Is this the Baddest Christmas guitar shreadCD of all time??

Neil is an old friend and this live recording of his One Silent Night absolutely slays me every time I hear it. IMO it buries TSO!!
Neil has spent much of his career working with guitar manufacturers doing clinics over seas so many here in the US don't know about him.
Check this out guys!! Just hit play on the 1st tune and it will play all the way through the full 2 CD set. Some SCARY guitar shredding here guys SCARY! Check out the shredding on clip 1 Carol of The Bells on disk 2 in particular
http://www.neilzaza.com/Store/store.asp

Can't believe I had never found this before! Sweet!

topshot rhit wrote:

Can't believe I had never found this before! Sweet!

Neil has always worked for Guitar manufacturers doing clinics and has never really been that well know as just an artist.
I know him from working at a Hamer dealer back in the late 80's when he was doing clinics for them.
GREAT guy he is a believer and the story of this project is amazing.

Quote :

Oddly enough, the idea for this Christmas CD set came about at an
unlikely intersection of life experiences: a motor home accident and a
holiday craft show. And if you think these make for unusual
circumstances, lend me your ear for a moment, friends. Have I got a tale
for you









It was early 1997 and Bobby Rock, Bill The Buddha Dickens, and I had
just finished up rehearsals in LA for the Rock Across America tour. With
a three-man crew aboard and a trailer full of gear in tow, we were all
cruising through the night in Bobby's brand new Winnebago, en route to
opening night in Atlanta. All of us were asleep, including, as it turns
out, the driver! Not recommended.

As we drifted off the road onto some rocky terrain near an
embankment, our boy woke up and panicked. He jerked the wheel hard left
and clipped a guardrail with such velocity that the RV disengaged from
the trailer and rolled bottom-over-top four times. The motor home seemed
to disintegrate mid-roll, as huge chunks of mangled fiberglass were
hurled skyward, and all of us passengers were deposited onto the highway
at various points along the way. When the smoke cleared (quite
literally), I found myself laying in the grass of the Interstate median,
having just endured the bone rattling sensation of getting bounced
around in some kind of turbo spin cycle of a clothes dryer.
Miraculously, we all made it through.





THE JOKE
An ambulance, a hospital, a catheter,
and a postponed tour later, I soon found myself back home in Cleveland,
recuperating and pondering my next move. Enter, the craft show. As a
family event, I used to always go to a local holiday craft show and
carry on about how watered down so much of the Christmas music for sale
there always sounded to me. If it were me doing a Christmas CD, I would
joke, it would be the real deal, and all of the blue-haired retirees
would be lining up to load down their baskets with multiple copies of my
masterpiece. All I would have to do is hang out at a booth and do a
little playing to promote it. Early retirement awaits, I would tell
themif I could only find a little spare time to actually record such a
disc. Well, after the wreck, spare time was plentiful, and I was about
to find out just how serious I was about making this Christmas CD.

Four Easy Stepsor is it?
Every
project needs a game plan and mine could be summarized in Four Easy
Steps. Step One: Call Tim Bradford to take care of instrumentation and
arrangements. Step Two: Drop a bunch of soulful melodies and killer
solos over the top of it all and then do a clean mix. Step Three: Throw
together some nice packaging and send everything off to the duplicator.
Step Four: Show up at the craft show with my guitar to serenade the
patrons and watch these discs fly out of the booth.

Okay, so maybe Step Four wasn't a true aspiration after all. (I have
to draw the line at weddings and craft shows!) But even as a joke, it
served its purpose because it actually got me thinking about how cool it
would be, creatively, to take a shot at a Christmas record. And this
would prove to be enough of an impetus to get the whole project off the
ground even if my Four Easy Steps concept would eventually turn into
Twelve Difficult Chapters!

From Humble Beginnings
The first version of One
Silent Night was close to the initial vision. Tim created the foundation
for everything with his Kurzweil 2500 and bass tracks were divided up
between Doug Johns and Greg Henderson. And since the only live
instruments were bass and guitars, this permutation of OSN was always
referred to as the MIDI version from folks in my inner circle. I was
reasonably happy with how everything turned out but, with a multitude of
other personal and professional distractions, I simply never got around
to releasing it. Then, around 2000, when I was living in Canada for a
time, I would revisit the masters and listen to them on occasion, just
to connect with that feeling of being home back in Cleveland. This time
around, though, it struck me as good, but somehow incomplete. I suppose
my vision for the project had expanded over the last few years and, if I
was ever going to release OSN, it would need a serious overhaul. So
away I went

The
first plan of action was to get real drums on it. But, since there was
no available click track anywhere on my masters, my initial attempts to
cut live drums were futile. Eventually, Tim found the original MIDI
files (which had been packed away for years) and, once a click track was
revived, we were back in business. I ended up recutting all but a few
solos and rhythm guitar tracks, then I brought in Greg Henderson to redo
all of the bass tracks. Things were really coming togetherso much so
that it was going to be difficult to fit everything on one disc. It was
at this point I realized that a Volume Two might be in order. Tim not
only agreed to Bradfordize a few more classics for me, but he even
kicked things up a few notches, as his arrangements of Jesu, Do You
Hear? and The Messiah Medley clearly illustrate.

So now, with two volumes worth of OSN starting to really take shape,
and my Four Easy Steps concept a distant memory, it was mandatory that
we have live drums on everything. For this, I put Bill Cioce in the
drummer's chair and we tracked both volumes at Palumbo Studios, which
was basically a converted barn on rural property outside of Cleveland.
What was the catch? (because you know that for this project, there has
to be a catch!) We would record in the sweltering heat of Augustwithout
ACand around the sporadic interruptions of an agitated neighbor's
tractor rumblings! It was brutal, no doubt, but it truly did sound great
in there, and Bill did a commendable job of gluing it all together with
his rock-solid drum tracks.

An Orchestra? Are you crazy?!
Now was it time to
mix? Not quite. Having gone this far, there was really only one thing
left to do: Bring in an orchestra and replace the MIDI strings! So, with
my One Silent Night Christmas show looming on the horizon, I met with
Paul Leary and explained that I needed 19 orchestral scores, for each
tune, in three months! To those in the know, this is an absolutely
insane amount of work to churn out in that time frame, but Paul pulled
it off admirably. Given the extreme amount of time and toil that went
into this project, the string sessions for
OSN were monumental to me
on a personal level. We recorded at a church called The Chapel, where
Fred Patterson conducted his house orchestra. For me, seeing Fred and
Co. play down the tracks was like watching a small army of painters put
the final coat of paint on my dream home. So any difficult logistical
issues
we might have had to deal with that day were eclipsed by the joy of
seeing this very ambitious body of work make it to the home stretch.

The Homestretch
Speaking of home stretch, now it
was time to mixand fast. I took my hodgepodge of masters down to (Who
else?) Joe Viers at John Schwab Recording. We were under such a tight
deadline to complete this whole
project before my One Silent Night
concert (which had been booked for months in advance), that it was
suggested that we only release Volume One for the time being. But I had
always envisioned both volumes
as a single work and just couldn't
bare the thought of separating them. So we kicked and screamed our way
through these marathon mixing sessions and somehow managed to meet our
final art and duplication deadlinesjust in time: The UPS man showed up
with a pallet of CDs within 48 hours of show time!


Touchdown!
So
it all worked out, albeit differently from I had originally envisioned.
Instead of debuting OSN in 1997 at a craft show with just a guitar, it
was in 2002 to a packed house at the Palace Theater with a full
orchestra. Instead of one volume, it was two. Instead of a bunch of
sequencers, samples, and machines, it was living, breathing instruments,
an orchestra and great players. And instead of One Silent Night-the
concept-exiting the world with me on a highway in Texas, One Silent
Night the tangible-found its way ineven if it did take more than Four
Easy Steps.

Here is a little teaser vid I was able to throw together from Carol of the bells from the OSN Live At The Palace set. I found a TSO vs Zaza vid some one had posted on Youtube and clipped out just the part from Neils version for this.
SCARY chops shown here SCARY!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfN36vVIT9o

I love Zaza,

I wish he would tour. Satriani should have him open his shows. He is easily just as good, if not better than Satriani.

Another great guitar Christmas album is Gary Hoey's- Ho Ho Hoey:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Of-Ho-Hoey/dp/B003UNB00S/ref=tmm_other_meta_binding_title_0

Got Ho Ho Hoey and your right it's cool. Yep I wish like you Neil would tour the OSN thing as IMO he buries the TSO stuff.
Satriani is a good player with nice melodies but is not on the same planet in technical ability as Neil. Frankly I don't think Vai is ether maybe Gilbert or Pertruci but neither of them have Neils sense of melody.
Neil has always been the clinic guy for manufacturers and in the US is not that well known as a pure artist and that is a shame as he is a unique player with scary chops and speed but also one of the most amazing senses of melody I have ever heard. Neil has speed and accuracy on par with guys like Paul Gilbert but what makes him unique is he also has amazing feeling and the ability to knock you out with just one well placed singing note. Unlike many shredders I listen to I don't forget Neils melody lines as soon as they pass but they get in your head and they are singable!
I know Neil from working at a Hamer dealer back in the late 1980's and having him come in and do clinics at the shop.
Little funny story the dude incinerates the guitar at a clinic then turns calls me out by name and tells me in front of the crowd to play something. NO way on earth was I following him and we both had a good laugh on that one!
Neil is not only a KILLER player but one of the most down to earth and nicest guys I have ever hung out with.

Jeff Scheetz' Christmas album is very good as well. There are some others, too, if you're into instrumental. Unfortunately the links are dead now to my past Christmas shows where you could have heard lots of good stuff.