Some Kind of an Introduction

The pre-diary babbling:

Yes, the title is an actual reference to Metallica. Go ahead and sue me.

...now that think of it, Lars Ulrich probably would sue me if he were reading this.

Anyway, I thought I'd write a proper opening text about myself and why I'm writing this diary like thing of mine, but I believe you will get all the necessary information from reading the blog description. If you can't however, then you probably can't read in the first place and none of this really matters.

Well yes, I am a master of photoshopping as well.

 

So, we hit the studio with Sepulchral Curse on the last weekend of February to record a brand new EP. Diverging from our previous efforts which were more or less thematic wholes, this new one is a collection of songs working in their independent folds. The reason for this arrangement is quite simple; the EP is actually a cluster of album leftovers and a one, sad and lonely cover song (which is a rather damn good piece of old school death metal). Despite the term I just used to describe the songs, all of them are excellent compositions. If they truly were some authentic garbage we would've thrown them away, not bothering to waste any of our mental or financial resources at all. Why and wherefore we dropped them is because they didn't fit in both musically and thematically.

While I really can't reveal the narrative of our upcoming full-length, I can say something about the songs on the EP and what to expect from our second album. While my own purpose was, and still is, to write somewhat more compact tracks with fewer individual parts than nearly twenty, my song on the EP is a perfect portrait when I can't hold myself at all and the outcome is an overly progressive chunk of black death metal that would make our band members (myself included) rip their faces off in frustration when practicing the song.

This time we had two songs from Jaakko on aboard, which was extremely welcomed addition as his last works were dating back from the At the Onset EP. The first track of his was dropped out from our debut as the overall nature was too much rock'n'roll and not enough death metal. I remember being surprisingly butthurt about ditching the mentioned song back then, yet nowadays I see why the other members were right about the issue. Still, I'm more than glad to record and publish the song now! While the other Jaakko's song could be on the second album by its musical merits, we decided to put it on the EP as Jaakko wanted to write lyrics of his own and since I've taken the dictatorship over the texts on full-lengths (as for now that is), the situation was rather self-explanatory.

The actual diary:

As mentioned above we booked a whole weekend to record the drums, guitars and bass at the... erm... well, Tomi Uusitupa's studios. Naturally, we started with the drums and oh boy I can tell that they sounded HUGE just from the start. Maybe the fact that the shells themselves were actually quite hefty (13", 16" and 18" toms, 24" bass drum respectively) has something to do with it, but buying some quality Evans drumheads didn't hurt either. This time we had a legitimate drum tech tagging along the sessions as well, who actually knew how the drums should be tuned, compared to the batshit crazy monkey who thinks the only way to handle percussive instruments is to smash them like Hulk on stimulants. And with that monkey reference I was talking about myself.

The Workstation 9000 TM

The monkey and his master.

I was hoping to discuss more about the miking and so on but unfortunately I had some more dire things at hand, like playing the damn drums for example. Luckily we have these smartphones nowadays so I could message Tomi whenever I want to instead of whining about it in a blog.

My performance was actually quite good, hundreds of times better compared to the debut album at least, and judging by the people's reactions in the control room they were satisfied as well. The other Jaakko's song, under the working title Rannelepo, was causing some trouble as I'm not that used to play midtempo triplet bass drums even though I've played drums about 15 years already. I've only two gears; fast and faster. Additionally the last song to finish was a shit show to complete as I had about 4-5 of sleep the night before, meaning I was running out of energy too early. Having fun with the sleep disorders and deprivation, eh?

The second day was dedicated to guitars. The same problem occurred considering the much hoped talk on the guitar production, as I was too busy drinking dozens of cups of coffee while Tomi was keeping himself occupied with the guitar amps. Man has to have some priorities, right? To be honest I don't have much clear memories from the second day as the lack of good sleep was still hindering my brain functions. All I know is that the guitar sound was nearly perfect even before adding any EQ and compression. Me and Kari decided to leave early as we both wanted to spend some time with our families. So metal, so much rock attitude, wow.

You can almost smell the raw, bestial energy caught in the photo.

The third and final day was for the bass lines as the smartest of you could probably guess it by now. What you couldn't figure out however, is that I wasn't even at the studio that day! But since Tomi has already proved himself as a badass studio wizard and I was counting on Niilas carry his duties out without any major complications, I thought I could give myself a full day off of studio. Tomi managed to send the tracks with edited bass' already on the same evening to confirm that my forethought was quite right. Damn it feels good when the things go on as planned.

So, what's next? I'm supposed to record Kari's vocals in a couple of weeks as well as my own vocal performances at my home studio, Sounds From Below. I expect those sessions will go smoothly as ever before. Additionally I'll do some minor synth arrangements to widen our musical soundscape and play some extra percussions to emphasize some rhythmic elements. If these experimentations are to succeed we will use them in our repertoire in the future as well.

More on that later, cheers!