Day at the tortoise races

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

EP mastered; artwork next

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

Master! Master!

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

Quick status update

Bass tracks are done! Great job from Jaakko, considering this was his first time in a studio ever. Over half of the clean vocals are done, and we are currently recording growls for one of the tracks as the day draws to a close. Plenty of guitar tracks to do still, all the solos and most of the acoustic stuff etc. Looks like we’ll have to put in one extra day during the weekend, although we were planning on completing all recordings this week to be able to mix the album on Monday and Tuesday next week. If all goes well, we’ll be mastering the record on Friday next week! That should keep us right on track for a release date real soon now!

The stuff we have finished is absolutely killer. Everything is top-notch, from Jake’s drums to Sami’s vocals to Jaakko’s bass lines. Hopefully the guitar tracks won’t be bad either I actually recorded an acoustic guitar solo for one of the songs just today, a nice little touch.

I’m le tired now, but have to keep on going for a while still. Found a nice little Thai restaurant here in Hämeenlinna, the food and a couple of beers is making us a little drowsy right now.

Stay tuned.
- Jari / Embreach