So, it has come to this. Recording of the six-stringed instruments on which our music is 95% based on. No wonder yours truly (me; Teemu, the incoherent vocalist, blogger and all-around asshole wannabe-engineer/overseer) is a somewhat a nitpicker during this phase, especially when quite a lot of these riffs are my rotten babies.
The general idea - at least in my head, this blog may or may not represent the views of the band as whole - was to get some real 'playing live' feeling in the guitar tracks. This basically meaning the following: if the "feeling's good" and the take is long and a continuous one with some slight mistakes, we will gladly put that on record instead of a take where everything is 100% perfect, but it's all just pieced together from a lot of different takes. Get it?
If you don't, by all means go and listen to those golden age Slayer records (in my book, Reign In Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss) and check out the abundant liveliness of the guitar p/slaying. If you still don't get it, just go ahead and listen to War Ensemble's intro riff.
The riff in question is not in any way sloppy, but it has the sense of just barely staying in one piece, which is a big part of the magic that's Thrash Metal for me. I hope we have captured at least a tiny amount of that magical stuff in the recording process we've done here..
But anyway, enough of this pseudo-philosophical ranting. Here are some videos that were taken during these recording sessions that took place on Sunday 18th April (Tapio) and Sunday 2nd May (Niko).
Tapio playing
Juuso acting silly and Niko playing
All in all, these two hard sessions went really well. It's always a bit difficult situation to fully reach one's potential in such short notice, but I personally do think that we've got something quite special on our hands when the whole thing's done and a lot of thanks go to these six-string fellows that took care of their duties without much bickering or fistfights.
You might also be wondering how we're doing all of this. Well, in the murky depths of our foul-smelling rehearsal hole, our drummer Juuso is doing the body of the technical work on this recording. This means not only pushing the rec button while we record, but patching the takes together and all-around taking care of business on the technical side, setting up mics, creating the raw mixes etc..
The man even seems to enjoy all of this.Next time, we'll probably be some of the last fixes and lead guitar work that was left from last time. Hopefully we'll be able to record some juicy bass tracks as well.
But let's get back to that when the time's right, oh boy oh boy!
Be seeing you,
Teemu
PS.
We've just released some prettttty cool promo photos courtesy of Lukas Pearsall on our MySpace and our official website should soon follow. Check 'em out!
PPS.
We've also released two live recordings from our Kouvola gig earlier this spring at our MySpace, and Mikseri.net should soon follow! Ain't that just AWESOME!
