Studio Report: Wasteland
Written on 6 Aug 2008
The project was started at around 1 AM on June 8th 2006, when some ideas were thrown about in Cubase. However, not much happened for the next 30 days - only some unused riffs and some drum beats were composed. Things started rolling in early July when a number of songs were initially completed (not much remains of those though :P), namely Anthropomoph, Impulse and Ominous Dawn. A few days later, two more songs were done: Artificial and Perdition (only the chorus remains to date). This provided to be a fruitful start towards writing the album, though. The second writing session took place in mid-August, when an older song (The Core) was sliced apart completely and reworked from ground up with only the main rhythm riff remaining from the original. A number of new songs were also composed, but only two of those made it to the album. The outtakes included tracks entitled The Remnants of Apocalypse, Blood Tribunal, Lord of Worms and Process. The two that actually did make the album are nowadays called Instigate Hostile Reaction and The Silence. A third writing session occured in early October, and during those sessions the remaining new songs were fully written. After that phase, it was time to start going through all the material and improve on them. After strenuous days and moments, the songs were finally shaping up to be how they are today. The drum programming was also pretty much finalized during that month. Not many changes were done. November was a mind-rest month in a way, as very few things were done to the songs or arrangements, though a few did happen. Mainly it involved changing the order in which the riffs came in the song. Also, the initial work towards the concept and storyline of the album was started. Stephen King's The Stand, the Fallout series and Mad Max movies were a big inspiration, which lead to a story about the final days of mankind before a great nuclear slaughter and the days after the events. In late December it was finally time to start recording all the guitars for the album. Everything went extremely smoothly and the job was done in just three days of active recording. Each song has two rhythm guitars, panned 100% each side, plus a lead guitar track in the center. The sound turned out to be quite nice and clear, fitting well inside the songs. As I had already finished all the bass and drum programming earlier, all the songs were pretty much done now. The last thing left to do was to finish up all the lyrics for the album and testing how the vocals would be like, stuff like phrasing, emphasizes and so on. Then began the strange days. The album was ready, including the lyrics, but the vocal recordings didn't take off anywhere. But then things started to happen and eventually most of the vocals were recorded by Matti. A few songs were left without vocals, so I finally recorded the remaining parts to finish up the album and finally release it on September 23, 2007. The guitars on this album feature two tracks of rhythm guitar plus one lead guitar. They were recorded with an Engl Powerball on the third channel (Lo Lead) with gain at 2, lo lead bottom on, bass at 4, mid-focused at 10, Treble at 8, channel volume on 10, presence on 7, depth punch at 4 and master volume at just over 1. Kind of funky settings, but they seem to work quite nicely with the amp and cab (Engl Vintage 2x12 with Celestion V30 speakers). The bass on this album was originally programmed with Spectrasonic's Trilogy, which had a decent bass sound. But it required a bit of tweaking to make the sound less machinegun-like. It did fit very well inside the songs, but I ultimately re-recorded all bass parts. The bass was first done with Tero's Fender Mexico Jazz Bass tuned to drop-B through a Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI. But since I bought an Ibanez BTB555-MP that summer, I again re-recorded all bass parts with it and those are the ones on the final album. All the drums were done with Toontrack's EzDrummer, which is simply great. Very good quality drums almost straight out of the box. Just some minor tweaks overall to make it sound more suited for a metalish style. The drum tracks received the standard handling: some midscoop and bass/treble boost on the kick, compression on the snare, distortion and midscoop for the toms and a 600 Hz highpass for the overheads. My vocals were recorded on a ghetto Athlon XP + Reaper v1.888 system at Relativity's rehearsal space. The mic was the workhorse Shure SM57 into a Behringer MX602A mixer into Audiotrack Inca 88. It actually wasn't too bad of a system for some rough vocals. The album features guest vocals from several people, and it was the first time to experience something like that. The method was then used later on as well, even on the very latest Vortech albums! == Equipment used Guitars - Behringer MX602A mixer as a preamp - Shure SM57 on-axis 1 cm from the grille aiming just about dead straight at the speaker - Engl Powerball + Engl Vintage 2x12 (Celestion V30) - Schecter 007 Blackjack in standard tuning (BEADGBE) Bass - Ibanez BTB555-MP (tuned standard: BEADG) - Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI Vocals - Shure SM57 - Behringer MX602A - Audiotrak Inca88 interface Mixing - RME Fireface 400 interface - Behringer Truth B2030A monitors