Here is Travis Orbin’s drum tracking video for ‘My Alien Father’:

And here is Gabriel’s piano/keyboard tracking video for the song:

Read the lyrics to ‘My Alien Father’.

Gabriel’s Notes: This song is a tribute to my father, who is fascinated by alien conspiracy theories. The lyrics are drawn from his extensive library on the subject (and are used here to further express the paranoia of this story’s main character), and the music is inspired by sci-fi b-movie soundtracks – particularly that of the X-Files, one of my father’s favorite shows. As a result, it is the only song on the album to use prominent synths. Tom came up with a bass line for this one – a pattern in 9/8, reminiscent of Tool, which repeats twice in full then cuts itself off the third time. I went through multiple revisions of the drum part with Travis, and he ended up tracking it in a single take.

I cannot thank my father enough for making this album a reality. Without him, it would not exist.

Travis’s Notes: This is the tune that I alluded to in the “Fear of Humanity” video description; it was tracked entirely with the dual floor tom setup. In Gabe’s demo, the tom-toms and snare sounded quite big and ballsy, and I wanted to retain those textures/tones. The only discrepancy between the two setups are the 14″ MDM hats instead of 15″ MDMs.

And as always, there’s a bunch of complementation present:
2:10 – triplet on hats, piano
2:19 – 2:21 – hats orchestration, vocal melody
3:40 – 3:43 – crashes/china, vocal melody
3:56 – 3:57 – crashes/china/tom-toms, synth melody
4:09 – 4:10 – accented tom-tom quintuplet melody, synth melody
4:18 – 4:19 – double kick flams complement nothing; sometimes you just gotta play some double kick flams

Full drum set transcription
Tempo = 110 BPM