My music is old enough to drink.

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According to the year that the Kinko’s copy machine was barely able to transfer to the edge of the paper, this compilation of scorching instrumental guitar hits is TWENTY ONE YEARS OLD. My music is old enough to drink! I was 21 at the time that I made it, right around the time I started figuring out how make songs. Now my age is 21 x 2. As mentioned, the FUN SIZE tape is 21. So much 21 stuff going on here.

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I made the FUN SIZE tape to hand out to fellow metalheads in hopes of one of them knowing of a band or like-minded musicians for me to possibly play with. I never got any leads out of any of it but at least they made people aware of my guitar wankery.

It’s easy to forget how much time it took to copy these tapes. Nowadays you kids with your newfangled computers can burn an hour’s worth of music to a CD in a minute or two and even print out a nice cover if you wish to do so (at least the 10 or so of you who still burn CDs). Back in the olde time tape days if my tape was 40 minutes long, that’s how long it took to copy. I would zero out the volume as they were copying and usually remember an hour or two later that oh yeah, I have to put the next blank tape in now. Super productive stuff.

Making the cover art was almost as fun for me as making the music (and still is to this day). I believe that FUN SIZE was my 3rd exciting release. The EXCESS CONSUMPTION MAY CAUSE A LAXATIVE EFFECT text was from the back of a bag of generic red licorice. It was begging for me cut it out and use it on an album cover. One thing I wonder is why in the hell did I feel it necessary to put my address on the inside? For the people I gave it to to send me a postcard? Did I think that a band looking for a guitarist was going to show up on my doorstep?

The “Iced Ink Productions” is just hanging out at the faded edge clearing its throat trying to make me aware of it: *ahem* Heeyyyyyy, over here! *cough cough* Look at me! Just blend all of the styles you want to do into one glob and use me as your band name!” It took 5 more years of dead-end classified ads in City Pages and trying to be the next Vai-Halen before my guitar shenanigans went through puberty and grew up to be Iced Ink music… and then another 3-4 years before I built the band. But I stuck to my guns, dammit, and I’m still sticking to them. If I don’t I’ll end up like this guy:

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I’m guessing I made about 60 or 70 tunes on my 4-track recorder in the 1990s. I still have all of the master tapes. It’s fun to have such a thorough documentation of my music’s awkward and embarrassing junior high phase. If I listen to it closely I can almost hear its peach fuzz mustache and crackly voice. It’s been long enough now to where I think all of that music is kind of cute; for the longest time it was pretty embarrassing to listen to (don’t get me wrong, it still is).

My stuff circa 1993-94.

Having left cassettes behind 15 or so years ago it’s crazy to hear how poor the sound quality is on those old tapes. I often wonder what things would have sounded like if I had today’s technology back then. A slightly more pristine version of shitty, I reckon. It was nearly impossible to get a decent guitar sound with what I had, but even if I did have the right gear the results wouldn’t have been too different. My rule of thumb with guitar distortion was distort to the f*&king max. Twist every knob as clockwise as it will go. It never really occurred to me that trying to mix 2 or more tracks of guitars so heavily saturated with distortion was basically like scribbling on top of scribbling. Oh well, at least I eventually learned to dial it back.

Here is the song “Me & My Guitar” off of the FUN SIZE tape (grammar geeks, I apologize if that should have been “My Guitar & I”). Although the sound quality puts a severe hurt on my ears and I was essentially trying to regurgitate the Joe Satriani song “Friends“, I’ll give 21 year old me a pat on the back for throwing an interesting chord or two in the middle part, and the playing isn’t too shabby for a 21 year old, either. I’m just thankful that I grew out of that style (well.. for the most part) as the 1990s came to a close and I started finding my own voice. On the guitar, that is.

https://soundcloud.com/micycle/me-and-my-guitar