Alright! So how’s the tour going so far? How do you like playing with As I Lay Dying and Winds Of Plague?

It’s a lot of fun, they’re great people to tour with

I’m very curious to know if you guys have been involved with As I Lay Dyings notorious “Sandwich Game”? Where if you don’t cover your food some how it’s open for being smashed?

Nope, no sandwich games, I just haven’t had many meals with them really.

How about you guys? Is there any goofy pastimes? Funny Stories?

Not Really, no.  Not too many, well I mean we all hangout and stuff like that but there’s not really a whole bunch of pranking, it’s all really pretty relaxed.  Lots of gear talk and I don’t know, it’s just pretty chill.  But there was this on time that I got left at a gas station in Broadville, Ontario once, i just got out of the van early in the morning to take a piss I left my phone, my passport, wallet and everything in the van.  It took them about two and a half hours to realize I was gone.  we barely made the show in Toronto.   So now we do head counts all the time before we leave anywhere.

I’ve noticed in a lot of pictures you play BTB basses, is that your brand of choice?

Yes, it is

Can you tell me a little bit about how the use of 8 strings came about?

Definitely, it started out with Forging a Future Self being written all in 7-strings and there was always a desire to want to play a little bit lower but you know, not wanting to sacrifice the upper register and so the extended range instruments just made sense.

Was there any lessons involved or was it mainly just messing around until something sounded good?

well, Trent’s classically trained, He’s gone to school for it and Justin’s been playing his whole life and they’ve both played 7-strings extensively. There was a lot of practice that went into it.  I know that they said that getting used to it was a bit challenging but they did on their own.

How about influences?

Everyone really has a lot of different tastes but as far as writing goes it’s really more just what sounds cool, but influences is a tough one.  There’s just so many of them.  Mine are all from like when i keep going back to was like the music i was listening to from between i was like 17 and 23.  so there’s like a lot of mid nineties late nineties like hardcore and hip-hip, i like classic rock too but there’s definitely newer bands that catch my attention every once in a while too. you want to hear new and fresh stuff as a musician or anyone that likes music.

So how would you describe the differences between your albums so far? was there any specific direction you were going for?

like i was saying before, i think the music that was written was more like “hey this riff sounds cool” and just going with it.  we’re not thinking about changing it or doing something different.  we just know what we like and the formula is similar for a lot of the stuff.  But we’re not really actively seeking out to sound a certain way.  its pretty organic and has a really natural growth to it.

Was there any certain reason why with the re-release of rareform you guys went back and redid the vocals and live drum tracks?

A lot of it we remixed we really wanted to give it a more accurate representation.  The previous singer from Rareform wasn’t in the band for very long at all and the majority of the vocal writing was done by Trent and I helped him out with a little bit with it.  But the original singer from Rareform didn’t really contribute a whole lot.  He performed them on the album but as far as contribution it was alot less for writing and  the rhythms and vocal placement had to be coached along.  With Anthony coming in we originally planned to just do a song or two and then we were going to release that into the social networking sites and stuff like that but we really wanted to give the accurate representation of the band. So we started doing it and got into it and ended up just re-releasing the whole thing.  So the original was an effort but this was the better representation of us.

So what are the future plans for you guys?

We are definitely planning on doing another album.  the writing process never ends when we are off tour so hopefully by the end of the year we’ll be closer to releasing something again.  There was alot of material that didn’t make it to In Dreams that we were still working on so we’ll see what we get from that.