UN: How did the initial idea for Blotted Science come around? Were you looking to do something a bit heavier but just as technical as all of the previous bands that you have been involved with?

Ron: I wanted to put something together that was more of a collaborative effort rather than a solo project. On the last two releases that Ive done (Spastic Inks Ink Compatible and my solo CD Solitarily Speaking), I wrote everything, basically passed out parts to players, did all of the production, just about everything. Actually, I sometimes think that Ink Compatible should have been another solo CD. On Ink Complete, Bobby and I wrote that material so there was definitely a collaboration there. But on this I wanted to get players involved early and have input from them, rather than doing everything myself. Originally, I wanted vocals on this, too, but Alex and Chris (Adler, original drummer) wanted it to be instrumental, so we went ahead and started writing without vocals in mind. We were even thinking of getting another guitarist (Jeff Loomis was first on my list), but we figured between Alex and I, there were enough people writing. And yeah, once Webster was on board, there was no way I could write anything but the heaviest recording that Ive ever done. And so I did LOTS of listening to Cannibal Corpse and Lamb Of God CDs to get some sort of cross between Spastic Ink, Cannibal Corpse and Lamb Of God. I had been rather disgusted with the direction that current prog metal was going in and was up for something different.

UN: When did Alex become involved with the project? Its been known that he is quite the bass player from his work with Cannibal Corpse but this is certainly a lot different from the rapid fire death metal he is usually playing. He does an amazing job though I would say.

Ron: Alex became involved when I saw the video for Frantic Disembowelment from Cannibals Wretched Spawn CD/DVD and asked him if he was up for it. I saw that video and put up a posting on the Spastic Ink/WatchTower forum if anybody knew Alex and how I could get a hold of him. I think within a week or so, a friend of his saw the post, and Alex sent me an email from Europe where he was touring and we clicked from the get-go. When he returned home we started writing. And yeah, I think this was something a bit different for Alex, to show that he can play material other than death metal. It was also a chance for me to write and play something A LOT heavier, and do a few things that I hadnt done before. I think I get stereotyped into only being able to do tech stuff, and thats totally not the case.

UN: Charlie was the last to join the band. What happened with Chris and Derek? Honestly I think that Charlie would be the best fit out of all three drummers. Not that Chris and Derek are bad drummer, far from it, but Charlie seems to have been involved with projects with a similar technical edge before.

Ron: You might be right about Charlie being the best fit - he really did great on the tunes and was able to get the tracks back to me in a timely manner. With Chris Adler it was a lack of time on his part because Lamb of God is so busy and that has to be his priority, and working via the Internet made things rather difficult. Chris would've loved to do it but he also didn't want to hold us up so he bowed out; at least we got to do a tune together for 'Drum Nation 3', which turned out pretty cool. I think if Derek had been with us from the start, things would have worked out with him. We were running into a problem of where he wanted to have more input in the writing (which I wanted), but the songs were already completed by the time he came into the picture. There was no reason to change things, and that caused a delay, and his home schedule also delayed things even further. Weeks and months went by without much progress on the recordings. And just like Chris, the whole process of sending ideas back and forth via the Internet got to be too much of a distraction, and getting things done was taking too long. But the Internet process was not a distraction at all for me and Charlie. Not only is Charlie a fantastic player, but hes a GREAT communicator as well. He also gave me tons of input on the mixes. Luckily, we did find Charlie pretty quickly after things didnt work out with Derek and he had the time and setup to knock everything out in only a few months. The funny thing is - the three of us have yet to be in the same room together, let alone play together. Charlie finally met Alex for the first time when Behold The Arctopus toured Florida and I've met Charlie when he came through Texas; I hang out with Alex whenever Cannibal Corpse plays San Antonio or Austin, and we hooked up at NAMM a couple of years ago. We all may meet up at this years NAMM. Will be VERY cool!

UN: How did the writing process work? Would you write all of the music and then send it to the other members to work on? Was any of it changed as the music was sent back and forth or did it remain fairly true to what you originally had written?

Ron: Alex and I sent ideas back and forth with sheet music and mp3s. It was similar to how Bobby and I wrote Ink Complete. Wed write something on our own, put it on tape, and give it to the other guy to check out and work with. With the Blotted material, Alex and I had specific notes that we were using for certain tunes and Id just tell him something like make up a whole tone tune at 145 BPM. Or make up something really aggressive with the notes G A Bb and D at 178 BPM. Most of the songs used the writing system The Circle Of 12 Tones that I came up with, so we had a lot of structure to follow to make things work out just right. And so Id have a bunch of tunes that I wrote, a bunch that Alex wrote, and Id do some arranging with them, fill in a few blanks, and that was it. From there on, things didnt change much at all. We wrote just about everything while Chris was still with us, so most of the grooves were based on his style. Thats what caused problems with Derek; he doesnt play like Chris and so he was almost being forced to do that. He didnt like that, and I didnt blame him, so we just decided it wasnt going to happen. Charlie is a session drummer and took the ideas that I had with programming, and put his stamp on everything, and it all worked out. Who knows what would have happened if Charlie would have been with us from the start. Yikes!

UN: How long would you say it takes to write a Blotted Science song? It goes without saying that they are intricate songs, but at this point in time in your playing can you whip off riffs like this or are you meticulous in your writing having every last night worked out to perfection?

Ron: Good question. That varies on what song. The Circle Of 12 Tones actually helped moved things along because it breaks things down so that you have a bit of direction even if no ideas are flowing. The hardest song(s) to put together was probably Adenosine Buildup and Adenosine Breakdown because its the same thing backwards. After I wrote a tune I had to play it backwards and make sure it sounded cool. I remember Laser Lobotomy was done rather quickly (probably a few weeks), while Oscillation Cycles (only clocking in at 1:30) took months because I couldnt find a tune that sounded cool and 4 totally different tempos. I think I wrote enough material for 2 full songs before I got what I wanted it. R.E.M. was very easy because that followed a pattern of notes being laid out on a clock (as they are with The Circle Of 12 Tones), and I just went forward or backwards. Also, I usually write a bunch of songs at once so its hard to say exactly how long it took to write one specific song. I do that in case I get stuck with one song, and I want to get something done, Ill move on to something else. Alex and I did write quite a few tunes that didnt make it onto the Machinations CD, so well have to see where they end up. Maybe on Blotted II. Who knows.. It was fun though taking Alexs tunes, my tunes, then putting them together trying to make the listener figure out who wrote what. I still hear little things on the CD where I remember listening to them for the first time when Alex sent them to me, thinking Woah, Mr. Cannibal Corpse wrote that and Im going to be playing it. YES!

UN: I have to bring this up because it makes me laugh. The review from All Access Magazine is hilarious. Does it make you laugh when people who have no idea about technical music or your career give an uniformed and ridiculous review like that? I particularly like the part about playing music to get chicks and playing to Rush fans when if he did any research would see that the band isnt a live band to begin with.

Ron: Obviously, that All Access guy is a total goober who completely does NOT get it in the least. And because he is so off-base, his review actually turned out pretty funny. It's like unintentional comedy, which is usually the best. This guy reviewed Machinations with a total cock rock mindset, stuck in late 1980's Sunset Strip hair metal values where playing well was optional as long as you had a bunch of slutty looking chicks rockin' out at your gig and the main goal of the night was getting laid and doing blow. Nothing against hot women and great sex but that wasn't exactly on my mind when I wrote 'The Machinations of Dementia'; it's a little bit more cerebral than that, I guess. We'll see if any hot chicks turn up at our shows if and when we take Blotted out of the garage and actually play live which we're trying to do at some point in 2008. And if we could get 10% of Rush's fanbase I'd be stoked beyond belief.

UN: Aside from this review, has the response to the album been favorable?

Ron: Yeah, it's been pretty incredible! The feedback and reviews have been extremely positive across the board with maybe one or two exceptions that I've seen so far. It's always nice for a musician to get confirmation that you're doing something cool after you've put so much of your heart and soul, not to mention time and money, into a new project. Hopefully those reviews will help expose us to new people that wouldn't have checked us out otherwise and all the good word of mouth we've had so far will continue and we can build on this.

UN: Illegal downloading seems to be a pretty big topic these days. Do you know if the Blotted Science album has made its way on to any of the sites? Is there anything you can really do to combat it?

Ron: No, there is absolutely nothing you can do to combat it. As a musician you are literally at the fans' mercy now. All you can do is hope that people like what you do enough to where they feel compelled to buy the real thing after they've downloaded it illegally. Its weird when I get a CD order from somebody and they say, I love the CD - GREAT STUFF! Please send me a copy. They already have it! Back when the Internet first came around it used to be, I dig the audio snippets on your website - heres my order for the full thing. For Blotted Science we did not send out any promos prior to the album's release but Alex took a few boxes of CD's with him on tour with Cannibal a couple of weeks before the official release date. I think it took about 3 days until someone who'd bought a copy at a Cannibal show ripped it and uploaded it and it spread like wildfire from there; it was on dozens of torrents and blogs within a couple of days. All that stuff is bad enough but what really pisses me off is some of those Russian sites that actually front as legitimate digital providers and sell downloads like a mini iTunes! It's one thing to get your music stolen on a 'non-profit basis' and another to see some piece of shit actually make money off your music by selling it under false pretenses. That's pretty damn low.

UN: I was curious to ask a few guitar related questions. I was wondering how much you still pick up a guitar and practice. Did you still work on new techniques and learn exotic scales?

Ron: Well, I sure as hell am right now trying to re-learn all of this Blotted Science material that I recorded during the last year or so! And yeah, its a bitch! Since were thinking about taking this to the stage, Im transcribing everything, ramming a bunch of memory cards into my head, whipping out the metronome, and getting into the best playing shape possible. There are quite a few licks and patterns that have stuck with me after recording them, but there are also some things that take a while to remember what I was thinking when I wrote it and played it. Im in the middle of putting together an instructional guitar DVD and will feature LOTS of material from the Blotted CD so Im brushing up on the tunes for that, too. Im expecting to have that done mid-late 08. I teach guitar five days a week so I usually play a few hours a day even if Im not killing myself learning Blotted tunes. I dont do any of that exotic scale stuff. I asked Marty about that because people always think he has all these books with crazy exotic scales, and hes never even thought about it. If I hear something thats out of the ordinary, Ill pick up a guitar and try figure to out whats going on theoretically, but I dont really make any effort to learn a new scale or anything like that. The cool part about The Circle Of 12 Tones is you end up with weird note clusters and you have to group them into scales and lots of times, you end up with some wacky new set of notes leading to who knows what possibilities. For instance, The Insomniac has some weird tonalities that I never would have come up with without the system.

UN: If Im not mistaken you have built your own guitars for quite sometime now. Are these the only guitars that you play? Have you ever been approached by a company to build replicas of any of your guitars and have them for sale? Do you still build guitars or do you use your trusty ones that you built years ago only?

Ron: Yep, I only play guitars that I have built. Ive looked into getting endorsements with a few different guitar companies, but it almost always comes down to the same thing. I get a guitar off the shelf and Id want to modify it too much to be happy with it, and companies wouldnt like that. As a matter of fact, right before I went to Japan to do the Marty Friedman DVD a few months ago, I could have gone with a really good guitar company but after trying out one of their guitars, I wanted to shave off certain parts of the body, raise a few things, take out knobs, pickups, extend the neck this way, etc. So why bother, you know?

UN: Do you have any advice for guitarists starting out that want to pursue more technical avenues of playing? Is there anything that helped you early on to develop some of the more difficult techniques, for instance sweep picking or odd time signatures?

Ron: What I did way back when was listen to a lot of Rush and Yes, work with a metronome, and learn what the hell I was doing musically. I also did a lot of understanding that music is based on patterns, numbers, and while music is and can be very emotional, I tried to understand where the technicality of it comes from. I got into music theory, took classes, learned to write in key, analyze various styles of music, and wasnt so focused solely on playing guitar. Sure, I spent 4 or 5 hours every day playing guitar because playing is a HUGE part of being a musician, but theres writing, timing, working with themes and concepts, learning to give and take with fellow musicians, the engineering aspect of it all, listening to what the other instruments/players are doing and how everything works together, etc. - it goes on and on. I think theres too many shredders out there who dont care about what else goes on in their band, and it shows in their writing and everything else they do other than playing fast. Actually, I cringe when I get lumped into that shedder category, which happens from time to time. I DO think that you can have a shredder who is also a well-rounded musician, but too many times it doesnt happen. For instance, on the Blotted CD, I dig it when a review comes in and they mention these guys are playing their asses off but its not just a shredfest, there are real songs here, or listen to how these guys are working together, or something to that effect. Yes, the playing is there, but theres a lot more to it than that.