TONY'S EXTENSIVELY LONG AND BORING BIOGRAPHY (WARNING: HIGH TL;DR LEVELS):

I, Anthony Charles Dickinson (a.k.a. Prince Of Darkness, Prince of Darkness, Princeofdarkness, PoD, and all other variations), am a musician from the town of Louisville, Colorado. I am 18 years old (19 come late August) and a recent graduate of Monarch High School.

The Early Days:

I have been playing music for quite some time, starting piano at the young age of 4. My mom is a piano teacher, and the lessons were free, so I couldn't pass it up. I've always loved music, even before I started playing piano. In elementary school, one of my favorite channels was "The Box," which was a channel where viewers could call in and request their favorite music videos to be played. This channel really helped start developing my musical tastes, as I would take a tape recorder and record the songs off the TV from the speakers.

Around that time, my brother had a band entitled "Shame." Their practices were always held in our basement, so live, loud music was never unfamiliar to me. In 5th grade, our school allowed us to play musical instruments if we so desired. Being that my brother's band was playing, it had inspired me to pick between one of two options: concert percussion, or upright bass for orchestra. My brother was already playing drums at the time, so I decided to go the other route.

First Instruments, First Teacher and First Experiences:

In 6th grade, I had joined jazz band, having to borrow the school's bass guitar. I finally got my first Squire (everybody's first instrument is a Squire) bass shortly thereafter. Thoroughly enjoying my new skill, I started playing along to some of the bands I really liked at the time: Smash Mouth, No Doubt, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. My brother frequently showed me great albums of metal bands to play to as well. This is where I discovered Metallica, Megadeth and Primus.

In 7th grade, I started playing with the Second Baptist church's Gospel Choir. This was a great experience for me to play jazzier and funkier styles of music. A slightly unfortunate part of having a Squire 4-string bass was that most of the songs were played on 5-strings. I had to frequently down-tune my bass down a 4th to B E A D to play with the songs. This also led to me getting my 5-string.

Also around this time, I had started taking lessons from my first bass teacher, Jed Ostrom. He really helped me get on the right track with my music. I only was able to take lessons from Jed for about 8 months, as he had to move back to his homestate, New York.

In 8th grade or so, I started to learn guitar. I had several full score and guitar tab books from the bands I liked to play to on bass, so I gave it a shot.

Shadow Cast (Now the important stuff):

Even though I played for a little bit with my brother's band "Shame," I wanted to have a band I could call my own. This band would soon become what is known as "Shadow Cast." I had known both the two other founding members, James Lee (original guitar player) and Travis Moberg (original drummer), from orchestra and jazz band, respectively. Starting out, we covered music from the bands Megadeth, Audioslave, Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Early my freshman year, Shadow Cast and Shame sort of 'fused'. Two members of Shame were brought over into Shadow Cast to make a full lineup. The lineup was now the original members with Travis Ambrose on vocals and Scott Cook on guitar. Despite writing tons of songs, we only played 3 shows as a full line-up.

Shadow Cast is no longer, but the music will still be written and recorded by myself, but on a studio-only basis. Former members will still be participating, and perhaps we'll come back together if we find other members for a full lineup, but I don't foresee that happening very soon.

I am currently playing in a more Hard Rock/Alternative Rock outfit playing guitar with former Shadow Cast drummer, Travis Moberg. It's still slightly in developing stages (not even a name), but we have original material written already, and big plans.

Influences:

My influences are most deeply rooted in Metal. My top 5 favorite bands are Megadeth, Symphony X, Nevermore, Children of Bodom, and Dream Theater, but being in many other musical activities such as Jazz band, Drumline, several other projects spanning many different genres, and even Marching band has allowed me to discover tons of great music of all kinds. You will hear mostly metal from me, but I have dabbled in Jazz, Funk, Latin, Classical, World, Electronica/Techno, Fusion and other genres. Many of my songs try to span multiple genres.

Because Metal is my strongest point, I frequently integrate other genres into it. I have done Classical with Metal (though that's not so special anymore, because of Yngwie Malmsteen), Disco with Metal, Surf with Metal, and more.

Venture into Video Game Remixing:

I had been to OCRemix a few times in the past, but never really paid too much attention to it. But, in summer of 2006, I had found a forum post with a link to virt's "Crystal Flash." This song started my remixing career. My first couple of remixes were "Diamond Dust" off of Sonic 3D Blast, and a James Bond theme and "Flying Battery" from Sonic & Knuckles medley. I also started to arrange every song off of the Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles sountracks into one, gigantic medley. The unfortunate part is that these were almost verbatim covers with little to no new ideas.

I did a lot of this, slowly developing my remixing skills and closely following DoD (Dwelling of Duels) but never bothering to enter because of how much of a n00b I thought I was. I would also closely follow remixes of the likes of Snappleman, Braincells, norg, Ashane, virt, housethegrate, Ailsean, Ryan8bit, Master Hatchet and all the other great guitar playing madmen of video game remixes, learning from their examples and approaches to remixing.

Sometime last February or March, I contacted Snappleman over AIM to ask him technical questions about mixing. I showed him some of my works and he suggested I tried DoD. More than enough reasoning, I did it. That month was Sci-Fi Month and I decided to do a Mega Man X medley. This song became what you all know as "Zero Light" and I won that DoD with that track.

My Nickname:

"Prince Of Darkness" has nothing to do with Satan or Satanism. Satanism is one of the most asinine, juvenile piece of shit that's called a "Religion" that's ever had the unfortunate chance to exist. Don't let that make you think that I'm a hardcore Christian from that statement, because there are plenty of people in Christianity that are just as bad. I believe in a higher power, I don't believe in fanatical, business-oriented, organized Religion. "Prince Of Darkness" is one of my favorite Megadeth songs, and is also my Megadeth forums user name. It's pretty much stuck since then.

Confessions of the untr00:

I will admit that despite playing a lot of video games in elementary and middle school, I rarely do it now. I still greatly enjoy the soundtracks and do my best to find soundtracks that are not only the truly popular soundtracks from series' such as Mario, Zelda, Sonic, Castlevania, Mega Man, Final Fantasy, and those. They're great soundtracks, don't get me wrong, but they're not the only soundtracks.

Aspirations:

Now that I am done with High School, I am taking a year off. I will be using this year to gather up money, buy equipment, and work on my musical skills. Depending on how sucessful or unsucessful things are, I will be auditioning for Berklee in Boston for Fall 2009.

If you asked me what my dream job would be, I wouldn't be able to answer you thoroughly. I love everything about what I do. I love performance, I love composing, I love arranging, I love production. Production is probably the skill I lack most at and wouldn't be satisfied if that's what I only did. Any of the others I would be. If I had my way, I would not be known for being a strong bass or guitar player, or a strong composer or arranger. I would love to be known for being a musician, and a musician who loves what he does as much as he does with life.

Other Factoids:

-I am a total multimedia guy. Other than music, I love to do filmmaking, picture editing and graphic design, programming, web design, 3D design (this one I'm not so good at), flash animation, and more. Some of these skills aren't very developed, and some are very secondary. For instance, I really enjoy filmmaking, as you will also see on this website.
-I am very Obsessive Compulsive when it comes to getting things just perfect in my music, videos, or whatever. If you've ever worked with me, you'll probably find yourself asking the question, "does that really matter?" a lot. My answer is yes, yes it does.
-I firmly believe that unbalance is never good. Finding balances is almost always the greatest solution. Examples can be found all around us. Being super skinny is never good, nor is being severely overweight. Anarchy is a terrible idea, and so is strict dictatorship. Your coffee is too hot, you can't drink it. Your coffee is too cold, you can't enjoy it nearly as much. Best solutions are always in the middle ground. I use this philosophy with my music, too. Too complicated is boring, too simple is known as Soulja Boy. Too much guitar? Add some synth. Too much synth? Use more guitar. Perhaps I'll become a Buddhist.
-Other than bass and guitar being my primary and secondary instruments, I have also dabbled with drums. I will not rank my skills up to my drum buddies, but I am far from "drum dumb." I only play keyboards when I need to.
-I am uncontrollably obsessed with astrology, but fairly private about it. I will go out of my way to figure out peoples' signs.
-I have embarked on a journey to turn a Guitar Hero controller into something useful, an actual instrument. It will, hopefully, be a MIDI instrument in the end. I'm aware that Chris of Powerglove has done this, but I'm going to have to take a different approach.
-On that subject, anyone who starts playing real guitar because they played Guitar Hero need to hang themselves.
-I dressed up as the Burger King for Halloween. Twice.
-I hate onions. SO MUCH. Sauteed, Fried, Deep-Fried, Blossomed, Grilled, Chocolate Covered, they make me gag.
-TOP 3 Video Games: Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Final Fantasy VIII