Peterson Silcox Giles and Grant

About

The project started as a collaboration between Mike Peterson and Jim Silcox from 1998 to 1999.

Bill Giles and Scott Grant were old friends who generously volunteered to add bass and keyboard parts.

They can also be heard on the albums from Steppes and Shroedinger's Cat

The band never played live together, but Mike and Jim occasionally played live with several different bass players

Players

Mike Peterson - Drums, Vocals, Sequencer

Jim Silcox - Guitars

Bill Giles - Bass

Scott Grant - Keyboards

All selections arranged by the players

Release Date

1999

Engineered and produced by

Mike Peterson

Art by

Bill Giles

Package design by

Bill Giles, Mike Peterson

Credits - Mike's songs

You Drive Me Insane
Potato And A Six Pack
Nothing Exceeds Like Excess
I Can Do It
Hard To Be A Star

Words and music by
--Mike Peterson

It's not exactly accurate to say that I wrote all of the music. Most of my songs are a team effort. I come up with the basic ideas, and the team adds the details. Extreme and excessive thanks to the following team members who helped make this project possible.

Jim Silcox - for being my partner in the project, providing arrangement help, vocal coaching, and writing the "Idaho" part in Potato And A Six Pack

Jack Schwarz - for the solo section in Hard To Be A Star

Lee Zimmer - for the solo section in I Can Do It

Dennis Bales - for being my music teacher for 30 years and helping with theory and arrangement

Credits - Jim's songs

Looking To Cure My Blues
I Wonder
Live For The Light
Trouble
Raging Out Of Control

Words and music by
--Jim Silcox

Thanks to Abe Senna, Mike Patton, Bob Golden, John Plmer, Dan Simpson, Bill Lendenmann. Also, Vickie, Temple, Addie, BJ, Debbie & Diana. The shared influences, experiences, good and bad times were appreciated. Also, love to Alex, Aisha, Julian and the Silcox clan. And to Monique, love you most!

Technology

This project was recorded direct to disk digital, using Cubase VST 3.65. The computer was a Pentium II 400 with 128m RAM and 40g of hard disk.

Audio hardware included a Layla a/d d/a converter, Mackie mixer, Alesis and Yamaha effects and JBL studio monitors. Vocals were recorded with a Rode NT2 microphone and Alesis compressor. The guitar and bass were recorded through a Sans-Amp PSA-1.

Electronic drums were Roland V-drums. Guitars were custom Fender strat and Gibson Les Paul. Bass was a custom Fender Precision bass. Keyboards and MIDI sound modules were Ensoniq vfx, Korg Trinity, Roland JD-990 and Ensoniq MR-Rack.

How it was created

Except for Nothing Exceeds Like Excess, the pieces were rehearsed using drums and guitar. Nothing Exceeds Like Excess started as a complete MIDI sequence.

To record the other tracks, first a dummy drum part was created using Cubase.

This was done to ensure accurate tempo. We found that playing to a sequenced drum part was more musical than playing to a click.

Guitar was recorded first.

Various other parts were overdubbed at various times.

The drums were added last.

All parts were performed live, in real time.