McDonald for 30 days for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You do not want to do that to your body, that's just as bad as smoking a full pack of cigarettes and downing 4-5 beers a night. Just as bad. Make sure to eat as many greens and organics as possible; vegetables, fruits, that sort of thing. Walmart is always a good place for a touring band to load up on their healthy foods. If you have to eat fast food, make sure you're sticking with basic foods (Taco Bell has really great and surprisingly healthy veggie bean burritos. They are also cheap).

When any of these elements are missing, not only will it have a negative effect on your health, it can have a negative effect on the bands' health as well. Lack of sleep, food, and/or a hangover or a drunken demeanor could cause nasty sparks in any band dynamic. Couple all of that with non stop driving, and you'll have to really learn to like your band mates.

That's all I have for now off the top of my head; I'm excited about a number of prospective things that may happen this summer/fall/(and even winter) so I'm getting back into tour shape and prepping my mental (and musical) chops in preparation.

If you want to read a really remarkable story about surviving on the road, read Henry Rollin's "Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag". It was, is, and will always be my personal bible for touring.

(EDIT: and seriously, don't do drugs. Anything harder than alcohol will DESTROY you on the road.)

1. Pro Tools HD rig - I feel like upgrading my rig to HD will create a really solid foundation for all the work I would like to do. Avid's now offering a Native card which essentially uses the host computer to do all DSP processing. Since I'm capable of building high performance systems for cheap there is no reason not to base a home studio machine around such a system. I also have my eye on the new Avid OMNI interface to provide signal I/O and conversion. All the reviews that I've been reading about this interface are glowing. In fact, Sound on Sound did a shootout with the converters in this interface along with some industry favorites and this one came out on top.
2. Pre-amps and microphones - I'm still not sure what to get in terms of pre-amps. The OMNI may very well have the right pre-amps I need. If not, it will definitely be superior to what I have right now, and it will be extremely easy to upgrade. the one important factor is getting an excellent vocal microphone.
3. Monitors - I'm still strongly considering the Yamaha NS10s, just so I can have something that's a bit more honest and raw than what I have now.

This rig will cost upwards of $6500-$7000 or so, which is much better than my previous pie in the sky post. The HD Native + OMNI system comes in a bundle that is a nice $5k (with the Digi-002 trade in). At that point I may just budget the rest of my money for a good vocal microphone. It is a long process to save for this equipment, financially, but I'm chipping away at it. I'm attempting to use music related income to completely fund this upgrade, so it may take a while; but so far I'm off to a really great start for 2011, and am almost halfway there. Almost.

I'm moving next weekend to a new space in Eagle Rock so I'm really busy getting ready, packing etc. The new "studio" room will be another bedroom; not the best space in terms of acoustics (12'x12' room) but I'm really going to try to make the room as acoustically pleasing as possible for mixing. Also, I realized something last night- the desk that I work at puts the speaker cones above my ears. I put the speakers on their sides and everything sounds, well, a lot worse now. Which is good, because I think I'm getting a better picture of my mixes. If I can hear the "badness" of my mixes now, then there might be hope for me to actually create something decent without much help. Maybe some speaker cushions will help with bass response, which would be an instantly cheap way to improve things.

It has been really good for me to immerse myself in a project like this for a great many number of reasons. First off, I am using my studio every day and getting to know the idiosyncrasies of my set up. I've been trying to learn how to "see through" my speaker monitors. I've been reading and have also experienced that every single monitor set up sounds differently. Not only does every pair of speakers sound different, but it changes depending on the size and shape of the room (among many many other factors). I think that to truly take advantage of my monitor set up, I have to learn how to see past the surface image that it presents to my ears, as it is not "right" (as in, realistically reproduced on regular sound systems) in many cases. Not right is subjective, but there has been many times that I have created a sound, or mixed a song just to have it sound different nearly everywhere else. Since I am working on my system so much lately, I am beginning understand the differences so that I can adjust accordingly and better reproduce the sounds that I want.

Right now, this is a lot easier with guitar sounds. I have a really good grasp on the sounds that I like to create guitar wise. Even if the sound is a little off on my set up, I have full confidence that the sound will be good. A guitar is mostly known, by sound, for a relatively small spectrum of fundamental audio frequencies (though harmonically it goes all across the entire spectrum). In fact, most humans can probably hear guitars easier than most other instruments as those fundamental frequencies happen to fall into the range that most humans interact with on a daily basis. That is, mid range frequencies. It always blows my mind when some guitarists purposefully scoop out the mid range frequencies with an eq filter to get more of a "metal" or chunky sound for a lot of modern rock/metal music. By doing that they are essentially making their sound unrecognizable, especially with distortion.

This doesn't apply so much with clean sounds, especially when it comes to pickups. If I want an especially clean and sparkly sound, I want to produce something that starts with less mids, but something that doesn't take away from the high frequencies. For this, I rely on my guitar pickups to create the tonal choices that I want. My Paul Reed Smith custom 22 guitar has a unique pickup selector that produces sounds that cover an extremely wide array of frequencies. My bridge pickup has the most mid range out of all of the options. This is perfect for heavy, distorted rock sounds that I want to sit well in a mix or punch through in a live setting. This pickup isn't good for clean sounds (unless I want something with a little more "bite" on it.. A clean tube amp driven with a hot bridge pickup will produce a biting, horn like sound on single notes, but full chords will sound a little muddy). This is why I like to use the second pickup position on my PRS; it does a really good job of recreating a single coil pickup sound.

But these are all for what most people consider "typical" guitar sounds. I like to play with a combination of both typical and untypical sounds. A sound that I love to create is a fat, filtered synth like sound. (I've only done this for one live song by MKIO, which we hardly ever play unfortunately - In This Ocean - thus I have never really played it live. But come to thyink of it, I do use this sound in Dragonfly by Android Lust, come to think of it..) By itself, filtering a clean guitar sound will produce your typical wah effect, especially with the resonant frequency turned up. Turn the distortion on and you have the same effect; 70's era disco guitar porn music ("wakka wakka", etc). For me, I like to make the sound extreme. A fat, filtered synth sound is essentially the sound of a square waveform (though definitely not a perfect synthesized square by any means). It helps to pitch shift the sound down before hitting any distortion. After that, I use an effect that creates a massive filter.. Not a wah filter, those are way too gentle. I'm going for an extreme filter. Luckily, my Line 6 M13 has lots to choose from. There is one in particular that works really well. After that is some fuzz distortion with no eq, with the gain/fuzz turned all the way up. Instant square wave synth filter sound. Add some delay onto the end of the chain to create extra effect. Put the delay before the distortion to create wild distorted fluctuations and oscillations. I assign my controller pedal to manually do the filter (frequency) sweep, which makes it extra fun to play. Anyhow, this is just a slight digression into one of the many sounds like I love to create and play with on a day to day basis.

For the new Collide album, I'm using a lot of typical and untypical guitar sounds. I'm not going to say what I use to make all my sounds with, but you could guess it if you are familiar with a program that rhymes with "uncle pig". I really want to out do ALL of my past work with this, so I'm putting a lot of time into making sure I do that. I'm going to go back to finishing parts for the last song on this batch tonight.

There was one song that I messed around with the ebow to create a violin effect of two successively played bowed notes. Suffice to say that I have a lot of room to grow when it comes to playing the ebow. What I would like to try is to use a regular bow. I might have to hit up ebay to see if I can find anything for cheap.

Anyhow, it's good to be back so to speak on this blog. Next project up after Collide is to finish up a couple of tracks for Hoodoo Engine, a project that has been in the works for a long time now. Finally, I'm going to start devoting a large amount of time to Mankind Is Obsolete production. I've been secretly waiting for our producer to come back west to start but I think I'm just going to start doing some of the crazy time intensive tasks in preparation; namely, that is to convert all the currently songs in progress over to the highest sample rate possibly by my system. This means importing protools sessions under 96k and re-recording (rendering) midi instrument tracks to audio. I'm also going to start recording guitar parts for that.

Before I get into explaining what those truths are, I have to explain a part of myself with full honesty: I'm an eternal optimist. This is both a good and bad thing. It is good because no matter what, I will never give up. It is bad, because, well, it very well may be the definition of insanity (something along the lines of "he keeps on repeating the same thing over and over, and getting the same results. Why does he keep on doing it?").

Touring, for me, has been about endurance. Strength. Inner vitality. The ability to overcome even some of the worst living conditions. It has been a lesson of observation, an anthropological study of culture across the United States. I also got to experience how different regions, climates, and cultures inspire different eating habits across the US. There are some regions that all you can find is fried everything. Seafood. Italian. Spice; and of course, fast food. Actually, the vast majority of the USA lives off of fast food. We are officially a fast food culture, for the majority. Anyhow, I digress: that is a topic in its own right.

The truths that I describe here are my own personal truths. I don't mean to speak for anyone and everyone that has toured, but they are truths that I have discovered for myself along the way. They work well for me because, like I said, I am an optimist. Also, my touring experience hasn't been luxurious by any means. Not to destroy the whole "rock star" myth, but it is nothing like what it is portrayed as. Even on a tour bus.

Some artists (the lucky < 1%) are fully taken cared of when they tour. I noticed that Katy Perry had her very own tour bus when MKIO played the Warped Tour. And it even had a giant picture of her airbrushed onto it. So this experience is not one of any sort of celebrity or popular public figure you may read about in the tabloids or see on American Idol. But you see, the very fact that she had a picture of herself painted into the side of the tour bus proves again that the rock star myth will always hold a lot of sway with the masses.

(That experience itself was rather funny; MKIO won a contest through a special Ernie Ball MySpace contest back in 2008 and we were selected to play a one off date for the Warped Tour. We happened to be in Washington State at the time so chose to play at the Gorge; which in itself is a beautiful, sprawling venue embedded into the side of a huge mountainous gorge. I think the Pacific Northwest will always hold a special place in my heart. Anyhow, the experience goes like this: the contest we won gave us a 15 minute spot to play in the midst of 20-30 bands that won. Ernie Ball set up a "stage" in the form of a modular flatbed truck, which opened up to the crowd with a guard rail, full back line and large PA. Our winning spot had us playing at 11am (or maybe it was 10:30?). We were there at 7 or 8am in the morning. It took us about an hour to park in the "artist" area. This is where I spotted Katy Perry's tour bus. And then, we had to haul our gear and merch about half a mile to the "stage" that Ernie Ball had set up. Talk about insane load-in. When we got there, the sound guy was an asshole to all of the bands. I forget what he said, but he was a complete tool. We took it all in, though, because this was our chance to play at the Warped Tour! Awesome, or so we thought at the time. Just a warning to bands that take part in "contests" of this nature: they are rigged to be self promotional devices that ultimately exist for their own corporate benefit. Hey, at least we got to play, and it was fun. We gave out a lot of stickers and demo CDs, and might have even made a few new fans.)

These are my personal truths about touring:

1. Touring for more than three or four weeks changes you.

When you tour for more than a couple of weeks, you will change in ways that you have never had without touring. If you continue touring, and stay on the road for more than a month or two, that is where the real changes start happening. Personality quirks that you never though you had suddenly bubble to the top of your personality. Living day in and day out in a vehicle with other people also introduces those quirks to everyone else; and vice versa.

2. Growth or death

At this point, you have one or two choices: choose to grow, or quit. Touring is hard work: you have to drive many, many hours (sometimes overnight) to get to your next destination. If you do not make it there in time, or if there is a problem, you risk not being able to afford gas or afford to eat that day. Gas and food become your priorities; if either do not exist, then it's time to go home (or to take out another line of credit). After all the driving and stress of getting there on time, you have to load all of your gear and merchandise into the venue. Then depending on how the night is set up, once gear is set up you will then sound check. If you are lucky, the venue might buy you a couple of pizzas and feed you for the night. We felt really blessed on our last tour with Android Lust: for the most part, we had a hot meal every night, and enough money to pay for gad and then some (You know you are doing something right when you get to eat). Most of the time, on our year long tour, we were very lucky to be fed by the venue, let alone paid. (But there are definitely exceptions to that rule: MKIO has been graced to work with some diamonds in the rough- promoters that take care of us no matter what.)

3. Your fans are your best friends

When you are really grovelling in the shit of a nasty tour, your fans quickly become your best friends. Through their kindness and generosity MKIO was able to survive our year long tour. Not because we got paid a lot by venues, not because they fed us, not because of any per diems: no, we survived because fans took us in every night. Most would feed us, and we always had a couch or a floor to sleep on. Jon, our drummer, had a knack for cooking really healthy meals on a budget. Gordon brought his own mess kit so we were able to cook small meals, heat up soup, and make coffee. If we were able to at most make our gas money from any guarantee or door deal + merch, our fans were the ones that really provided for us beyond any of that. I fucking love our fans, and I know they love us.

My day is beginning to wrap up here so i will continue this series tomorrow. In the mean time, let me know if you have had any experiences on the road. I would love to hear them!