So, as that one picture in the Facebook showed, we’ve been mixing, mixing and then again, mixing. We’ve had two separate sessions, one with Matti A and one with Harri. There’s around 140 tracks in the session currently and album having around 70min of music, so it’s been a quite hard work to mix it. Using the whole spring has been worthwhile since this album absolutely sounds best for far. And Harri has been busy recording solos as well as Matti P too.

Next step: we’re starting to search for publisher for this epic. So watch out metal labels: you’ll be getting unnecessary long email shortly 🙂

So, we’ve spend our autumn (yes, it seems like we’re stuck in everlasting autumn here in southern Finland) by recording vocals, acoustic guitars and mixing the album, hooray. Usually, when we have reached the point where Harri has to grab the acoustic guitar to his hands, that has meant we’re pretty close to finish line…but not this time, sorry 😀

What is there still eft to do then one might ask… Well, solos, for starters, small polishing round for some lead vocals, a lot on background vocals, perhaps more keyboards and layers and layers of symphonic stuff, propably 🙂 Yeah, and of course we need to find someone to release this bundle of ProgPower.

That being said, we start contacting labels earliest at springtime… So lease be patient and check for news time to time. I know, we have revealed only bits and pieces of the album and not a lot of details nor concrete blocks of songs or sampler or anything… But that’s because we’ve done so in the past and this time we’re doing things bit differently, so stay tuned. And meanwhile, enjoy this clip of Harri playing his first ever (semi)acoustic song of Ultimatium

So, the summer went by, we mostly enjoyed the vacations and there was little progress. Good news is that we’re now back in work and this massive piece of work is slowly moving forwards. Matti A popped by and recorded some leads and background vocals, like this:

It’s been a while, again, since out latest post. What we’ve been up to? Harri is (still) finishing guitars, now actively doing acoutics and clean guitars. Meanwhile Petteri got his bass tracks done and here’s what he has to say:

Hi Ultimatium-people!

I’ve been honoured to be a part of next upcoming Ultimatium release. My old time friend Matti with whom I had played in DIO tribute band Angry Machines contacted me on summer 2018 and asked if I was intrested to play Bass for the next album Ultimatium had been working with. I’ ve been Ultimatium fan and it was an easy decision for me. Hell yeah!

Due to time schedules and location these recordings decided to do in my homestudio using an easy and simple setup (of course for bass players 🤓).
I got the material and started to work with those good sounding intresting progressive songs. First by listening raw material, composing bass lines and then of course I needed to learn to play those songs. And at last the difficult part : get them recorded! Now after 6 months and hours and hours spent by beating the bass recordings are almost ready and the focus is on producing the bass tracks. Some re-amping and sound adjustments needs to be done before mixing process. Those are done soon!

It has been a very nice and demanding project. I have enjoyed a lot to create and record music. Eventhough it has taken more time than I assumed. First deadline we had was end of 2018… But I wanted to do my best and actually I have spent quite much time for capturing the ”magic” takes. Hopefully it has been worth it…

I really look forward to hear the final version of the album. And I hope You enjoy it !

Until that Stay tuned!

Big Bottoms,
Petteri Gullsten

So, what’s next then? Tomi will start his parts real soon and we’ll start the mixing process as well. Matti Auerkallio wil be singin some bacjground vocals as well. And after that, there’s still solos to be played 🙂

So, we’ve spent out our autumn and end of the year by finishing up the rhythm guitars, waiting for the basses and planning the vocal sessions. We almost had a change to mix the drums with Matti A, Harri and Tomi on one Saturday, but we just too thirsty while building the vocalbooth that we simply forgot 🙂

Rhythm guitars completed

Vocal booth, ready…


Vocal booth, tested and…

…Approved 🙂

Actual vocal recordings will start early next year, so it does look like we’ll be able to finish the album next year at least, mixing / mastering included

Yeah, it’s been a while since we updated this blog. During summertime there was not that much progress with the album. Couple of more tracks got some fine-tuned guitarings, but that work continues. Basses will be ready probably during this year. However, Juha Haipus won’t be playing those basses due to scheduling issues, recording 65min epic isn’t that easy task to do if you don’t really have spare time from works & studies 🙂 But that’s the way it goes nowadays, few of us can afford to be full-time musician (except Matti A, who’s professional :D).

But that’s the end of bad news (for now at least). Matti P finally got his own mancave and is bit busy constructing vocaling booth + studio room. And that a notch towards more professional studio environment, which us a much-needed and anticipated improvement. So this might still turn into recording & construction blog 🙂

Yes, I’ve been lazy updating the studio blog, apologies for that. So, I’ll write a a bigger update now 🙂

Yes, most of the keyboards are now completed 🙂 I’ve been using my trustworthy combo of Kurzweil K7, Yamaha motif-rack xs and Roland Phantom for all the work, plus couple virtual instrument lead sounds, which I’m not yet going to reveal yet and a big bunch of orchestration virtual instruments (not all are in place yet, but I recorded leads, choirs and orchestration parts as midi too). So far it seems that this will be the first album without harpsichord sound (if I remember correctly, don’t remember all the songs from demo-perioid). And no Hammond sound, yet at least. I’m still waiting for final guitars from Harri, ’cause I need to change certain things according to guitar, so we’re definitely not yet there. Obviously solos are not yet done…

As for the keyboards, this album will sound a bit different from previous Ultimatium albums, mainly because the lead sound (main sound picture below) is most dominant in this album, piano being next in line. While composing these songs, I noticed that it was quite refreshing to change the dominant sound, since the keyboards riffs I came up with we’re quite different from what I composed earlier.

Couple of words for tech enthusiast’s about my equipment: As stated on previously post, I’m using win7 + pro tools (the cheap version, not HD) for recording + brand new RME raydat and M-Audio 2626 preamp/interface (which I’m going to retire after  this album). And of course with tons of virtual instruments and plugins etc. And an iPad for controlling the pro tools, so I don’t have to jump between computer and keyboards so often. And as for the actual playing, my method is simple: keep playing ultil you’re happy with it 😀 That sometimes takes a lot of nerves to spend one hour just for 20sec of music 🙂

So, what’s next then: rest of the guitars from Harri, Haipus starts recording bass around a month from now and I’ll start figuring out the vocal recordings. And solos and also the non-musical aspects of this album (we need a title, a cover and packaging and…what was it…something important…no not that… Oh, A label to release our album!). Also, I recorded tons of video material while recording the leads (+6h ), so I’ll be posting some videos to our youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/ultimatiummetal

And there’s a new controller for recording the solos, say Hello to legendary Yamaha dx7. Maybe I’ll even use one square lead sound from this machine 😉

So, on Monday and Tuesday evening I started recording first keyboards.. Don’t know why, but I decided to start from pianos. I use Kurzweil pc3k7 that I bought as a b-stock from Thomann, that’s absolutely the best for pianos of those equipments that I have. Things didn’t start so smoothly, first glitch was my iPad mini not connecting to Pro tools…duh, the software that’s doing the work was not running…and when it was running it said to me that this one’s outdated, download a new one…

So, after a while of downloading and installing, I was up to speed…untill my Pro Tools decided that it’s not using any of my 6 cores and froze completely showing 100% cpu usage in its own performance monitor… So a reboot, bit fiddling with bios to make sure all the cores are unlocked all the time and we’re back on…untill Waves plugins decided that my computer id had changed and licenses are not on my machine. So I had to use my once-a-year-save-my-licenses-thingie that Waves has implemented and then I send angry email to them, this was not the first time it happened… And on Tuesday, two blue screens of death… After finishing up for that day, I started uninstalling recent apps that I had acquired, might be one of those…

In the end, I somehow managed to do pianos for a bunch of songs, some are still needed and probably I’m going to re-record some of them later, since I might have been bit rusty at the beginning… Or not, let’s see and hear 🙂