“Deafening Silence”
The new Embreach EP will be released on Monday, August 11th. Stay tuned and spread the word! 
Track listing:
- Red Serenade
- The Residue
- Shadow’s Song
- In Your Wake
-
Recent Comments
zattu on Taming the beast
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Having escaped from the studio a few weeks back, things have kinda slowed down for us. But no need to worry, this is just the calm before the storm
After listening to the mastered CD for a while now, we think it’s a winner: no further adjustments needed, everything sounds great in the first version already! With the CD 100% finished, we’ve also started to work on our new website. Expect more content, a much better looking interface and a bunch of cool extras!
As for the EP’s artwork: last week was all about trying to force-feed our visions to our cover artist and getting first sketches back from her 
This week, the project’s on hold since she’s on vacation, but once she gets back we’ll probably be able to finish the artwork during next week. Still a lot of small challenges to tackle!
Stay tuned!
Jari / Embreach
We’ve approached a couple of artists we’ve come across on the internets, asking whether they’d be interested in working on the cover art for the EP with us. Things looks pretty promising, hopefully we can find an artist to work with this week, still waiting for a response from a few people.
The finalized, mastered version of the EP is still sounding great! Can’t wait to release it to everybody out there. Soon!
Anxiously,
Jari / Embreach
We spent 6 hours at Finnvox on Friday evening, and the EP is now mastered! It’s sounding great through our home and car stereos, ghettoblasters, ipods and what-have-yous. Listening to “Her Grace” and our new EP side-by-side, Minerva (the mastering wiz) remarked that it was hard for her to believe they were from the same band. I guess that’s a good thing
Now that the CD is mastered, we’ll be working hard to finish the artwork and our new website. Stay tuned for more updates during next week!
Jari / Embreach
We’re heading to Finnvox studios tonight to master our new EP. We chose to work with Minerva Pappi again since she did a great job mastering “Her Grace”. So, in only a few hours we’ll have the finished master copy of the CD in our hands!
Last time we actually had some problems with the first mastered version of the CD, since the actual recording lacked balls and we tried to enhance the low end while mastering – which _really_ didn’t work and ended up causing a lot of hum in the low frequencies. Our bad! You can’t build a Rolls Royce out of cupcakes in the mastering phase alone: the original mix’s gotta have balls to boot. Then you can actually tame them a bit while mastering. Luckily, the new record is very, very tight playing-wise compared to our previous efforts, and sounds nice’n'tight already.
After coming home from the studio, we’ve exchanged a lot emails within the band trying to make up our minds about the names for the songs and the EP itself, somehow trying to capture the essence of the album in the names as well. There are recurring themes in the lyrics we’ve tried to distill into words, and our discussions have spurred quite a bunch of suggestions. It’s a team effort, so while Sami wrote most of the lyrics, everybody’s throwing around ideas as to what the pieces should be called. You’ll get to hear what we decided to go with real-soon-now
Jari / Embreach
Sitting at home, drinking some red wine, listening to the finished songs. They sound great!
- Jari
We’re almost done with mixing the songs, the last one is on the way. Then, some small and quick fixes for all of the songs and we should be done on schedule, i.e. tonight. The basic mixes sound great! You’ll definitely hear a difference to our previous release. The vocals are clearer, and the soundscapes are pretty diverse at times.
We did some last-minute EQ’ing to the rhythm guitar tracks since they sounded a bit harsh out of the band context (e.g. in some opening riffs played by guitars only), especially with headphones. Now they’re a bit smoother, with some of the 5150’s high end toned down. Not my favorite amp, but we managed to get a great sound from it for this record!
The record will be mastered on Friday, and we’ll also get busy with the artwork this week. Expect a grand release date announcement real soon now!
Laterzzz,
Jari / Embreach
After a well-deserved break, we’re back at the studio. We finished acoustic guitars and solos late Saturday night (or early Sunday morning) and headed back to Helsinki barely awake, trying to keep company to Edu who was behind the wheel. Having slept most of yesterday myself, we just drove back to Hämeenlinna with Sami this morning. Edu and Jake came here last night already and listened to the tracks making notes on what’s missing and what needs to be fixed.
Janne started mixing the songs early this morning and we’ve been mostly staying out of his way, since the first step is to clean up the drum tracks, which is mostly mechanical work and best done without a bunch of monkeys chattering in the background
Apart from two small fixes to lead guitar tracks, from this point on it’s all about making the record sound like the massive opus it is in our heads. Most of the music we’ve written is pretty straightforward in the sense that there’s only two rhythm guitars (often playing the same thing), bass, drums and vocals. But then there are sections that have grown to quite epic proportions, with many different vocal things and a “choir” of guitars going on at the same time. Let’s see how they turn out in the final mix!
Exciting times,
Jari / Embreach
I haven’t had the time to write about Friday, but I’m going to take that time now. We finished all the vocals and it was a pretty heavy day since I was singing and growling for 8 hours straight. That’s a lot of singing by any measure and the fact that more than half of it was growling makes it even tougher. On the previous days I was trying to keep the sessions fairly short (max. 3 hours) to make sure I don’t tire my voice out. Friday was pretty much the last day possible to do singing so I just had to keep singing until everything is done. And now everything is done and sounds great!
After the 8 hour session I was really tired and I had a hard time concentrating properly, but my voice was still fine. I even added a clean harmony as the last thing. It’s pretty awesome to notice that you haven’t totally worn out your voice even though you’ve been using it for a full day.
We didn’t run into any really problematic parts. Some minor issues with tune (that you can hear on the clip below;)), which were fixed fairly quickly. Janne has a very accurate ear, which is, of course, very important.
I remember that in previous studio sessions I’ve had some parts which I just haven’t been able to sing and we’ve been stuck there for quite a while until I managed to nail them. This time we had none of that. Even the most difficult piece, a very high full distortion overdrive, was done in less than 10 attempts.
Here’s a few tips that I’m mostly writing down for myself, but if you can benefit from them, all the better. Some of it is self-evident, but it’s always to good to write things down, it just makes things clearer.
- If you’re out of pitch, first, don’t change anything and try again a few times. It may be that it’s just a small inaccuracy that will fix itself.
- If you’re high (in pitch, I mean), relax. Probably the best advice I’ve ever received: Less is more. Maybe try singing the problematic part a bit softer. I can hardly ever fix a note by thinking “I’m going to sing this just a tiny bit lower now.”
- Another good trick is to have someone play the problematic notes on a keyboard while you sing. This way you can easily check your tune in relation to the keyboard.
- Slightly slip off the other side of the headphones so you can hear your voice without it going through the equipment. This will help you hear more accurately.
- Remember that you have to do more than just stay in tune. If it’s in tune, but it sounds like shit, do it again until you’ve got it in tune and with the right feeling to it.
- Auto-tuning is cheating
- Basic stuff: sleep well, drink a lot of water, keep your head together, relax, have short breaks, have a guitarist give you a massage at the end of the day (it’s a good warm-up for their fingers;))
Now we’re all waiting eagerly for Monday when we start mixing. Anyway, a small break from the studio will do good. It’s good to get some distance.
Here’s some more photos and a few clips:
-Sami / Embreach
