19th of January 2018 – First day of actual recording
Location: Deerhouse Studio, Tampere, Finland
Myself and mr. Pulkkinen set up everything yesterday; I changed all the tom heads for fresh ones, added a 6th tom to the set, which I’ve wanted to do for a while, tuned everything, miked everything and so on.
We ran into a couple technical issues with getting all the recording gear communicating which each other, and had to wait for a couple more mics to arrive, courtesy of sir Henri Virsell (Manzana guitarist, all-around sound guy, master of boogie), so no time for recording yet.
Today I arrived at almost exactly 4 p.m., mr. Pulkkinen also briefly swung by. We checked everything again, everything was still working, and after he left, I tweaked a couple small tuning things and got to work.
I decided to start with “Mindcaptives”, which is an almost 12 minutes long prog epic. I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night, so I figured I’d fuck myself even more. “Ei anneta siimaa.”
If I’m recording myself, I usually don’t really rehearse the material beforehand. I only listen to it, maybe find the most difficult parts and figure those out a little bit. I enjoy coming in kinda fresh, recording almost part by part and being creative while recording, I’ve found this way works well for me.
Mindcaptives took about 4 hours of work (including a quick food break in the middle) and a lot of energy, but I think I came up with some pretty cool stuff. I took a little bit of video of some quirky shit in the middle.
The second song I attacked was titled “Vengeance”. A slightly more hectic one. I replenished myself with a whey protein shake.
I decided to try a Mangini-esque hummingbird hi-hat action on the intro, and I’m personally really liking it.
Mostly smooth sailing, until the fast middle part, where I actually got to do some blast beats. I love me some blast beats.
I got through this one in a little over an hour.
More tomorrow!