Rhythm guitars done

Woohoo! Finished the last bunch of rhythm tracks late last night. We actually re-did most of the guitar parts in the pretty epic track that’ll be the last track on the album. It’s a slightly slower song, but has some tight parts that are actually harder to play right than many of the faster riffs. Especially one of the really heavy riffs was kinda rushed for both guitars in the first take, slightly ahead of the beat, so we simply turned up the metronome and played it really nice and tight. Everything flowed nicely last night, and we also ended re-doing the chorus parts for both guitars: when we first recorded them, we were kinda struggling to get both guitars to sound both tight and 100% in tune (some big chords there, they can easily sound out of tune on an electric if you’re not careful) Last night, we nailed them down on first (well, re-)takes!

Having finished the rhythm stuff, we had a little live jam session in the studio with Jake on piano and me on acoustic, mostly improvising around a theme we have planned for the outro of the last song, and thus the whole promo – some of it may even make the final cut Just jamming around and having a couple of glasses of red helped bring our stress levels down nicely, and today we’re ready ad eager to fill in the blanks: first the remaining acoustics, and then the leads and solos.

We should be finished tonight!

Jari / Embreach

An even quicker status update

All vocals done. All rhythm guitars done save for one chorus. Tomorrow’s the day for acoustics and solos, i.e. the fun stuff, hopefully Looks like we’ll get everything done by Tuesday and have a the shit mastered on Friday, already booked a session at Finnvox. Feeling relieved! The new songs kick so much ass!

Stay tuned,
Jari / Embreach

Siso for the win

Recorded some geetars last night. Through Edu’s Krank first, but listening back to the tracks today, the sound was a bit too harsh for our purposes. We tried the Krank through 2 different cabinets (the Mesa in this pic and a Marshall 4×12″) but couldn’t find the sound we wanted. This morning we scratched our heads for a while and ended up switching to the Peavey 5150 head (“Siso”) and the Marshall cab with three different mics (Sennheiser 441 & 421 as well as a Shure 57) picking up the goods. The sound turned out great! Modern and clear. Think Soilwork’s Figure Number Five.

Jaakko’s currently getting geared up for recording the bass tracks. At first, he’ll probably be going direct to the mixer, with sounds dialed in from the computer. Jaakko has brought his brand new Gallien-Krueger head along as well, let’s see what will get us the best sound.

On this record, we’ll be recording acoustic guitars for the first time in Embreach history. On our two previous promos, there have been some clean electric guitars but nothing acoustic. We just set up the mic and should be ready to add some acoustic touch to the songs. My Yamaha had a nasty spike in the middle frequencies when miked so we ended up using the Charvel acoustic found here at the studio. Luckily, it was already tuned to D standard which is the tuning we’ll be playing the acoustic parts in.

In addition to the instrument section, everything has also been set up for recording Sami’s vocals. Must say, the couple of verses he just sang as a test sounded GREAT!

From the sound department,
Jari / Embreach