Rock and Roll Diary- The EP is mastered and ready for print

Last night we wrapped on recording the Rise of the Templars Ep for Hoagy and my band, Crusader.  Unlike most of the days I've spent in the studio, I didn't snap any pics and upload them here.  We were basically just adding synths, mixing, and mastering the 4 tracks, so I can assure you that it wasn't so exciting.  No midget porn, strange donut frosting incidents, large body/regular sized guitar hijinks, or any of that- just 4 dudes sitting around a mixing board with my trusty MIDI controller in tow.  Trust me, as exciting as it was to hear the finished songs for the first time, it would only have ended in a "you had to be there" scenario. 

Other than being about 20 hours over budget, I have no real regrets about this recording session for the first time ever.  I think being a loud mouth jerk on the Internet has helped me to be more vocal about how I want things to sound.  It might be weird for a drummer to be so involved in the overall process, but I like what I do and I want that to come through in harmony with the rest of the band.  I've got to give it to the whole group, I think everyone was in top form. 

I was hoping to have more versions of 2 of the songs, showing how a track is built in the studio- from scratch tracks and demos all the way to the finished product.  Sadly, that would have eaten up a lot of expensive studio time that was already running very thin.  It's too bad, as I set out on this endeavor originall to let you all share in the experience of hearing something come together, but I guess it wasn't to be.  Regardless, I'll re-post the original scratch tracks for 2 songs that I've put up previously set against the final versions from last night.  That should give you some idea of what a little spit and polish will do to a track.  Enjoy.

Here is the scratch version of track number one (labled as #3 for some reason)- the title track "Rise of the Templars"



03 rise of the templars unmixed by dethtron


.....and here is the final version



01 Rise of the Templars by dethtron


Now for track number 3, Asgard's Fire, formerly known simply as the Viking song. I'm glad it finally found a name. This is the original scratch track



04 untitled unmixed viking shenaniga by dethtron


......and here is the final version. You may find that it ends a little abruptly, but it bleeds over into the next song, so it makes more sense in the context of the album.



03 Asgard's Fire by dethtron

That's it.  Enjoy these while they're up; I will be taking the tracks off of Soundcloud in a while, but all of this should be on disc and iTunes by early December.  Feel free to comment, but if it's about Hoagy's voice sounding nasal, I think you might be smoking crack.  I've got 4 other bandmates and a very experienced recording engineer that will all disagree with you.

Rock and Roll Diary: Iron Forge

You can almost taste the maple shells and gold hardware- would you believe this kit's 14 years old?

I was planning on returning to writing about gaming today (I still might later), but Hoagy just sent me another test mix 12 minutes ago- I've now listened to the song 3 times, so that's how I know so specifically :). Apparently he finished up his vocal takes last night under the radar. 

Unlike the last "finished" song I posted, this sounds a lot more like the rest of our material.  "Engine face," previously posted, was written in the very early days of the group, so we're probably retiring it soon.  It's fun as shit to play, though, so we wanted to record it for fun and posterity's sake. It will not be making it onto the full length album, sadly.

Anyway, here is the test mix of "Iron Forge" including the controversial new chorus*.



Iron Forge by dethtron


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*for an early demo featuring the original chorus, check this shit out, recorded 6 bass players ago when we were a 4 piece with a different name....

Rock and Roll Diary: Engine Face Drums

Hoagy was kind enough to record some video of me playing, with me only being partially aware of it.  So here is, I think*, part of my first pass at Engine Face, the song I posted last night.  My favorite part is when I clearly go into the chorus a phrase early and am visibly pissed at myself.  Thanks for recording me playing like shit Hoagy :)






*It must have been pretty early, since I still had my glasses on.  I usually ditch those as soon as I start to get sweaty.  I'm pretty new to the glasses thing- anybody have a way to prevent them from fogging up?

Rock and Roll Diary: The Brutality continues....

Sadly, due to a number of guitar related issues, we are officially 4 hours over our recording budget with 1 track still needed vocals and a number of other touch ups needing to be done here and there.  We've got the time and $$ to make this happen, but it sucks watching the cost of recording skyrocket before my eyes.  But at least we all know how things will be when we go to flesh out our full length down the road.  In hindsight I'm honestly going to blame a lot of this on the fact that all of us have recorded exclusively with 4 piece bands in the past and underestimated how long recording 5 people would take.  Live and learn I guess. 

Rock and roll diary: vokills

Hoagy bunkers down to nail his vocals.  This should be our final day of recording.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary: the muscles from... Schaumburg

Brad clomps out some guitar solos

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary more buried treasure

...and it was about that time that we found producer dan precision of 88 fingers louies squats.  Hoagy just peed himself!

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary buried treasure

Digging through the studio and found this

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and Roll Diary: Day 2 Sneak Peaks

Finished up the second day of recording a few hours ago and after taking time to decompress a bit, sat down to twiddling my knobs, as Hoagy would say.  By which I mean I started on a rough rough rough mix of adding synth to live elements to make sure everything jives. It's sounding good so far.  It'll be even better when I export everything for our producer to tweak (Dan from 88 Fingers Louie), but you can get the basic idea here. 

We finished up 1 (of 2) guitars today and all the bass parts.  I think we're a little behind schedule for tomorrow, so looks like we're going to be over budget shortly.  1 guitar and Hoagy's vox are set to begin tomorrow morning.  Hopefully we can knock out all the recording tomorrow, but I have my doubts that we'll get any final mixing done.  Who knows though, we might have some "1 take wonder" tracks for tomorrow.


This is what the guitar and drums sound like for the still as yet un-named song about vikings.  As with yesterday, there is pretty much no mixing or studio magic involved in this yet- I'm just showing you all the process as it progresses.



Viking ROUGH by dethtron




Here we get on to an extremely rough edit with adding the synths in to what you heard above for the first time.  I left the levels where I had them while I was still writing, so the synths and such are still at a much higher volume than the will be in the final mix- well except those chimes, those may get louder.  Also upon hearing this again, I think I forgot to mute the synth bass, but it's no biggie since I didn't have time to grab a wav of the live bass for his anyway- which is a shame, because Ian blew us all away with his playing today.  I promise this won't be one of those bassless metal albums you're used to.



Viking song first rough draft w synth unmixed by dethtron

Rock and Roll Diary: Sneak Peaks

It's been a long, yet surprisingly fun day for me.  I got all four of my tracks knocked out in the studio in slightly less time than I was allotted.  Set up was a complete bitch, but I think it will all be worth it when everything is mixed.  Our producer says I had $17,000 worth of mikes hooked up to my shit today.  That kind of blew my mind.  It's always depressing blowing 2+ hours of studio time on setup and level checking though. 

Anyway, my hands feel like they've been run over, trampled, and then run through a wood chipper, so I'm just about done typing.  Below I'm going to post 2 tracks from the day.  Bear in mind these are VERY VERY VERY early mixes.  Nothing has really been eq'd, had effects added to it or been particularly cleaned up.  My takes have been edited together into a final rough mix and that's it.  There hasn't been much studio magic yet and my kick sounds really weird since it's been eq'd (ok so some things have temporary eq on them) to cut through better so everyone can hear it.  The guitar was laid down yesterday by Joe and while it is super helpful to have a scratch track, there are many parts that will probably sound off to you.  Rest assured, my shit is pretty much spot on with the click track though (metronome).  If you don't know how albums are recorded here is a basic order.  A quick throwaway guitar, vocal, or bass track is laid down set to a metronome.  The drummer then plays over that, again along with a metronome.  From there the "scratch" guitar or whatever tracks are removed and the rest of the parts are layered on.  we got rhythm guitar done on one track tonight, but I don't have any of that available for your perusal.  If I get a chance I'll post these same two songs with more stuff mixed in tomorrow, so you can hear how things evolve.

Up first is the ep's title track: Knights of the Templar.  The guitar at the end was way off, so it was cut out of the rough mix, so just imagine that it's there.  Actually listening to it now, the guitar is a little off throughout, but the end was especially not good.  Again I will remind you that this is a very rough mix and only barely represents how the final product will sound.



03 rise of the templars unmixed by dethtron


Last but not least here is the as yet still untitled song about Vikings that I had previously posted synth parts for. This should song more metal than the all synth mix :)



04 untitled unmixed viking shenaniga by dethtron

Rock and roll diary

Let the destructification begin

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Brad gets down to some serious business

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and roll diary: Tetris

After a rousing game of irl tetris all my gear is packed for the morning and day 1 of recording.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Rock and Roll Diary Part II

Had a fairly  boring day on the music front.  Due to my getting ahead yesterday, there wasn't a lot to be done.  I got my drums tuned where I want them.  Thanks to recording the head tensions prior to changing heads yesterday, though, it took me longer to set everything up than it did to tune the drums.  My Premier kit has always been exceptionally good at holding its tuning, so I'm not worried about them slipping out of tune between now and Friday, when we start recording, or even after I start playing them.  Just in case, though I have a printout of my head tensions stowed in my snare drum case.  Additionally, I have a spare head for every drum now, because of yesterday's almost unwarranted change.  I've never broken a tom head in 20 years of playing, but I do periodically blow out snare heads, so it's nice to have a good extra handy.  I hit fairly hard, but mostly use my wrists and fingers, like you should, so it's not so much the power of my playing that busts heads as it is the fact that I crank my snare way the fuck up to get the sound I like. 

Finally, you may have noticed the bad ass artwork up top.  That is going to be the EP cover.  We commissioned an artist to paint that for us about a month ago and he brought that to us in record time.  I almost got sex wee all over my leg the first time I saw it.  This is probably the first time that I've been truly happy with album artwork on any of the 5 or so albums I've been involved with in the past. 

PS, to clarify some questions/statements from yesterday regarding the demo backing track I put up.

1. Sounds Symphonic- what I posted was just strings and a couple of odds and ends (chimes and a filtered synth).  This will be low in the final mix, adding depth to the 2 guitars, bass, drums, and vocals.
2. Doesn't sound metal- see above, but also note that we have a far more classic sound than what's big with the kids today.  I like a lot of the more modern stuff just fine myself, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with the studio magic that goes into producing a lot of that stuff.  Faking drum parts, over producing everything, and pitch correcting vocals is not only unimaginative, but takes away the human element of the songs.  In short, we're less Dragonforce/Dimmu Borgir and more Iron Maiden/Judas Priest/Motorhead/Bolt Thrower/Cathedral

Rock and Roll Diary Part I

This week is going to be crazy busy for me.  As such I'm not going to have a whole lot of time to talk about 40k or WFB.  That doesn't mean that I won't be posting though, but that I've got something different on my mind.  I will still finish part II of my IoB rant, though.  As I've alluded to in the past, I'm in a new metal band, Crusader, hot on the heels of dissolving the Psychobilly band that I was in, the Massacres.  This weekend we're going to be in the studio recording 4 tracks for our first EP entitled Rise of the Templars, which has been inspired by the mythology of the Knights Templar as well as the Blind Dead films.  I won't go on, but I'm sure my singer, Hoagy, can go into more detail in the comments if he cares to.