The significant amount of extra time for making music the pandemic gave me, wasn’t only just the key to an intense writing phase for my third album. It was especially a chance to improve my musical skills and push those boundaries.

Those days, I was listening to Neal Morse and NMB a lot and I loved Eric Gilettes heavy but very melodic guitar playing on ‘The Similitude of A Dream’ and ‘The Great Adventure’. This music influenced my third album but also I wanted to improve on guitar with Eric as my new idol. If you listen to my lead playing on ‘The Black Riders’ and compare it to ‘A Wandering Mind’, you’ll get an idea of my learning curve. I reached a whole new level of ability on guitar through that.

The whole recording process improved as well. I wanted the production to sound as professional as possible. So after recording, I loaded reference songs into my DAW and tried to get my mix as close to their sound as possible. Due to the complexity of my arrangements, mixing is always something I fear. You can either ruin the whole album or add real magic to it with a good mix. Until today (I’m just about to start mixing AP4 as I write this article) it is the one thing I feel like I could still improve the most at and that I don’t yet feel exactly comfortable with.

Except for singing. For the first time in AP history, on AP3, I did the vocals myself as well. I used to sing in punk rock bands before, which was OK to me and felt good but singing prog is a whole different world. Plus: the lyrics for this new album were very personal. So that was quite a challange. Fortunately, I have a very good musical hearing and I’m good at imitating voices, so I tried to sound as close to the singers I liked as possible. So with a lot of hard work and durability, I made my way through this process as well. Actually, Neal Morse was a big motivation in this aspect as well. He’s not exactly a good singer but as a multi-instrumentalist and musical mastermind, he’s doing it for the bigger picture and it’s totally fine. So whenever I felt like giving up on those vocals, I told myself it was just as fine for me. I was going for the big idea just like him…

tbc