Darren

Well me and Jeff just started out playing songs we knew already. We didn't really know how to "jam" because we had never done it before. We figured why not try to play a song to Kalle's drum track? The first one didn't work too well. There were lots of varying drumbeats and it was hard to keep up on the beat. Eventually, we combined chords from two songs and matched it with the drum beat. We recorded it in Adobe Premiere, then later converted it to Real Audio.

Next we tried picking with two guitar tracks. Kalle gave us chords for the twelve bar blues and it was a lot easier to match that with the drums. I did the strumming and Jeff improvised the picking track.

After that we started to mess around using the distortion on my amp. That's where all the "trashy" stuff came from. From this I figured out you don't have to be a genius to write songs. You just find what sounds good.

Jeff

Jam.... what comes to you mind when you say "jam"? Peanut butter! Yeah that's the ticket! But really, when you think about it, making music can sometimes be like making a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich. In order for things to sound good, they must blend. Music many times tastes better with more than just one ingredient and so on.

So I think that the process of us making this sandwich was quite cool. For example, we started out with the bread, a foundation upon which to build the rest of our music on top of. Then we imported this bread from Sweden. (Although I like their cheese a lot more, the bread tastes quite good over on that side of the globe.) We added our American parts of the sandwich, the guitar strumming and some picking. Carefully spreading the jam and peanut butter all over the place, we got a nice looking open faced sandwich. After all, only one drummer, one slice of bread. (Those of you in Europe should be able to relate to that quite easily.)

And there we had it, a tasty morsel... a little bit more than just jam... more like an entire sandwich. Kinda neat.. multicultural. And since we all knew our common structure of the sandwich (the 12 bar blues), everyone worked together quite nicely to create the final product.

Now if you're wondering who did the picking, that was me. I am often fasinated with what I suppose is termed as "Hawaiian" music. Although you won't find a single Hawaiian music CD in my collection, I enjoy the music and the unique style of accents to songs the acoustic guitar adds to the score. These accents often follow a slightly different rhythm than the rest of the song, adding a layer of fun and childlike happiness to the sounds. Of course, after listening to some Hawaiian music yourself, you'll quickly realize I have no idea what I'm talking about.. but still, I suppose that's all I can really think of right now.

Oh and on a final wacky note, you'll notice we like our peanut butter and jelly without the bread sometimes... so you can listen to a few other mixes we did. Hope you enjoy the sounds as much as we did creating it, blasting our guitar amps in the middle of the night and so on.

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