For lots of reasons, I got into doing instrumentals in the 90s and found a new love, but I always wanted to go back to a vocal band, too. Over the last two years, I've been talking about the 5th album having vocals, but I've finally decided that Randy Ellefson will continue to be an instrumental artist while the vocal album will now be the debut album by Z-Order, a new band.

The style of Z-Order's songs is a bit different, being more aggressive and in minor keys, whereas the instrumentals are mostly upbeat, major key songs. That said, one of the darker instrumental guitar songs is on Z-Order's debut.

But the biggest reason is that I don't want to confuse everyone but alternating releases with and without vocals under the name Randy Ellefson, always trying to explain which album has a singer and which doesn't. This year I've already been working on both Z-Order's debut and the next instrumental album and it's become hard to distinguish them for people, so I've been avoiding saying anything about the latter in official news while tweeting about it all the time.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be fleshing out the Z-Order website and altering much of what is here if it's referring to what is now that band. This means a new bio here and removing pictures of Z-Order's band members, for example. So much to do but I'm excited about 2012 - and I hope you are, too!