TRIVIUM frontman Matt Heafy spoke to Tucson, Arizona’s Rock 102.1 KFMA radio station about the overwhelming success of his Twitch channel, which boasts a follower count of 238,000.

Matt, who streams everything from video games, guitar clinics to TRIVIUM and acoustic song covers, all while he’s off the road and awaiting the next TRIVIUM tour, said: “The main consistency is five days a week when I’m off tour, two times a day — 8:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. — is when I do my streams on my channel. And the majority of it — 75 to 90 percent of the time — is me playing TRIVIUM songs by request to TRIVIUM supporters. It’s me staying in shape.”

He continued: “I never take time off vocally ever; I never take time off. I had COVID last year [and] I had COVID again this year — I still didn’t stop singing and screaming and streaming to make sure that if I get the flu on tour, if I get food poisoning on tour, I’m gonna make sure I don’t have to cancel shows. So I’ll need to train through every single element.

“When my kids were newborns, I was not getting sleep, still making sure I’m here, providing entertainment, providing community, providing all that stuff, and still keeping myself in shape year round — more like an athlete than a musician, is the way I treat it.”

Last fall, Heafy told HardDrive Radio that he and his bandmates, as well as their “entire crew,” were fully vaccinated the 2021 leg of their U.S. tour with MEGADETH, LAMB OF GOD and HATEBREED. “The Metal Tour Of The Year” marked the four groups’ first run of concerts since the start of the pandemic.

“I had breakthrough COVID as well, so I was about as immune as you can possibly get and I was still adhering to every single rule,” he said. “And I know that maybe some people, unfortunately, are rolling their eyes when they hear about this stuff, but the way I think about it, I don’t think anything other than this is a virus; it’s a sickness. I’ve had tons of freakin’ shots. Every time you go to South America, you have to get boosters and immunity, if you’re gonna be near the jungle. My kids are almost three. When they were little, they got polio and smallpox and measles vaccinations, hepatitis vaccinations. That’s the only way I thought of this: ‘You know what? I wanna play shows, and I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure not one person misses our set for one freakin’ show.’ So, we had the vaccine, still wore masks everywhere except for dressing room, stage and bus. You know how much I love food. We made sure every single meal we had on every single day off was outdoors — outdoors, no friends. ‘Cause we wanted the shows to happen.”

In October, TRIVIUM bassist Paolo Gregoletto told Mankato, Minnesota’s “Midwest Beatdown” radio show that the band’s tour manager was diagnosed with COVID-19 after the third show of “The Metal Tour Of The Year”. “We had a bunch of [COVID-19] tests with us,” he said. “We got a couple of extras. Everyone tested. No one else was positive. We caught up our manager. We caught up the tour. We pretty much said, ‘Look, we’re not gonna cancel a show. Everyone’s good. We’re all isolated from our tour manager. We’ll test tomorrow and as many days in a row as you want.’ And no one ever got sick on our bus except for our tour manager. And we kept going. That was basically it.

“There was really no rule kind of set up how that was gonna work,” Paolo continued. “But what we’ve been seeing people do is, okay, someone on a [tour] package will get sick, and they’ll be, like, ‘well, everyone’s gonna take 10 days’ or something to quarantine — whatever people are doing. And we were, like, it’s not possible. There’s too much at stake for a tour this size, or any tour, really. ‘Cause if you start canceling shows, the margin is very, very thin with that kind of stuff; it’s not sustainable. So we were just, like, ‘Look, if no one is sick, the show must go on.’ So that’s what we did. HATEBREED’s sound guy helped us out big time by filling in on monitors. Our assistant tour manager picked up the slack for the shows, and then our tour manager was just e-mailing — Zooming in; [sending] e-mails, doing all the stuff he had to do. And he came back when he was fine, and that was it. And we kept rolling.”

Gregoletto added: “It was scary, obviously, but I was also kind of relieved to have that happen right away, ’cause it’s, like, once you kind of know what it could be once it happens… It’s kind of like Matt when he got sick [with COVID-19] way before the tour, it’s scary ’cause you’ve been trying to avoid it the whole time, but then, when you get through it, you’re, like, ‘All right. I felt bad for a few days and now I’m good.’ It felt good to just have that happen, and we dealt with it, and the show went on. And we didn’t publicize it ’cause we didn’t wanna [create] any sort of doubt that the tour was gonna get canceled, that shows would get canceled. ‘Cause it’s crazy times right now. I’m sure a lot of people have seen bands are dropping from tours and stuff, and we just didn’t wanna do that. So we chose this way instead.”

TRIVIUM’s tenth album, “In The Court Of The Dragon”, was released in October via longtime label Roadrunner Records. The record was produced and mixed by Josh Wilbur and recorded in the fall of 2020 at Full Sail University in Orlando. The album cover is an original oil painting by French artist Mathieu Nozieres.

LAST IN LINE has inked a deal with earMUSIC, the recorded music label of German entertainment group Edel AG which boasts a roster of global artists including DEEP PURPLE, Alice Cooper, BABYMETAL, THUNDER, STATUS QUO and many more. A new EP from LAST IN LINE will tentatively arrive later this year, following by the band’s third full-length album.

The news of LAST IN LINE’s partnership with earMUSIC was shared by the band’s drummer, Vinny Appice, during a recent appearance on “Waste Some Time With Jason Green”. Vinny also revealed that LAST IN LINE completed recording six more new songs in late January at Danny “Count” Koker’s Desert Moon studios in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Formed in 2012 by Appice, bassist Jimmy Bain and guitarist Vivian Campbell — Ronnie James Dio’s co-conspirators and co-writers on the “Holy Diver”, “Last In Line” and “Sacred Heart” albums — LAST IN LINE’s initial intent was to celebrate Ronnie James Dio’s early work by reuniting the members of the original DIO lineup. After playing shows that featured a setlist composed exclusively of material from the first three DIO albums, the band decided to move forward and create new music in a similar vein.

LAST IN LINE’s debut album, “Heavy Crown”, was released in February 2016 via Frontiers Music Srl, landing at No. 1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. Initially, the release had been preceded by tragedy when Bain unexpectedly died at the age of 68 on January 23, 2016. LAST IN LINE, honoring what they knew would be Bain’s wish to keep the band moving, brought in Phil Soussan and committed to sustained touring in support of the album before beginning work on the follow-up release, 2019’s “II”, which was also made available through Frontiers Music Srl.

Last June, Soussan spoke to Metal-Net.com about the progress of the writing and recording sessions for LAST IN LINE’s third album.

“I’ve been quite motivational with the band,” Phil said. “I’m trying to keep things happening. We wanted to work on a few different aspects [during the pandemic]. And we also had to go about getting a new record deal — we were changing labels — so that’s something we’re in the process of doing, and we’re getting pretty close now. But part of that was writing a third record. So we’ve been hard at work trying to write a third record and even record that third record while we’ve been in different locations around the world. And, obviously, this band works as a unit in every sense of the word, so it’s a real handicap not being able to be in the same room as everybody and trying to make it happen.”

In February 2021, Appice told Metal From The Inside that former DOKKEN and current FOREIGNER bassist Jeff Pilson, who produced both “II” and “Heavy Crown”, is not involved with the upcoming LAST IN LINE album. “We made a change,” he said. “Actually, the guy who mixed the last record, Chris Collier — he’s great; he’s working with KORN — he recorded this record. And we’re kind of producing it ourselves, between all of us.

“Jeff is great — Jeff’s a great producer, and [he has] great ideas and stuff, but we just felt that we could probably do what we wanna do now that we’re a band, we’ve been on the road, and we know what we wanna hear,” he explained. “But it’s coming out great. The stuff sounds fantastic.

“And yeah, I’ve been through a lot with Jeff Pilson. I’ve known him for years. He’s a great guy. He’s like my brother.”

Also in February, Soussan told the “Pat’s Soundbytes Unplugged” podcast about the musical direction of the new LAST IN LINE material: “The songs are another progression from the last album — the difference between ‘Heavy Crown’ and ‘II’, and now ‘II’ and whatever this next album is gonna be called; we don’t know yet, by the way. But it’s definitely evolved even more; it’s gone into even more of an evolution, but we are always trying to keep the characteristics of LAST IN LINE there. I mean, you can’t shake those things — you can’t shake Vinny’s drumming, you can’t shake Vivian’s playing. And I’d like to say the same thing about myself, and, of course, Andrew.”

Some of the early recording sessions for LAST IN LINE’s third album took place in January 2020 at Steakhouse studio in North Hollywood, California.

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You could WIN a Fuzz-Tone FZ-M from Maestro Pedals in today’s I Love Pedals Giveaway! Ends Feb. 10, 2022.Fuzz-Tone FZ-MMaestro created the world’s first fuzz pedal – the Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1. Introduced in 1962, the Fuzz-Tone became the sound of rock and roll and a must-have accessory for guitarists everywhere after the success of 1965’s (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones, which prominently featured its cutting edge sound. Now Maestro is bringing the fun and sonic fury of those early Fuzz-Tones back with the new Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-M. This all-analog pedal boasts a Mode toggle switch that provides two pedals in one functionality for increased sonic versatility with both an FZ-1 inspired fuzz sound and a thicker, more modern fuzz tone. Its 3-knob control layout gives you intuitive control. The Attack knob controls the amount of fuzz. The Tone control lets you adjust the timbre from bright and raspy to warm and wooly and anywhere in between. Use the Level control to set the output volume; it can go way beyond unity gain when desired. The true bypass footswitch triggers the LED lights in the bugles in the Maestro logo when it’s on, so you’ll always know when the effect is active.I Love Pedals Day #9: Gibson Maestro

In the winter and spring of 2021, I found myself staring at a computer screen overloaded by tabs in my internet browser. Each of these tabs displayed the same processor (colloquially referred to as a “chip”) and the current stock quantities for each of a dozen suppliers. The lingering scarcity of this particular processor had been foreshadowed in other industries, and when I found myself noticing the depleting stock—with my curated lists of suppliers at the ready—I began ordering whatever I could get my hands on. Diligent or obsessive? You decide. Perhaps a bit of both, but the preparation certainly paid off when packages of the scarce processors started arriving at the workshop. You do not need to be a manufacturer to have a grasp on supply shortages, as they happen quite frequently in our modern world, even outside of a global pandemic. Often it is simply caused by overwhelming demand. On my hunt for processors, I was reminded of the scene in Jingle All the Way when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad are going to outlandish lengths to acquire the hottest holiday season toy, Turbo Man. Supply shortages can feel like that. (Remember, nobody wants Booster!)Global economics is by no means a strength of mine. I am more adept at shipping logistics. This often unappreciated system is made up of processes like FOB, Ex Works, ISF bonds, HTS codes, and customs. Now, before you feel compelled to save yourself from these abbreviations, I would like to happily promise that I am not going to be elaborating on any of that.The electronics industry has not gone unscathed by the shortages that are currently presenting themselves, most notably in the world of semiconductors, which are typically made with silicon or germanium. A substantial number of the world’s semiconductors are made by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), who are responsible for these tiny yet powerful components that OEM companies design their products around. Amongst these components lie some heavy hitters. Most notably for our industry are the SHARC and Blackfin processors made by Boston-area company Analog Devices. These, and other DSP chips, are at the core of many of our favorite pedals—pedals that simply could not exist as they do without them.We work amongst a brilliant, innovative group of artists, and, though our business cards may say “designer” or “engineer,” it can be easy to forget the art form behind the work.I’ve been wondering where this will lead our industry. We work amongst a brilliant, innovative group of artists, and, though our business cards may say “designer” or “engineer,” it can be easy to forget the art form behind the work. We may be tinkering with breadboards instead of shredding on stage, but in our wonderful little industry, we’re all musicians and/or music lovers. If you say engineer, it’s easy to invoke visions of a person going over blueprints for a building. If you just say artist, it may be equally easy to imagine a financially challenged person painting on a canvas in a studio apartment. Perhaps some of that stigma has dwindled over the years. I hope that is the case.Back to my wondering!Like other artists, we pedal manufacturers create new products and bring them to market. Supplier shortages have caused delays in our manufacturing, and I wonder how we will see companies pivot. Whether you have noticed it or not, we have seen it before—and we’ve had to come up with creative solutions. Let us take a certain shortage scenario and play out what could possibly happen. Say a pedal company makes a model with a specific knob, and the knob manufacturer cannot produce it for an extended period for some unforeseen reason. The pedal company might see this potential speed bump and pivot so that they can keep manufacturing that model. Change the finish color, substitute different knobs and, voilà, a limited edition is born.The semiconductor shortage has me wondering what we might see in the months to come. Maybe a bump in releases that are built around more commonly available components? Perhaps we will see companies institute waiting lists or batch releases that coincide with their ability to get ahold of the components they require? Regardless of outcome, my hat is off to the manufacturers traversing and adapting in this situation. A shortage of supplies is not a shortage of ideas.Now let’s talk about shipping logistics!

SEVENDUST has announced the second leg of its tour celebrating the 21st anniversary of its “Animosity” album. Tickets and VIP packages will go on sale this Friday, February 11 at Sevendust.com.

First leg (with TETRARCH and DEAD POET SOCIETY):

Mar. 04 – Oklahoma City – The Diamond Ballroom
Mar. 05 – Dallas, TX – House Of Blues
Mar. 07 – San Antonio, TX – The Aztec Theatre
Mar. 08 – Houston, TX – House Of Blues
Mar. 11 – San Diego, CA – SOMA
Mar. 12 – Sacramento, CA – Ace Of Spades
Mar. 13 – Santa Cruz, CA – The Catalyst
Mar. 15 – Anaheim, CA – House Of Blues
Mar. 18 – Denver, CO – The Oriental Theater
Mar. 19 – Denver, CO – The Oriental Theater
Mar. 20 – Wichita, KA – The Cotillion
Mar. 22 – Minneapolis, MN – Skyway Theatre
Mar. 23 – Chicago, IL – House Of Blues
Mar. 25 – Kansas City, MO – The Truman
Mar. 26 – St. Louis, MO – The Factory
Mar. 27 – Nashville, TN – Wildhorse Saloon

Second leg:

Apr. 29 – Grand Rapids, MI – 20 Monroe
Apr. 30 – Detroit, MI – The Fillmore
May 01 – Cleveland, OH – The Agora Theater
May 03 – Pittsburgh, PA – Roxian Theater
May 04 – Syracuse, NY – Sharkey’s
May 06 – Long Island, NY – The Paramount
May 07 – Hampton Beach, NH – Hampton Beach Casino
May 08 – Hartford, CT – The Webster Theater
May 10 – Harrisburg, PA – HMAC
May 11 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre Of The Living Arts
May 13 – Baltimore, MD – Rams Head Live
May 14 – Charlotte, NC – The Neighborhood Theatre
May 15 – Charlotte, NC – The Neighborhood Theatre
May 17 – Fayetteville, AR – George’s Majestic
May 18 – Little Rock, AR – Little Rock Music Hall
May 19 – Birmingham, AL – Iron City
May 20 – Daytona Beach, FL – Welcome To Rockville

SEVENDUST previously played all of “Animosity” at a January 2021 livestream event from Opav in Orlando, Florida. At the time, singer Lajon Witherspoon told Midwest Beatdown: “Oh my God. There’s some songs on [that album] that we’ve never played, I think. It’s gonna be fun to get back and do it, and also to play some of those songs we’ve never had the time to play, and to see each other again and to laugh with each other and look at each other, and start jamming and somebody’s back breaks or falls out, because we’re old now.

“I’m really looking forward to getting back and doing ‘Animosity’ and having a good time, and hopefully bringing some type of sense of weird normalcy in this world that we’re trying to navigate through during this pandemic,” he continued. “And I can’t believe it’s gonna be 20-something years since we recorded it. Oh my God.

“So many people have been asking for it, so that was another weird thing. It was, like, ‘We’ve gotta do this,'” Lajon added. “And I’ve kind of gone [back] and listened to the songs, and there were some really cool songs. And what a great time in our careers as young men growing up and just kind of learning about life and the industry and everything that was going on with it. It’s just really cool.”

SEVENDUST’s third album, “Animosity” was released in November 2001 through TVT Records. The disc peaked at No. 28 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in March 2002 for shipments in excess of half a million copies.

SEVENDUST’s 13th studio album, “Blood & Stone”, was released in October 2020 via Rise Records. The follow-up to 2018’s “All I See Is War” was once again tracked at Studio Barbarosa in Gotha, Florida with producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette, who has previously worked with ALTER BRIDGE and SLASH, among others.

? Second Leg – ON SALE FRIDAY?

Sevendust will perform their 3rd album ANIMOSITY front to back plus a few other…

Posted by Sevendust on Wednesday, February 9, 2022