Tombstone Almanac

Things started happening for Marty Stauffer and Mike Armstrong of Tombstone Almanac back in 2005. They met at a party, and jammed together that night for the first time. " It was amazing," Marty said of that night. "Mike had brought a guitar to the party to play a couple of songs he'd written, and I happened to be there. So when Mike was getting ready to play, the host of the party tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned around, he pushed a guitar into my hands and said "You're playing, too." We were pretty tentative for about ten seconds, and the next thing we knew, we were BURNING, dude. We threw riffs at each other as fast as we could for an hour, without letting up for a second." Marty and Mike knew they had to do something with this; TOMBSTONE ALMANAC is the result.
With diverse musical backgrounds- Marty rooted in Blues-Based heavy rock, and Mike bringing a very acoustic Southern-rock flavor to the table, at first it seemed that they were too many musical worlds apart; that the styles and influences would prove difficult, if not impossible, to merge into a coherent sound. The first thing Marty did was buy an Acoustic guitar. "I didn't even own one," Marty explained. "I was very much a Les Paul-into-Marshall stack kinda player." Mike remembers, "We weren't sure it would work, stylistically. I'd written some nice Acoustic ballads, and here comes Marty, bashing them over the head with a ton of distortion. So he shows up one day with a new Epiphone Hummingbird, and I showed up with a Fender Strat- brilliant minds thinking alike!"
Writing songs and recording an album were always the number one priority for the core members of Tombstone Almanac. They began recording demos on an old 4-track tape machine, and began assembling the infrastructure for what was to become their recording studio. Mike had a ProTools rig, and Marty had a few guitars, but it was clear they needed more equipment if they were going to do an album on their own terms. So "Gear Aquisition Syndrome" took over- amps, mics, boards, signal processors, more guitars, sound treatment for the room, everything. The band's sound, meanwhile, had become fully cohesive, and totally unique. Described by a fan as "Black Sabbath crashing into Lynyrd Skynyrd", it's a sound all their own, and they love it. "We never wrote music for anyone other than ourselves, really," Marty says during a break in mixing the new album. "Mike and I just wrote and played what felt right to us. It's what we'd always wanted to do: self-produce our own music without answering to anyone."
In 2008, the band scored the services of Mike Barz, probably the most insane drummer either Mike or Marty ever heard. After a revolving door of Bass players, Nick Marotta joined the band, and the final lineup and band chemistry was complete.