Rise of the Machines

 

Synths, Day 1:

 

Due to my certain underlying conditions considering my sleep, doing night shifts has been a total pain in the ass for the past six months or so. During working at night time and especially after it, I'm experiencing mood swings, anxiety, breathing difficulties, exhaustion and arrhythmia. Sounds fun, right? Well, this Tuesday after just one night shift I could hardly sleep at all and it felt like I had a hangover of the century with a migraine so bad I was ready to shoot my head off. After calling to work not being in any kind of condition to continue the rest of the nights, I had the worst arrhythmia I've ever experienced and I almost fainted out two times. While my wife was at work herself I was lucky enough to have Kari to take me to the emergency (we are practically neighbors down here at the countryside). Gladly I was taken in and under treatment almost immediately.

After two hours in electrocardiogram monitoring and checking some basic blood values, I was feeling fine and ready to go home. The doctor told me to take a good rest for the end of the week, sleep as much as I could and avoid any physical stress. Yeah, I could do that, no problem! Come this Wednesday and I thought it would be a marvelous idea to do some work on our front yard, smashing and breaking ice with a hammer and an iron bar like a maniac before recording some synths for Sepulchral Curse. Well guess what, I almost fainted again. Absolutely fucking genius. One could think that nearly collapsing down would somehow hinder my urges to play and record anything and even though that would've been the sensible thing to do, I still decided to do some studio work the very same day. Just couple of pills of beta blockers and we are ready to go.

Some time earlier I was fishing for any guidelines from my band mates to know what kind of arrangements they'd like to hear. I got some rather vague comments telling not to add any new melodies or doubling the existing ones (bummer), and not to play anything too dominant or outright crazy (double bummer). With these instructions I got practically two workable options; pads supporting the chord progressions and drones giving some additional flavour. I had already planned to play everything I could as MIDI, since doing any changes on the sound choices or arrangements would be a hell lot of easier and faster to do, than fooling around with my analogue Korg. Besides that I wouldn't need to use any of my effect pedals, as using them at this point of production would just complicate the whole mixing process and it is something we don't want to happen. Don't do drugs kids, do virtual synthesizers instead.

I started with Rannelepo, and for the intro and choruses I used some eerie and even semi ambient-ish string emulations (I spent almost three hours to find the perfect one from my sound libraries), giving the song rather Nightside Eclipse-era Emperor vibes. Because the guitars had so much going on I played mostly fifths, so the song wouldn't sound too crowded. At first some of our members weren't that keen on my arrangements, as they felt they made the song too mellow and even featherweight. As a grown-up man with a fully matured personality I stated we should forget the whole thing and ditch all the ideas about any album extras whatsoever. Because that is the way the sensible, adult people act. I told them if any of us would have any doubts on any synths and what not, we should discard and purge them immediately. Basically (and luckily) I was told to chill the fuck out and think the matter over later, which I'm more than happy with now to be honest. After a couple of days I returned to the song and lowered the synths by an octave and it sounded a hundred times bigger, darker and overall better than the previous version. What made me even happier was the collective, positive reaction to the changes, making me even more enthusiastic and confident than before.

 

Well of course Emperor, Vangelis and death metal will fit together perfectly.

As mentioned in the earlier post I told that Jaakko wrote the lyrics for Rannelepo and this time he provided us a text inspired by some Cimmerian barbarism, which admittedly is a fine theme but something I could never write about myself. The song's story gave me an idea to implement a field recording track of a strong gust of wind to underline and even dramatize the lyrics. By chance I had this top quality wind track on my hard drive I recorded some years ago. But alas, it sounded like shit no matter what kind of EQing or reverb I used. It just sounded too... warm and real, which is a rather absurd statement, but still. To my surprise I found a wind sample from Native Instruments' Absynth's library that sounded absolutely perfect. It sounded cold, ill-minded and cruel just as I wanted it to be. Again, don't do drugs kids, do virtual synthesizers instead.

 

Synths, Day 2 - The Revenge:

 

After being completely fatigued and drained by a 26 hour Twilight Imperium game, the best yet most exhausting board game there is, I needed a couple of days just to get my shit together to even think about recording anything. Finally, I started to work with Bläkrok, the debut album dropout and the most rock'n'roll song in our catalogue. Hell, even the structure is screaming for Hellacopters and The Hives with its pop music-like design. Yes, I might be exaggerating a little bit but I'm not that far from the truth after all.

As the choruses were sounding huge already and I wanted to avoid being that guy who always pumps the choruses up anyway, I wanted to boost the middle sections and solo slots of the song a bit. Due to the nature of the composition I tried out various organ sounds for an hour just to come to the conclusion that all of them sounded ridiculous and weak. I'm actually pretty sure that organs are not meant to be used in extreme metal at all, funeral doom being an exception. Anyway, after weighing my options I went full Emperor once again with those otherworldly string pads. If those Norwegians ever decide to make a new album with Emperor, I volunteer as their keyboardist. Ihsahn, take notes!

Finally, I went even more to the deep end of the 90's melodic black metal sound scape by adding... yes, orchestral hits (thank you Finntroll for reminding these exist)! In all of their wackiness they can sound really good and effective when used scarcely and in absolutely right places. In this case less is more, despite what a certain overweighted narcissist of a guitar player might say. When I finished the first version of Bläkrok I noticed there was a load of irritating noise in the same section with the orc hits. At first I had no idea what was going on, but after inspecting the waveform of the synths, I found out that there was an insane amount of decay and release in the orc hits, manifesting as this wall of odd industrial buzzing. Praised be Loki for VST's and intuitive work flow, as the problem was fixed in under a minute.

Damn I love recording.