First up, I guess not many people know you over here, tell us about Scale The Summit.

We are a Instrumental "Adventure" Metal band, for those who love melody, superior musicianship, epic riffs, and great solos. Most of the time it is a little difficult for us to explain it in words, but that would be the best example to date.

Your music is very experimental, what would you call your biggest influences, personally as well as bandwise?

The artists and bands that inspire me to play and write music are, Bireili Largrene, John Petrucci, Frank Gambale, Between The Buried And Me, Canvas Solaris, Yes, Bulb (Misha Mansoor), Necrophagist and Cloudkicker. They are forever changing, but those would be the current ones for me. We all have different bands that influence us.

Your technical skills are unbelievable at some times. How come ALL of you can play that well and how did you find each other to form a band that consists of only people that are that technically skilled? I mean there are a lot of bands who have one or more very good musicians, but in your band it is all of you.

Thanks a lot. We actually all met when me and Travis moved out to California to attend Musicians Institute for GCA and then GIT. It was actually one of our main goals when moving out there. We wanted to find a drummer and a bassist. Me and Travis grew up in the same neighborhood since we were kids. We met out drummer Pat at Musicians
Institute, and then we met our bassist Jordan over the internet and he turned out to be attending MI as well. It all worked pretty easy. Jordan was the first bass player for us to audition and he turned out to be a ridiculously good player, we consider ourselves very lucky to have come across those two so easy and so quickly.

Would it have been possible for anybody to join the band with „normal“ skills?

Probably not. I mean our goal is not to write the most complex stuff you have ever heard, because we're all into writing wellwritten songs more than just making it technical sounding, but as you have heard, our stuff is pretty tough. I think besides being atechnical player, you have got to be really clean as well, to execute this stuff live and have it sound good. I would probably go bald from stress if someone were to leave this band. We all work so well together, its great.

You have a 6 string bass and a 8 string guitar, when did you start thinking that the normal amount of strings is not enough?

I origianaly got the idea for an 8 string because I wanted more of a challenge (for myself). Then once I got it, I started using it at practice and realized that it actually added a lot more to the music. This happened around 2 years ago, I think. So from then in out I have never looked back. I think Jordan has always wanted a 6, and we always thought it would be a great idea, so he got one. Since we all play in standard tuning, it was great to add the 6 string bass and 8 string guitar to the mix for extended melodies and more heavy sounding parts.

Your album "monument" just came out, tell us some more about it

Our album "Monument" was released may 25th. It consists of 8 songs, running about 40 minutes. Its got some awesome tunes on it, complex, tons of great melodies, flowing song struture, lots of odd meter, great layered guitar parts, killer groove, and some ridiculous playing from all instruments. Plus, the artwork alone came out amazing.

You self-released Monuments. Is that because you wanted to keep in control of everything or was there no label interested in your music yet?

We choose to self-release this album so that we would already have a release under our belt and to help save for a van and trailer for tour. We didn't want to start from the very bottom with a smaller label, we wanted to show that we can really accomplish a lot by ourselves. We are currently talking with labels, so you may hear some news in the near future.

What has changed for you as a band since the album release?

We have got a lot more attention from magazines, labels, and a ton more fans. I think the best thing is that we are all not stressed anymore. We wanted to get this thing out so much sooner but hit a lot of road blocks on the way, that were all out of our hands.

How are the reactions so far?

Great! We have been getting a lot of great reviews, of course there are the typical bad ones, but thats with every band. No big deal.

Tell us more about the songwriting process. You have an amazing amount of changes and different parts in your songs. Does it take long for you to write new songs?

Our song writing process is always started with guitar. We get 80% of the guitars finsihed and then we start with drums and add bass later on. Everyone puts in thier own opinion of parts, harmonies, timing, tempo, etc... We always end up changing a lot while we are writing, due to extending parts, shortening parts, adding in a new melody or riff, the typical changes. The amount of time it takes us to write always changes. I feel we get songs finished in a pretty good amount of time though, but it all depends on how much time we have each day to work on them.

Why no vocals?

Well to put it simple. We just dont want one, we spend a lot of time writing this music and making it sound so full that if we would add anything more it would ruin it. A great example from a reviewer said, "A Kevin James LaBrie (Dream Theater) sounding voice would definitely ruin the magic." We all agree with that 100%, and that being said, we would obviously never add a screamer as well.


That definitely makes sense. You are still young, what do you want to achieve with the band and where do you want to be in a few years?

We all want to be touring full time, worldwide. As well as hopefully being on a label that has the same views and wants to put us on the road a lot.

Please describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard it yet:

I think, "Instrumental "Adventure" Metal band, for those who love melody, superior musicianship, epic riffs, and great solos" about covers that one. I do strongly believe that we have created a very new sound in the progressive metal genre, the reason for starting "Adventure Metal".

Your artwork shows sky and clouds, your shirts show a lot of animals, your song titles are mostly nature related as well. What makes you that connected to it?

Well... we live in and around it everyday.
For the merch, I design a lot of it, we just pick the ones that we like the most. Same goes for all the designs that are submitted to us from our awesome fans.

How do you choose your songnames without lyrics?

We basically all come up with ideas that we hear while playing or listening to our music. It takes us a while to find one that we all think fits very well, it is very important to us.

What are the furture plans for STS so far? Touring? New material?

Touring, absolutely. We are talking with labels right now, so hopefully we'll get some help with touring. We all want to go out as aoon as possible and as much as possible. We are also working on new material, we have been since the new album was finished. Its going great. I think everyone we'll be hearing a lot more from us throughout the next years to come!

 We hope so, thanks for taking the time for the interview.