Periphery just dropped the following bomb via Facebook:

Sad to hear Periphery bassist Tim Murphy has left the band issuing the following statement: “I’m sorry to announce that as of today I will no longer be playing bass for Periphery. I have had so many unforgettable experiences and have met so many wonderful people while playing with the band and just want to say thank you to all the fans for making that possible. I am leaving to pursue something new. If you are interested following up with me, feel free to add my personal page at facebook.com/tom.h.murphy.
-Tom”

Murphy is a great bassist and a great performer, and speaking as a Periphery fan, I’ll miss the guy being in the band. That being said, it’s not exactly a secret that Misha Mansoor is the driving force behind Periphery, so it’s hard for me to imagine that this will hurt Periphery too much in the long run.

Still, it is a little troubling that Murphy is leaving less than five months after guitarist Alex Bois also split from the group. Hopefully the loss of two members in such a short time span does not forebode any rough times for the band.

-AR

Thanks: Rod

Misha Mansoor hasn’t done his own Rigged column for MetalSucks, but anyone who’s interested in finding out what guitar gear he uses could easily do so from his many Gear Geek columns on MetalSucks and from the general fruits of the Internet. Much more interesting is this video piece he produced with Metal Injection on the band’s recent Frak the Gods Tour stop in New York City, in which he takes us behind-the-scenes of Periphery’s stage show. He covers the band’s setup and sound-check, the sound guy, backstage, explains their light show, speaks with the other bands on the tour… everything, and it turns out that Misha’s a hilarious video host despite having the flu. Someone get this guy a regular show on Metal Injection.

-VN

I gotta be honest: I cannot for the life of me keep track of who the crap was in Periphery or Haunted Shores when. Misha Mansoor was definitely involved with Haunted Shores at some point, but I assume that involvement ceased before former Periphery vocalist Chris Baretto joined… although I don’t think that Baretto a part of that band now, though I could be wrong… and then I guess at some point current Periphery vocalist  Spencer Sotelo also did a track with Haunted Shores… and we just got a press release telling us that HS guitarist Mark Holcomb (above, with Mansoor) has joined Periphery full-time after filling in with them on their last few tours after other other guitarist Alex Bois parted ways with the band back in July, and… maybe now Bois can join Haunted Shores? And I just went cross-eyed typing all that shit. Seriously, it’s easier keeping up with who is what version of L.A. Guns than it is with who was in what version of each of these bands at what time.

I’m sure someone will try to explain it to me in the comments section, but don’t bother. The important thing is, like I said, Holcomb is the new permanent guitarist in Periphery. Or, uh, that is, he will be, following the band’s upcoming European tour with Dream Theater, because a dude named Nolly from Red Seas Fire was already slated to be on that tour. But after that! Holcomb all the way!

In all seriousness, I saw Holcomb play with the band just a few weeks ago, and he was great. So if any Periphery fans were worried about who Bois’ replacement was gonna be, they can now breathe a sigh of relief.

-AR

If you’re into what’s happening in the modern music world and especially the modern metal scene then you’re no doubt already familiar with the band Periphery.  To say they are carrying one of the biggest buzzes in the industry right now is an understatement.  While you may have heard of them, and even be a huge fan of their music, what you may not know is that they are continually focused on giving music lessons and teaching any and all up-and-coming musicians who want to learn.  Giving lessons has become a standard part of just about every tour they do and in a time where other bands find they are struggling to stay afloat on the road, Periphery uses this approach to not only bring in some invaluable extra money while on tour but also to enrich the next generation of musicians and create a stronger bond with their fans.

Periphery’s drummer Matt Halpern has gone way above and beyond with Bandhappy.com, a forthcoming website that has been many years in the making.  Once a musician creates an account on Bandhappy they are then able to pay for and take LIVE, online or on tour music lessons from a plethora of musicians and teachers from all over the world. If one would like to teach, anyone can apply, and once approved, all teachers gain access to an online profile where they can set their schedules, rates, and teach either online or on tour, anytime from anywhere – it’s easy to use and gives complete control to the teacher, enabling them to provide a truly personal learning experience. Perhaps the most awesome feature of Bandhappy is that it provides a great opportunity for students to take LIVE and personal lessons from some of the top names in the industry.  Something like that can be a complete dream come true and is something that’s never be made available before.  I certainly couldn’t imagine myself when I was 16 being able to take a guitar lesson from Adam Jones-my mind would have exploded!

Matt was kind enough to give me all the details on Bandhappy and more in the following interview.

Click to read more…

This article is mainly for all of you who are in a band(s) or are attempting to be. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bunch of you misconstrue this article as a rant or a tool for me to vent about reactions to Periphery. To those of you who still believe that is my goal by the end of this, I would like to thank you. Although it is sad to see you miss the point entirely, perhaps you weren’t intended to understand this concept to begin with. And with this industry being about survival of the fittest, you are only going to make the lives of other professional musicians that much easier!

Let us start with a few things we know about the music industry:

1) It is hard to break into. Everyone wants to be in a band, and now that anyone can make music on a laptop, the industry is more saturated than ever. There are subgenres with absurd names popping up every day (for example the one that begins with the letters “Dj”). So as you start thinking about forming your first band and/or project, the odds are already highly stacked against you.

2) There are two main groups of factors that affect how successful a band is: factors you have control over like conducting good/smart business, and factors you don’t have control over such as being in the right place at the right time, and whether your music will be liked or not. This article is going to focus on one aspect that you DO have control over.

3) Everyone is on the Internet. People’s dogs have Facebook pages. And just because some people don’t post on forums or comment on blogs doesn’t mean they don’t read what is said. The grand majority of your favorite bands and musicians read a lot of the same sites you do, and lurk on a lot of the forums and blogs you frequent and perhaps post on as well.

4) At the end of the day, like it or not, this industry is a business. And the most successful bands usually get as far as they do by treating it like one. Sure you can have fun with it, but if you have ever wondered “Why did Band X make it and Band Y didn’t?” chances are Band X was better at the business side of things. That is the difference between making some noise for a few years and making a career.

With these four points in mind, perhaps you can see what I’m getting at.

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(TesseracT 2k11! Official photo with new vocalist Elliot Coleman.)

Yesterday the metalsphere with abuzz with the news that TesseracT had parted ways with vocalist Daniel Tompkins and had replaced him with Sky Eats Airplane / Of Legends vocalist Elliot Coleman. Instead of opting for the traditional route of announcing a band member swap with much media to-do, TesseracT just went and showed up for a gig in Milton Keynes, UK with Coleman holding the mic, didn’t say a word, and let the Internet do all the dirty work for them. Today TesseracT came out with an official announcement featuring quotes from various involved parties, but we’ve up and done you one better: an interview with bassist / main band-businessman Amos Williams.

Amos shared with us his thoughts on new vocalist Elliot Coleman, how it came to pass that Tompkins and the band parted ways, future U.S. tour plans, a new album and what the band members do when they’re not touring

Our chat after the jump. Later this week we’ll unveil Part 2 of the interview, in which we talk about… well, just wait.

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MetalSucks tipster extraordinaire Hetal Bhatt sent us the below video, and while it has nothing to do with metal, it did make me laugh, and I did forward it to friends. So, enjoy:

And on that note, here’s some stuff we did this week:

• We debuted new music by Chimaira, Cannabis Corpse, and S.O.S.
• We debuted a new music video from Sleeping Giant.
• We got new gear tips from Periphery’s Misha Mansoor and Revocation’s Dan Gargiulo, and we spoke to Michael Amott from Arch Enemy.
• We checked out the latest releases from Decapitated, The Black Dahlia Murder, Limp Bizkit, and Wormrot.
• We pondered a world in which concertgoers can’t film shows with their iPhones.
• We marveled that anyone finds Tosh.0 to be funny.
• We wondered which deathcore frontman has the best tattoos.
• We found the worst line-up for a festival ever.
• We chose our favorite extras from the new Annotations of an Autopsy video.
• We broke the bad news that vocalist Chris Clancy and keyboardist Drew Stavola are both out of Mutiny Within.

You’ve got one more week with me and me alone before Vince comes back. Deal with it, fuckers.

See ya Monday.

-AR

You asked and Misha answered. Today, the Periphery guitarist/mastermind and #20 on our list of the Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, tackles more MS reader-submitted questions about gear, guitars, and more. This week: Misha’s preferred method for recording guitars directly to a computer, the best way to record drums on a budget, and how Misha created the sexy synth/drum loops on the Periphery and Animals as Leaders albums.

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He’s baaaaaaack. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and staring down a long summer break from touring, Misha has returned to his duties as resident gear guru / nerd-face at the MS Mansion and is ready to answer the questions you asked him last time. After the jump, Bulb tells you how he tunes his 7 and 8 string guitars (and approaches writing with each), and what his favorite wireless system is. As always, feel free to ask Misha questions you’d like answered in future columns in the comments.

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Of course when you set out to make a list like, say, the one we’re doing right now, of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, you are bound to piss a lot of people off — that just comes with the job.

But I always find it hilarious HOW those people get pissed off. For example, this week I saw a lot of complaints that the guitar players we’ve been selecting aren’t “modern.” And I can’t believe we have to fucking define the word “modern” for some of you idiots, but apparently we do. So:

So… which one of you jackasses would like to call up Alex Skolnick or Vernon Reid or Adam Jones and let them know they’re antiquated and obsolete? ‘Cause I saw Testament and Living Colour and Tool live just last year, and I would not want to make that call. Just because those dudes have been playing this game for awhile doesn’t mean their best days are behind them.

My point simply being: I don’t care if you hate our choices. That’s fine. But at least try to hate our choices based on an argument that makes sense, y’know?

And on that note, here are other ways we entertained ourselves this week:

• We debuted new music from A Pale Horse Named Death and Oakhelm.
• We checked out the latest releases from From Exile, Godstopper, and Cruachan.
• We wondered which is better, old music or new music?
• We philosophized about Google’s new cloud service.
• We fretted that metal may soon be blamed for terrorism.
• We got excited about The Faceless’ new demo.
• We bemoaned the current state of In Flames.
• We wept because Dave Grohl is not going to be on the new Mastodon album after all.
• We enjoyed a vegetarian cooking lesson from a dude in corpse paint.
• We questioned the logic of the new Avenged Sevenfold video.

Next week we unveil numbers fifteen through eleven on our guitar player list; the average age of those five musicians is thirty-one, whereas the average age of this week’s selections was forty-two. So maybe you can go back to being upset because you think they suck, not because you think they’re too old to be “modern.”

-AR

MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Periphery’s Misha Mansoor…

I feel like telling the readers of MetalSucks why Misha Mansoor is worthy of this list is a little like telling a cardiologist why the heart is an essential organ, but I’m gonna try and do it anyway.

In a relatively short amount of time, Mansoor has become an icon in the metal scene, and if he’s not higher on this list for whatever semi-arbitrary reason, it doesn’t change the fact that he is arguably the musician who currently best personifies the phrase “modern metal.” This assertion is based on the following inarguable facts:

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Last year Periphery guitarist Misha “Bulb” Mansoor penned five excellent columns for MetalSucks in which he explored the finer points of gear nerdery; how to construct a “big” studio tone, how to differ those tones from live tones, and contemplating completely ditching speaker cabinets live were just some of the topics that gave us nerd boners the likes of which haven’t been seen since we saw a hundred Princess Leia costumes at Comic Con. But then Periphery became mega rock stars and lived on the road for months on end, leaving little time for Misha to publicly muse on the inner workings of his Axe-FX.

By now I’m sure you see where this is going: Bulb is back! And he wants to know what YOU want to know with regards to guitars, gear, recording and the like. How does he get that killer snare tone? What kinds of pickups does he use? Why is Periphery such a piece-of-shit band? Now’s your chance to ask Misha whatever guitar/tech-related question is burning a hole in your brain, so ask away and your question just might be answered by the man himself in his next column. Go ahead and troll all you want… he feeds on the stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

- MS dudes

Vince and Axl double-teamed Periphery guitarist Alex Bois and bassist Tom Murphy prior to their show with Scale the Summit and Fair to Midland in New York City on April 6th. A special guest interviewer joined in at the end for some added lulz. The Periphery boys told us about the success of their current tour (this was before they mysteriously dropped off the final week), their new Icarus EP, the progress of the next full album, and user feedback about MetalSucks (thanks guys!). Our fun-time chat after the break.

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Photos by Robert Bejil

It’s weird. Mention Periphery to any person on the street and they’ll think nothing of it. But speak their name to those who know, and it’s like you just dropped “Jeezy” at an As I Lay Dying concert. Periphery have become a huge band in the warped little snow globe of the metal landscape.

As a person who’s listened as the sextet has grown and evolved, and go through singers like cheez balls, seeing them live was an experience that I was far overdue to have. I had my chance about a week ago when the group ventured over to Hartford Connecticut’s Webster Theater supporting Fair to Midland along with Scale the Summit [Alas, they have since dropped off the tour. -Ed.]. The evening turned out to be a proggy feast I won’t soon forget.

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In a lot of ways, Francis Ford Coppola is to cinema as Metallica are to metal. He directed four incredible movies (the first two Godfather films, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now), all of which still hold up as examples of the craft at its finest, and then he devolved into self-parody. (The Godfather: Part III is pretty much his version of “The Unforgiven IV,” and if you don’t remember Jack, consider yourself lucky.) He basically sired one of Hollywood’s royal families (His children, Sofia and Roman, are also film directors, and his nephew is Nicolas Cage, who changed his last name in an effort to achieve success based on his own merits), and these days, Coppola makes his money via his winery (I’ve had some of his wines, they’re actually quite good!), and then self-funds small, personal art films, like 2007′s Youth Without Youth and 2009′s Tetro. These movies generally open to middling reviews and are seen by an audience of about ten people, but it doesn’t really matter, because Coppola is doing what he wants and he seems happy.

Why am I rambling on about this dude? Because he recently gave an interview to The 99 Percent in which he basically advocates illegal downloading, and the concept of the artist as an unpaid worker:

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Mazel tov to reader Emily Coate, who correctly answered last night’s trivia question — yes, Periphery have at least one Jewish member. I know that drummer Matt Halpern is Jewish; a few of you said in your e-mails that Misha Mansoor is, too, which I did not know, but could very well be true. In any case, Emily wins wins a mystery prize courtesy of Century Media, and a dreidel, courtesy of us. Yyyyyyaaaayyyy Emily!

Now here’s the trivia question for night 6:

• Which metal musician comes from an Orthodox Jewish background and has some 200 relatives living in Israel, including his brother and grandmother?

E-mail your answer to axl [at] metalsucks.net with the phrase “HEAVY METAL HANNUKKAH – NIGHT 6″ in the subject line. All entries should include your name and mailing address in addition to your answer, and are due by 5 pm tomorrow (Tuesday, December 7) evening. Shortly thereafter we’ll announce the winner and post night 7’s trivia question. And while you don’t have to be Jewish to enter the contest, you do have to live in the U.S. Shrug.

-AR

As part of our sponsorship of The Legacy Tour, featuring Darkest Hour, Veil of Maya, Periphery and Revocation, one member from each band will be penning an exclusive blog entry for MetalSucks to run during the tour (get a full list of tour dates here). Our first entry featured Veil of Maya guitarist Marc Okubo taking us on a run-through of his entire live rig, and the second entry was an update from Revocation’s Dave Davidson. Here’s Periphery’s Misha Mansoor on his new live rig setup (the idea for which he first mentioned in a prior column) and how that’s working out for him:

So a little while back I posted a column about going direct with the guitars on a future tour, and that tour just so happens to be this tour we are on now with Revocation, Veil Of Maya and Darkest Hour. The idea behind going direct is that instead of having an amp/rig that goes through a cabinet then gets mic’ed up, you just take an audio signal direct to the board and skip the whole cab and mic. This allows for a simpler and cleaner signal chain, as removing the cab, mic and mic-placement variables makes the signal extremely consistent every night. Now we are going direct with our Fractal AxeFX Ultras which is an absolutely phenomenal unit for direct tones.

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Periphery’s mastermind and resident nerd-face Misha Mansoor wrote a killer series of columns for us earlier this year in which he geeked out about various gear that he uses; I think it’d be fair to dub him the reigning “Metal Misha” at this particular point in time. But the original Metal Misha got wind of his competition at the MetalSucks-sponsored Darkest Hour Legacy Tour stop in NYC last weekend, and apparently was none too pleased about the situation. Thankfully, the rights to the “Metal Misha” crown come cheap.

-VN

Well, funny you should ask that question, because Darkest Hour’s Mike Schleibaum and Periphery’s Misha Mansoor just got together to jam and filmed it for ya’ll. This is topical, of course, because both bands are touring together as part of the MetalSucks-sponsored Legacy Tour along with Veil of Maya and Revocation.

Mike and Misha are two extremely talented writers and guitar players with distinctly different styles, so the concept of a collabo is pretty cool to me. Seeing as they’re both D.C. natives, maybe they’ll get together to record a proper shred record at some point in the future? Based on this video I certainly think that’d make for an interesting album. Make sure you sit through the intro stuff in this video to watch the jam sesh at the end… or just skip to around 1:50, you impatient prick.

Also: how stoned does Mike look in this clip?

-VN

It’s sad that gear getting stolen is a not-uncommon occurrence in the metal world — but the fact that it seems to happen so frequently never makes me any less pissed-off about it. And now it’s happened to a very direct member of the MetalSucks family, so… you might imagine that we’re fuming, and you’d be right.

A post from Periphery’s official Facebook page:

Since it seems that at least two of these guitars are rare/one-of-a-kind, hopefully they’ll be recovered quickly, as was the case with Katatonia’s stolen gear last month. And then hopefully someone will make the thief eat his own nuts.

While we wait for a happy resolution to this woeful tale, read Periphery guitarist Misha “Bulb” Mansoor’s “MetalSucks.net/Gear_Geek” column and learn why the idiot who took this guitar will never do as much good with it as Periphery would.

And don’t forget that Periphery will part of the MetalSucks sponsored Legacy Tour along with Darkest Hour (playing a “best of” set from their fifteen year career), Veil of Maya, and Revocation. Get dates here.

-AR