Studio Report: ...of What Remains
Written on 6 Apr 2025
While Mikko was recording his vocals for The Occlusion in autumn 2013, there was a good moment to start recording some new material! This time around it was back to regular programming and the direction for ...of What Remains was clear from the start. Plenty of fast songs. At first, three songs were written and are basically how they ended up on the album. The songs were Internal Poison, Predictable End and Oceans of Steel. Especially during these sessions, there was a large amount of songs demoed that never wound up being released. 13 of them in fact, some more ready, some less. One such song (Singularity) did get released on the 2019 EP, Impenitence. In total there were 20 completed demo songs for this album, which were then narrowed down to the 12 that were released. Once the release of The Occlusion was ready in Feburary 2014, it was time to fully focus on this album. Half of the songs that wound up on the album were written in March-May 2014, with a clear direction in mind. The songs were written in the order: Ghosts of Existence, Strength In Numbers, Blast Radius - all in 1-3 March, and then Neolithic in late March, and Signal Loss & Disconnect in April and May. One of the reasons for dropping several of the demoed songs, as they were more along the lines of what you hear in the Impenitence EP. The songwriting progressed very smoothly and the remaining 3 songs - Decay to Static, Underutilized and Toxin Release were written in late summer 2014. Basically the next day after the last song was written, it was time to record the final guitars and bass. And all recording was ready in just 4 days! As usual, after finishing recording all instruments, it was the moment to start writing the lyrics for the album, although there was already a lot of snippets and ideas written down through the year. The lyrics were written until early 2015, after which demo vocals were recorded to be used by Mikko as guidelines. It was planned that Ville would record live drums once again, but eventually it would not be so. So we had to fall back on our trusty programmed drums. But to do something novel, instead of using just the MIDI, the final drums on the album were actually recorded on a MIDI drumpad with actual sticks. So each and every drumhit you hear was played for real, even though the sound is from a drum machine. This was done with the Alesis PercPad and playing along to the demo programmed drums, and then basically replacing each programmed hit with the human-played hit. Sounds fairly decent and real, as well it is real. For the guitars, it was also a bit of a novelty as I took a classic guitar playing video of Dino Cazares' original modded Marshall, and spent a day matching up my Marshall amp sim and Mesa 4x12 impulse settings to sound as close as possible to that classic tone. And I got very close in the end! There's a short video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8C0o-0aOIc Meanwhile, Mikko had started recording his vocals and the progress was smooth. Most of the vocals were ready by July 2015 and thus test mixes could begin. As the test mixes were done, dropping in the final vocals was easy and we were able to finalize the album in early September 2015, and it was released a week later. == Equipment Guitars - LTD SC-607B with EMG81 - Focusrite Saffire 40 Pro - VTarAmps Marshall JCM800 VST Bass - Ibanez BTB 555 - Focusrite Saffire 40 Pro Drums - Alesis PercPad - Addictive Drums 2.0 Vocals are unknown...