Studio Report: Deep Beneath
Written on 23 Jul 2008
The project Deep Beneath started way back in June 2007 when I composed two tracks (Shadow Shapes and Retribution) while waiting for Matti to finish his vocals for Wasteland. Early next month another track was finished (Exile Within, originally titled The Six Phases of Unrest) and then I took a small break from songwriting to continue mixing Wasteland with the first batch of vocal tracks I received. Then a bit later in mid-August, I composed a whole bunch of songs within four days: The Undying Storm, Biodroid Legions and So They Rise (originally Voidforms). Then it was time to finish up Wasteland, so I didn't compose any songs for a while. Then in November 2007 I finally composed a further three new songs: Subjugation (originally called Rust), The Awakening (originally Re.Activate) and Deep Beneath, which also pretty much locked me on the direction which the album would take. Then in December I also re-recorded and re-arranged an older demo track of mine that never found a home earlier, and it fit perfectly for this album. Bewildered (aka Bewildered Beyond Disknowledge) was then finished and now I had an albumfull of material. In early January 2008, I started working on the lyrics for the songs and they were quickly finished in two weeks. Then it was time to start working on the final DI guitars for the album. All the guitar DI tracks were finished on 30 January and it was time to start recording the DI bass tracks. A big bunch of videos were filmed of the guitar tracking and there will be a compilation video. All DI recordings were finished on 31 January and demo vocal recordings started. In early February, I did the first reamping home tests and after getting an extra adapter I got it all working together perfectly. So now with the knowledge, I started reamping everything soon after. The tone was a bit different than the usual albums in those days with the 5150/Dual Rectifier combo on all of them. It does sound nice and is sure to work, but most albums tend to end up sounding the same, so with my Engl Powerball + Marshall JCM900 SL-X it was going to be a bit different tone-wise. In the initial reamping tests, I used the Fireface as an output going with a balanced signal into the Little Labs Redeye reamp box, and from there into the Engl Powerball and I had a Digitech Bad Monkey in front of the Marshall. The cabinet was dual miced with two Shure SM57s, both on-axis with the first one pointing at the center of the dustcap and the other one pointing at the edge of the speaker cone. From there the mics went into the Fireface. The drum tracks are programmed with Addictive Drums and for synths etc there's a wide variety of different VSTi synths. My favourites so far have been reFX's Vanguard and Nexus and Reason 4.0's NN-XT choir patches. However, eventually I decided that the reamped guitars won't cut it, so it was back to the original choice of impulses and EQ spectrums. I finally got a very nice tone going on with a Krank Revolution + Engl Savage spectrum pair, with a Peavey 5150 spectrum for the lead guitars. All that is achieved through a DI guitar track first going into a preamp modeler (I used the excellent and free Wagner Sharp v0.60), into SIR1 with a custom impulse of a Mesa Standard 4x12 cabinet. And lastly there's Voxengo Curve EQ to provide the EQ spectrum side of the combo. All that is highly CPU intensive (it was a thing back in 2008...), so I had a separate project with nothing else but the DI guitars and I added the plugins into that and then exported as .wav and added them to the main project. I also decided to use just two rhythm guitars since the mix is already busy as hell, so I needed all the frequency space I could get. For bass recording I used an Ibanez BTB 555 into Tech 21 Sansamp Bass Driver DI with both a dirty signal and pure DI signal going into RME Fireface 400. From there on, the signal went directly to Cubase with a temporary EQ cutting out some of the midrange. The Sansamp settings were at: Level 11 o'clock, Blend 100%, Treble 10 o'clock, Bass 12 o'clock, Drive 14:30 o'clock, Presence 14 o'clock. I also did demo vocals for all the songs, both to test out how the vocals finally fit in within the songs and also for Matti to practice the phrasing etc. For the demo vocals, I simply used my Shure SM57 into the Fireface 400. For the final vocals, we used two mics and then picked one to do the rest with. The first mic was Mikko's AKG C2000B and the other was a T.Bone SC450 cheapo mic, which we did end up using. The vocal recordings started on 1 March 2008 with some fiddling and not much was caught on tape on the first day. The second day was more organized and we managed to record the vocal tracks for 3 songs. The sessions continued throughout the weekend of 29 Feb - 3 March and we managed to record the last remaining songs on 3 March, completing the vocal recording sessions. == Equipment Guitar - Schecter 007 Blackjack - Wagner Sharp v0.60 + SIR1 + Voxengo Curve EQ Bass - Ibanez BTB 555 - Straight into RME Fireface 400 Vocals - T.Bone SC450 Mixing - Cubase SX 3 - Behringer Truth B2030A