Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for “Bible” and you’ll get a hefty plethora of writing, all geared around numerous different bibles, particularly those of Judaism, Christianity, and separately the original Hebrew bible itself. Yet, commonly, perhaps almost mistakenly, we refer to a single book that could easily come in multiple versions for loads of different beliefs as simply, the Bible.

When it comes to where I live and where I’ve grown up, the majority of the people around me are predominantly Christian. When some have asked me if I am religious or not, I have not ever really given them too much of a clear answer because part of me is still stumbling a bit or tripping on the toe as to what my answer should actually be – I’m just not quite sure if I could consider myself religious or not. Having said that, I think spirituality is something that has been heavily on my mind for years. For the purposes of this article, I will be referring to components often from the contemporary King James Christian Bible, the kind you would see here in the new millennium of the 2000’s.

What is God? What happens when you die? Why are we here?

All of these questions we often ask are considered the ‘fundamental questions of life.’ And more importantly, they often cross every human being’s mind on a serious level at at least one point or another in every individual’s lifetime. Some people living today still believe, in accordance with a very literal interpretation of the first book of the Christian Bible, Genesis, that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago, or in other words – 4,000 B.C.

People who follow the doctrine of modern and widely accepted science might subscribe to different theories of biological evolution. At this point, there is not a theory more well known than that of Charles Darwin’s. What is interesting to note is that at the end of his career and also toward the end of his life, Charles Darwin, the creator of the theory of evolution himself, remarked that perhaps he should not have been taken so seriously. For Darwin, studying the change and difference in animals and plants was a hobby, and in the beginning he focused more on the art of nature than the science.

When you put things into a social perspective, religion is often a difficult thing to talk about. Religious agenda’s can be found at the root, base, and core of virtually every arena of politics and government. Or even without the terms of government, politics with religious principles at their core among people in small scale situations can be encountered. Society has countless different rules being made all of the time, and lawmakers will continue to make laws until there are no more laws to make. We often tend to accept that this should be a universally accepted way to allow people to co-exist within society, but is it really?

To the uneducated, the ignorant, the arrogant, and the intolerant religion and outstanding moral principles can become the very reasons for choosing not to get along. In history, almost every single war that has ever been fought has, at its simplest and most basic foundations, religion. Entire villages, cities, families, homes, businesses, and organizations have been destroyed in the name of God, in the name of belief.

It is interesting to note that in order to get a crowd happy, delighted, and following a cause of any kind requires a distinct sort of talent. It requires a special kind of intuition that few artists have ever mastered. It is much easier, however, to take a crowd and turn it into an angry mob, simply by being vulgar, being disgusting, being hateful. Any particular sort of energy you pour into a crowd socially, the crowd will return it back forward and reflect it directly back at you.

As humans, we are born with a few simple parts that develop within the first 3-5 years of our lives. Our ability for speech, our ability to walk. With walking and speech children often find themselves experiencing an incredible new high during their first times participating in this themselves because there seems to be a natural desire to ascend into a developed adult. Children take great pride in being able to walk and talk, and why shouldn’t they? For children who cannot talk, and who cannot walk, however, there is a unique burden, and a pain that will often last a lifetime as they watch everyone around them move on a plane and level they have never themselves experienced. The result of seeing people who have much when we have so little is discomfort.

There is one thing that as we grow up, we all have in common. We love comfort. Being comfortable is more important than we realize. While comfort may be so hindering in our own development, it should also be equally noted that comfort is also important to our development. Without touch, babies literally die. Without affection, human brains do not fully develop. Without sameness and routine repetition, stress can tend to more easily rise within the body. The reaction we take to relieve discomfort is the reaction we take in a diplomatic, or perhaps just social, situation.

When our beliefs become challenged, often times people will have a knee-jerk reaction that makes them feel uncomfortable and subsequently dismiss that discomfort by denying or dismissing the very difference that the person opposite them may be proposing or holding. If you believe in more than one god, there cannot be one. If you believe in not having sex before marriage, there cannot be sex before marriage under any circumstances. If you believe in good and evil, the existence of a subjective universe cannot enter your perspective with any provable validity.

So what am I getting at here with all of this?

I suppose the real point that could be made is that religion, the word and concept, just might need to die. While I am not an atheist(What is God?) and I do not suggest anyone become one, I would suggest that everyone give their spirituality a complete makeover. Start asking the difficult questions. Start daring to think that the things you’ve always thought were wrong or terrible just may be able to be seen differently. Dare to imagine, because in your imagination you can test any idea.

I was once Christian, and my Christianity slowly got phased out from the time I turned 12 until the age of about 15 years old, where I then re-evaluated my beliefs. An interesting part of my spiritual transformation was the fact that while I was Christian I had no real reason to question my beliefs at all. In fact, my beliefs were not ever really challenged. Instead, I came to question my normal beliefs on my own, did my own research, reached my own conclusions from my own thoughts. There were even times when I had prayed, and my prayers seemed to be directly answered. In times of physical pain, I could often pray my physical pain away. But was it God? Was it a force outside of myself? You might also consider that the brain has the capability to alter its perceptions and remove pain from your awareness.

Spirituality is an important part of everyone’s lives, and in fact in the book, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, I have read that there is actually a part of the brain and processes within the brain that make spiritual activity an ordinary and natural part of any human being’s mental routine. While we as a society are being taught to be scientific and wholly rational, another part of us, something that is inherently biologically and scientifically based is daring us to create thoughts that resemble the extraordinary. To think of God is as natural as to think of food or water.

Question it. Answer it. Do you believe it?

The Eternal Exhaust MySpace profile often features the new recording efforts of myself, a lone musician working to establish a solid sound and create songs that I can personally be proud of. Many other people share a similar aspiration. Of the thousands of fans that are on this MySpace profile, I would make a guess to say that more than half of them are unaware that when they hear a song from Eternal Exhaust, every single musical portion is created by a single person. This means that on songs with various string instruments, drums, guitars, and vocal elements – are all done by one person, and that person is me.

But how do I do it? Obviously I’m not sitting there and playing all of the musical instruments at once, and obviously I am mixing together separately recorded elements. But there is another part of it that might also be a bit more puzzling – virtually every single portion is recorded with an early 1990’s computer microphone, not designed to output anything near studio quality. Yet, some of my songs sound fully polished, mixed, mastered, as if they belonged on a commercially bought compact disc.

My first secret is my software. I use Adobe Audition 2.0, an audio program that allows you to mix more than 50 audio tracks simultaneously, apply effects like delay and chorus, and do live digital recording. This program was famous among internet users prior to its release from Adobe Systems Inc. when it was known as Cool Edit Pro. Adobe Audition is not the only great piece of software to use, however, another great program that I would recommend is ProTools from Digidesign.

To get a sense for what the song creation, recording, and post-recording process is like, I’ll explain a tiny bit about my musical background. For one thing – I have none. That is, I have no official background of having been trained by a music teacher or music school. In fact, between my ability to play guitar, drums & percussion, my limited singing ability, and my luck with a piano – I’ve not ever had a single music lesson for any of it from anyone!

The great thing about music is that since the start of its existence it has always been a natural thing for a human being to take part in. You are born with the elements necessary to make music. The terminology, the ability to communicate skills and other processes, however, does take some instruction and time. I began learning how to play the drums when I was just 10 years old, where for a year or two before I even sat down to play at all I had been watching my brother play. Purely from watching him and taking a hint or two here and there I learned the essentials of rhythm.

And rhythm is the first step in the creation of any song at all. During my time living in limited living spaces, I was not able to set up my entire drum kit to record it live. So I had to improvise. I use a piece of software called Reason, from a company called Propellerhead. Reason is a music generation program, but it allows you to use a sequencer to create drum licks that sound totally natural, and there are also studio quality. I would not recommend going straight to software to put drums into your songs if you’re a serious musician, because when you leave it to software to fit drums into a musical composition, you can run into serious problems.

To record the drums live, you have a number of options. If you are recording everything with a single microphone, then the first thing to mic is snare drum. The microphone needs to be facing the snare drum itself, but be positioned at a slight distance of about a foot and a half or two feet from the snare and high hat. This single mic is capturing what will most likely be your most important drum elements – snare and high hat. You record your first portion, playing the same pattern again and again without silence or interruption. Separately, you will want to record a mic that is right next to the bass drum.

The real secret to doing great sounding drums in a recording with a single microphone is to record small bits and pieces separately, then take a single lick and put it into a loop with your software. You want to add the different portions into the loop to get the recording sounding more refined and multi-dimensional. You then re-encode to get your final, polished drum loop. If you do not want to do loops, you can do the same process for each individual beat, but if that is your course of action I hope you have plenty of time to spare!

Often times, since I do not have a band to play different portions, I will practically write the song as I’m recording it. In a sense, it’s like having a jam session with myself. A rough version of a song will come out in recording, and then if the song has potential, it goes into individual practice sessions by myself where it will later be re-recorded and re-polished.

After I have drums and rhythm to work with(always recorded using a metronome, by the way), I then move onto getting some solid guitar riffs into the work. I will sometimes do more than 50 takes for my first guitar riff, primarily because your opening riff is something you want to play with a lot. If the song is intricate, I will start with something simple and then slowly add more and more in as I play an evolving riff or verse, over and over again, recording it to the drums, being played through headphones, each time. Each guitar portion is recorded twice, then doubletracked. One take of the guitar being played can be heard in the left speaker, a different take of the exact same thing can be heard in the right speaker. The result is a symphonic, depth filled tone and sound for the guitars and their distortion/crunch.

Piece by piece, a song is made. If I had a bass, the bass would then be recorded to the guitar, with the same basic process. An intro, chorus, verse, another chorus, another verse, and a possible outro are all recorded more than once. The final, finishing touch, always, is the vocals. Vocals are also the most challenging. In my article, Getting Started as a Singer or Vocalist, I talk about some things you can do to get started. Vocals recorded into a mix are challenging. After you have recorded everything, you will then want to adjust decibel levels, equalize frequencies, and make other tweaks/adjustments.