it's been quite a while since the last update.. In this timespan, we've managed to switch our rehearsal place/make-believe studio to a much better one and get the recordings to the post-production phase.
This actually means that the bass tracks, vocals and lead guitars are done! Now all that's left is the easy part of giving the stuff to someone for mixing, right? Well, almost. You see, we didn't do the tracking the conventional way..
Instead, we opted to record a shitload of takes of every riff and vocal track and thought that we'd go through them in the post-prod stage and pick the best takes. This has proved to be quite time-consuming way of handling the recordings - and we'll probably do this never again, heh - but all in all the stuff that we've managed to get is pretty awesome, I'd say.
And what's even better, we've decided to try out the mixing ourselves so this is going to be a real DIY learn-while-you-do process. Who knows, we might even do even the cover art on our own!
And about the recordings themselves.. Well, the bass tracks took us only a few hours to record and everything went really smoothly there.
Somehow this always seems to happen when recording basses (at least in my experience). Some might say that it's the bass tracks themselves that are easy that anyone could play them, but I think it's just that the bass players themselves seem to be the hard-working guys that actually even manage to rehearse before recording.
The vocals took a bit longer and were done mainly in two days (plus some bonus takes a bit later). I've never been 100% happy with the way my vocals have been in previous recordings, so I decided to try out a bit unorthodox way of handling the vocal recordings this time around.
Well, not entirely like this but getting close.
The trick this time was that there wasn't any kind of vocal "booth" setup or anything like that, just simply me and my trusty Beta 58 mic (with our bass meister Ari overseeing the takes). This is the way I handle things live and I thought that to capture that "live" feeling in the vocals as well, I'd have to sing like I usually do and am used to in rehearsals or live.
The problem is that we had insufficient monitoring at the time and there were some takes that were rendered unusable since I tend to compensate my shouting by moving the mic further and closer as I shout and scream - and Ari wasn't able to hear the problem this caused in some takes right from the bat since we had that slight monitoring problem.
I am actually currently in the process of picking out the best takes from the vocal tracks (and of course our main engineering dude Juuso already did quite a lot work on this) and there are good takes to get the stuff to work, but this is just another issue that set us back a bit.
OK! So when the vocals were done, we turned to the lead guitars. This was a pretty quick process as well, we just lured Niko and Tapio to the rehearsal room, setup the mics and let them go at it by themselves. Recording lead guitars is sensitive work, they prefer to do their work at peace so I don't even have any pictures about this - so here's a pic of Ari drinking beer and smoking a cigarette.
So here it was in a nutshell - part III of the still-continuing saga of making of The Carrion King.
Hopefully the next update won't take as long, since I guess we seem to be actually nearing completion on this one!
Until then, be seeing you!
- Teemu
