George Bellas: Do Fret interview

George Bellas Interview:

US Guitarist, Composer and Teacher, George Bellas is a true musician's musician. A prolific composer and virtuso (in every sense of the word), George's newest CD, The Dawn of Time, is released July 16th 2010 on Lion Music.

To those unfamiliar with George's work, prepare to be absolutely blown away by his technique, musicality, compositional skills and tone!

Do Fret had the great pleasure of catching up with George ahead of the release of The Dawn of Time to talk about his music.

Q: Hey George - many thanks for agreeing to do an interview for Do Fret - your time is much appreciated. Your new CD, The Dawn Of Time, is released via Lion Music on 16th July 2010. Can you tell us a bit about the new album?

It's my pleasure to share some insight into my new album and also various aspects of my music and the process of making it. My new album, "The Dawn Of Time", is an instrumental album that is rich in Romanticism and Futurism with insane performances by Marco Minnemann on drums, and myself on guitar, bass, and keyboards. The album contains 19 songs in the neoclassical, neo-romantic and also progressive styles. The production is dynamic, clean, and has an open sound to it allowing the music to breath naturally. Very minimal amounts of compression were used during the production of "The Dawn Of Time", which yielded a much more natural sounding album than one that has been squashed to a pulp with compression and limiting. The album contains a myriad of lyrical melodies, virtuosic instrumental melodies, counterpoint, improvised guitar solos, odd-meters, poly-meters, rich instrumentation, and a plethora of awe-inspiring drum playing by Marco Minnemann. The writing process began shortly after my last album was turned into the record label and was completed within a 3-4 week period. After all the parts were composed I contacted Marco Minnemann and we began recording. The total running time for the album is mere seconds under the maximum capacity of a CD, which is 80 minutes. I actually had way more than 80 mins of music, so I had to cut some notes to shorten it up a bit, and that was indeed a challenge.

full interview