There is a lot I can say about this record. It is the first Spock's record with me on lead vocals. It is the first Spock's record with out Neal Morse. It is the first Spock's record where I got to play acoustic and electric guitar (love that!) It's the first Spock's record where I got to write a lot of the songs. So all in all, it was a blast to make and very emotional/stressful/powerful...I could put a bunch of adjectives to describe it. I am not going to go in to that here. This is for more of the tech side of things.

I used my Gold Mapex Orion series kit on all the songs with a variety of different snare drums. One of my favorite drum sounds on the record is the snare sound on Shining Star. It is old, probably 70's, Pearl snare that lives at the studio where we record. I assume that it used to be Kevin Gilbert's seeing that it was his studio but I really don't know. All I do know is that the head has probably never been changed. You can barely turn the lugs anymore and we put a wallet and a bunch of tape too on it. But man, does it have that old school thuddy/dead/kind of it's barely holding together kind of sound that I think is just great. Not for everything, but if you want that then this is the drum. I used that same drum on a lot of the Spock's record SNOW also.

I did all the sequence programming on my MAC using Cubase. I have since switched to Pro Tools but still have Cubase here if I need it.

This was the first record we recorded all to Pro Tools. We used our engineer. mixer/(co-producer really), Rich Mouser's Pro Tools HD system. All to Fire Wire hard drives. It is absolutely amazing how technology has changed the way music can be recorded.

I sang through a Neuman U47 mostly although I do remember using a Shure SM7 on something.

I used Kevin Gilbert's old Taylor acoustic guitar.

My electric guitar parts, there are only a few (Al is the real guitar player), were kept from my original demos I did here at my house on my cheap Strat through my POD Pro.

I didn't engineer very much on this record like I did in the past for Spock's because we had Rich way more involved then in the past so I didn't need to. That was better for this record because it was one less thing I needed to worry about