About

Aspect is:
Dan Heerdt (keyboards, lead & backing vocals, drums, bass, and guitars)

 
Aspect represents the evolution of songwriter and musician Dan Heerdt.  Fascinated and drawn to music from childhood, Dan learned to play keyboards on on old Hammond organ and Kimball piano around age 9.  From there
he moved to the drums at 13, preferring them to piano since there was so much more energy involved.  The following year he (drums and lead vocals) and friend Matt (guitar) decided to form a band.  They recruited two others:  Steve (bass) and Chris (guitar) and called the band Animal Instinct, as stolen directly from the Def Leppard autobiography.

Animal Instinct lasted throughout high school, but was hardly a success.  The band had no clear focus or direction.  Eventually Chris left and was replaced by Dave on lead guitar.  The four members worked on creating a more unified sound for the band, emulating classic, high-energy rock groups like Journey, Night Ranger, Van Halen, and Boston rather than following any of the more popular and mainstream “grunge” music of the time.  At this point the band began to gel as the band members worked on not only polishing their abilities as musicians, but began to try writing and recording original songs on cassette based four tracks.  It was also during this time that Dan began to watch and imitate the guitar players, shakily teaching himself to play guitar and bass with limited results.

As Dan and Dave’s playing and writing ability increased, they separated from the other members and formed their own band, Flashpoint.  Together they wrote well over 40 songs and recorded six albums!  Four of them were studio recordings (Ignition, Ring of Fire, Chain Reaction, and Fight Fire with Fire) and two were “live” albums (demos with a crowd sound tricked in to mask the low quality of the recordings).  During this time, Dan began to concentrate on piano again, focusing intently on music theory and song arranging and structure.

As his knowledge of music increased, his influences shifted to the more “progressive” sounds of Marillion or Dream Theater and also to the melodic, classical, but decidedly heavier and more aggressive music of bands like Helloween and Gamma Ray.  He also took on the role of producer and engineer for the band, experimenting constantly with new recording techniques in what usually proved futile attempts to get a pro sound.  By the recording of Fight Fire with Fire, the band has moved to the relatively new digital hard disk recording to create an album which represented both their most complex writing and sonic quality.

Most notable about Fight Fire with Fire, however, was that just before going into production Dave moved out of state.  Not wanting the great material to go to waste, Dan decided to record the album with himself playing and singing all the parts himself.  The album took about eight round-the-clock days to record and another three to mix.  It was during these two weeks that the idea for Aspect was conceived.

Realizing that Dave’s departure meant an opportunity to record the many songs written but shelved due to sounding more like his more recent influences than the classic rock sound of Flashpoint, Dan began a crash course to teach himself guitar beyond the sketchy and simple chord progressions he had known previously.  During this two year period, many more songs were written and the previously fictitious “Bulldog Studios” was finally pieced together a little at time.  Possessing a full arsenal of musical instruments and recording equipment, the time was right to begin recording.

The project needed a name.  Not wanting to follow the ego trends of most artists by simply naming the album after himself, the name Aspect was chosen to represent the many different roles Dan would play in the production of the album.  It was completed in February of 2006 and was well recevied by the 4 people who heard it.

The future is open and hopeful for Aspect.  Pre-production is underway for the second album, “Galaxy Prisoner.”  Much of a third and even fourth album have already been written as well and should go into production within a much quicker time frame than the second one did.