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

Drum heads they are a-breakin’

Last night’s results: drums done for 2 songs (save for little fixups) and almost done for one more: the bottom snare head broke in the middle of recording, so the sound went sour gradually, took a while before we noticed. No we have to do some retakes. Jake also recorded drums for the remaining song (with the highest tempo and craziest double bass stuff), but it proved to be a little too much after a looong day of work. Now he’s hard at working at re-doing the song from the top. Must say, the drums sound awesome! They have a _lot_ of punch and low end, can’t wait to hear them with the whole band playing.

Next up, we’ll be working on finding the perfect rhythm guitar sounds for the album. We have a general idea of what we want, but we’re no experts with recorded guitar sounds, so we have a playlist of reference tracks at hand if needed. We’ll probably use Edu’s trustworthy Jackson RR for the rhythm tracks. The sound will hopefully be huge and modern, yet still organic, with not too much but just the right amount of distortion to make things roar and still be distinctive. Although there are plenty of killer death metal -style riffs in the new songs, there’s also guitar stuff with lots of different dimensions and big chords, so we won’t just crank the amp up and boost it to high heavens. Let’s see what we come up with!

Jaakko the bass guy is joining us today, and we’ll have to whole group together for the next 2 days. Should be a lot of fun. An extra pair of ears is always beneficial.

Jari / Embreach