"Third pot" originated as a demo track for a hard rock trio I was playing with on Vashon Island, WA, back in 2022. The band wasn't interested in it--or at least, never even acknowledged receiving it--but I liked it and shared it on social media. My friend Mykie Frankenstein asked to build on it for his upcoming EP; that version was released as Three Pots of Coffee.

The drums were originally done with MT-PowerDrumKit 2; the bass was my Ibanez SRMS805, recorded through an ElectroHarmonix Deluxe Bass Big Muff Pi, which allowed me to get both the clean and distorted channels into my DAW. I uploaded source files (including MIDI for the drums) to the Internet Archive under a CC attribution share-alike license.

When I retired from the Army in late 2024, the soldiers of the battalion gave me an EVH 5150 standard guitar, which exceeded the federal ethical guideline spending limits on retirement gifts by a factor of 8 or 9. I'm not a great guitar player, but since then I have gotten a lot better, so I decided to use Third Pot as a basis to record something so they could know that I'm working on it. Every day a little better.

The drum MIDI was imported into EZ Drummer 3 and beefed up and tweaked a bit, and then I recorded three guitar parts: a rhythm part and two leads, one with an EBow. The result is... well, I like it, anyway.

Recording and this arrangement of the music licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Go nuts.