PipemanRadio Chats with California’s newest force in melodic death metal, Ravenmocker

0:04 Hi, you live on to censure? Wow crazy you. Job up time cloud job Shuti, yesday. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four C Y Radio and I'm here with our next guest, who uh had some killer music and so like, welcome to show Tom from rape Maker. How are you?

0:45 I'm doing great man, Thank you so much for having me. Oh my pleasure. Funny too. While I was starting to do that, I was looking at my virtual background, like, oh, do I have it a mirror mode? Your logo is cool. It's like kind of cool like bookends wrapping around in the name. Yeah, yeah, it's actually our drummer decided that might be a cool little addition to the to the logo. So he actually was the inspiration behind the backwards are right at the end there. And I think you almost need to do that nowadays, you know, because yeah, it's so hard nowadays with bands. I was just talking about that in the last interview, like the the things that bands have to do to make their names stand out nowadays because there's so many.

1:31 Yeah, oh, you're so right about that. It's it's really easy to get lost in the in the massive uh you know, music coming out and you gotta you gotta stand out somehow totally. So tell our listeners who may not have heard of you or heard your music a little bit about Raven Mocker and you know how it came about and what how you view your music, not not like a genre, but like how you view it as an artist. Yeah, sure, well again, thank you for having me. My name's Tom. I played guitar and sing in the band Raven Mocker. We are a melodic death metal band that derives a lot of influence from bands like Children About Them, Insomnium, Omnium, Gatherum, more melodic stuff than your typical death metal. But obviously I'm a huge fan of the death metal vocals, so that's the style I bring to the table as the vocalist.

2:30 We I Guess the band started off. I've always used I guess my own style of writing just as a kind of coping mechanism for the life we live nowadays. You know, worlds in peril, you know, almost a hundred percent of the time, and it's just a way I kind of get out of myself and allow myself to forget about all of that stuff. Professionally as a musician, I played drums for bands for the last like eighteen to twenty years. But I want to do something different. So last year I came off of a tour supporting Arch Enemy, and I was like, you know what I'm I want to do something different, Like, I just had this feeling of wanting to do more, be more. I mean on the tour, I you know, we did phenomenally.

3:16 It was a great response to the music we brought. But I wanted to do something else, So I left that project and I wound up just spending that summer writing and writing and writing and writing. You know, pretty much everything you heard on the first two singles was done in this room. You know, I got my my electronic kit and my guitars right there. You know, I just locked myself away in here for for days at a time and just started trying to you know, I'm not the greatest guitarist in the world. Drums is really my primary instrument, so I wanted to allow myself to be challenged. But also, you know, not worry so much about dude, if you can't if you can't shred at like Momstein's style speeds like there's no there's no disappointment in that as long as you're making good music. So I just kind of I lost myself in here and I just tried to I tried to just let everything out.

4:19 And I think we did a pretty good job. From you know, releasing the first two singles. This year, we've garnered almost two hundred thousand views on YouTube off of those two singles alone, and for being a brand new band, that's kind of like, that's a. Really, that's a lot. We're proud of ourselves for that. Obviously, that kind of sets the bar for the rest of what we do. So you know, we're far from taking a break, but we're trying to make every single song, every single quality of production a little better than the last time. And we just came out of the studio. Our drummer Dylan recorded I think the rest of the songs for the album, so I think it's like ten or eleven songs, and we we re recorded the first two because he's been playing it now for almost a year and he was like, I can do better, and we were like, all right, let's let's re record the drums for Infallible and Where the Raven Flies. So, needless to say, he he plugged away on him and they came out wonderful. But yeah, we're hoping the next songs that we drop over the next year or so they're gonna be really They're gonna be really special. They're gonna be something that fans can really appreciate and relate to. Don't get me wrong, I love my speed metal bands and stuff, but like we wanted to be accessible too, And I know, uh, yeah,

5:52 I don't really know what else to say about it. That's good enough. It's coming from the heart, you know, And yeah, I think that that's really We're gonna learn stuff about, you know, our writing process and everything like that over the next year. So who knows where the next record may come out to, But I can tell you for sure, the guys in the band they are they are so happy to be doing this and dedicated and like you know, they put in the work and it's never a it's never a hassle to get rehearsal together. We're all very enthusiastic about like future production, how we want our live shows to look, and it's it's really a special thing working without all of them, It truly is.

6:36 I love I love hearing that too, because that's important, you know. It's hard enough in the business you're in that it shouldn't be hard within the band. Yeah, And the fact that you know it's not hard and you're having fun and you're being real, that to me, that's what it's all about. And that's why you're getting that many you know, views and listens is because you know if you're real and you're being a true musician and not just somebody you know, try to implement some formula, Like it takes a lot of balls to go from drums to you know, singing and playing guitar now. And my hat's off to you because I played drums for nine years when I was a kid, and I sucked, and I switched a guitar. I sucked at that. I sang thrash metals, sucked at that. So my hat's off to you because it takes a lot of work.

7:28 And the only. Reason I sucked is because I didn't put in the work, you know. And also, you know a death metal singer that can do that. I mean, I don't think people realize. They think you're just screaming and how hard it is. That's why you know, I kind of sucked because I wasn't singing with the proper technique and I was blowing out my voice by you know, not doing it the right way kind of like you know, I look at Courtney in a part box as show and I watch her mouth. I'm like, oh my god, you know, like that. Technique that I watch her have, I'm like, I'm so enamored with it because it's like, holy shit, like look at what she's doing.

8:16 I don't even know if I could do that absolutely. Yeah, you know, yeah, vocals is such a new animal for me. It. I I did vocals very briefly when I was living in New Jersey for a band, and you know, we played a couple of shows here there, but like it wasn't long enough to really have to focus in on that technique. And I think watching artists like you know, Phil Boseman, Will Ramos, even Travis from Cattle, they they have such unique approaches to their individual instrument and I'm just trying to figure out how they go for the longevity that they do. And there's there's appsl a technique, and like I think there's been like research done on some of these vocalists because like people are wondering, how how do you get that tone? And then not only that, sustain it for like a month at a time, doing it for me.

9:15 Like you're talking about will, I mean like that blows my mind. I think my vice would be blown in like thirty seconds. Yeah, yeah, And I think I think it comes down to purely, like you know, we spend so much time just talking in our regular voice. I think there is depth that you can find that it just it creates a different sound, and when you learn to get that far down, it just creates something new entirely. It's a phenomenal and very interesting subject for me, especially kind of like learning it in real time, you know. Well, I think Alai is a perfect example of why you need to have technique right from the beginning, because you know, he kind of changed because he can't do the death chrem more. The doctors were saying you won't have a voice ever, you know.

10:00 Yeah, And. I think that's from you know, not knowing the right technique from the beginning, and then you can learn it later. But then if you don't from the beginning, maybe there won't be a later sometimes exactly. Yeah. Another band that I've noticed that is a Devil War's product. I used to listen to them in high school and stuff like that. And uh, you know the singer Mike, he's he's he's definitely much better off from where he used to be. But maybe like five ten years ago, I noticed like he just couldn't deliver on stage and like not talking, not talking. Shade on on Devil War's product. They got those guys earn their spot, you know, but like I definitely noticed he was getting like really gassed during the during the performances. It's like, man, I can't. I can't allow myself to You got to learn from other people, you know, no or another.

10:50 Uh, and it is a learned craft. Like people think that when you're doing the type of music you're doing that they just get up and scream. And like that's why I'm focusing on this because a lot of these really good singers could sing the mainstream. Stuff very well. Like you you take Tatiana, you know how she goes from that melodic voice to that brutal you know, gral Like that's talent. Oh, it's so impressive. It is so impressive. I I the only reason I haven't started singing clean in the Raven Maker stuff is because I don't. I haven't reached that point yet where I can comfortably do that, and it's something I I'm I'm gonna have to challenge myself on eventually, because I do want that kind of accessibility in the Raven Macker stuff. But at the same time, when I when I put it on a recording, I need to make sure that it's good, you know, like I don't want to put out something half assed, and then we go to play at midway through a set and they're just like, you know, yeah, So it's it is so impressive that some of these vocalists, I mean, yeah, Tazia spearbox again, Courtney does it like flawlessly where she can just she can just swap tones like that.

12:09 It blows my mind. It's truly truly impressive, it really is. I think people don't realize how hard it would be also to switch gears like that, like. On a dime. You know, yeah, it's unbelievable. Absolutely, And then you know, you mentioned like different people like Slayer, uh my favorite old time ever band, but Tom can't hit the notes that he hit back in the early days, which means certain songs he'd never be. Able to sing today. You know, you like you take some of the older songs like like I Am the any Christ, he never would be able to hit that high note. Yeah, you know, and that's why I always have a lot of respect for people that can have that longevity doing it, you know.

12:57 Absolutely, yeah, And I think a lot of that comes with age two, you know, like we're not you know, a lot of us like time stops for nobody, and you know when when uh, you know, Metallica, they down tune their stuff now just for ease of making sure that Hetfield can sing it. But also at the same time, like it's like, you know, they found a way to make sure that the fans still got that authentic experience, whether it's tuning down like a half step or a whole step, just to make sure that they can they can get that in the key that they're in now, you know. So I think I think, you know, in dealing in dealing with the aspect of time and having an effect on your voice and your performance, being able to account for that later on so the fans can get that experiences, I think also part of the game totally.

13:44 And it's so funny you mentioned Hetfield because I heard him recently talking about how you know, when they play Seek and Destroy at the same at the at the uh San Jose Games that uh they're playing in the old version. He's like, why don't they play the version I do now because I can sing now. I sucked back then and me as an old school that was at in their first show ever, like, I like his voice back then. But I also as an adult understand if you're an artist, yeah, you would want to progress. Like when he starts singing, he didn't have training or anything, just sang, and now he does have training, so you know, it's singing is different, but it makes him happy, which would make everybody else happy exactly.

14:34 Yeah, when an artist is feeling it on stage, everybody feels it, you know, exactly. So tell everybody how they would reach out to you guys. Check out all your music, gigs, merch all that good stuff. Well as for our live shows, we we just booked our first show with the Whiskey Go Go, so that'll be a really cool place to start off our live career out here in the southern California area. So you can catch us anywhere in the surrounding area Inland Empire, Long Beach, Los Angeles proper. We're going to be around here. As for our music, you can find us on any and all streaming platforms that you may use. These are Spotify, iTunes, all of them. We're on YouTube, We're on TikTok, We're on Instagram, Facebook. You just got to search Raven Maker all one word. But yeah, we're around. We're every day.

15:31 We're trying to get a little bigger. So I love it. Yeah. Are there any final words you want to leave the listeners with that we haven't covered yet. No, just a general thank you to everybody who's either just finding out about us or who may have heard of us through social media, our our our publicists, thank you Dean for having me on this, uh, this wonderful podcast and radio show. And you know we're going to be releasing musicstad throughout the year. If the first two songs didn't really appeal to you, maybe some of the future stuff will. And if you like the first two songs, well there's good news because we are more coming. So I love it.

16:11 Well, you guys rock and everybody's got to check you out. And thanks for being on the Adventures of plate Man. Oh, thank you very much for having me my pleasure. Thank you for listening to the adventures of plate Man. I'm W for Cui Regio