Muse's Muse Songwriting Message Board: RobAsh15 - Viewing Profile

I'm 50 years old, retired from a 30 year career as a professional illustrator and designer. If you're interested in seeing some of my art, you can go here: http://darkmir.deviantart.com/

I was in my first band at age 16. My father raised me on classical music, jazz and blues, and the rock of his generation, sharing everything with me from Wagner, Bethoven and Mozart to Tony Bennet, Frank Senatra, Nat King Cole, to Joe Cocker, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Janis Joplin and Steppenwolf. Later, in my adolesence, when I began to choose my own music, I drifted towards groups like Styx, Kansas, Pat Travers, Robin Trower, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Genesis, Alan Parsons, Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, Foreigner, Cheap Trick, Rush, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett... this list could go on a long ways.

I've always been a rocker. My hay day was the 80's and I love hard rock and metal from that period.

I made a living in a circuit band for 4 years in the mid 80's, and have sold a couple of originals over the years. To the best of my knowledge, none of the songs I have sold has ever been produced and/or released. From what I've been told, it's common for this to happen.

I am primarily a singer and lyricist. I also play very strong rhythm guitar, harmony leads and occasionally a little light lead work. I play bass very well. I program midi drum tracks in Addictive Drums and Superior Drummer. I play some keys, on a Yamaha PSR E423 keyboard, but mostly for adding in strange sounding groovy stuff, when it's called for. My DAW's are Adobe Audition 3.0 and Reaper 4. I think I might be about to upgrade my main DAW to Adobe Audition CS6... but I'm taking it real slowI am contemplating a switch to PreSonus as my main DAW, but am taking it slow.


My weapons of choice are:

Ibanez Sabre, Seymour Duncan Screamin' Demon pick ups and of course, A Floyd Rose. A great guitar. Skinny as a blade, fast as a star fighter. Sometimes I don't trust the sustain enough to use her for every recording, but in almost every way that matters, this little girl steps up and keeps the rubber on the road with no problems.

ESP LTD B-50 bass. Simple, straight forward, fast and sleek. A real "meat and potatoes" bass guitar.

Yamaha PSR E423 keyboard.

Blue encore 200 mic. The perfect blend of stage ready mic and still something good enough to handle recording work.

I use a Line 6 Pod Pro rack unit to voice all my guitars and bass, and run everything through a BBE 882i sonic maximizer to sweeten the tones.

Everything runs out to iKEy Audio 808v2 powered monitors.


Looking forward to getting some solid critiques here, and to maybe developing a few collaborations.

Let's rock, dudes.