Chapter 3

Our recording process was different from most bands'. When I was writing music for myself, I developed a specific process for writing and recording songs. First I would start by tabbing out my riffs in a program called Power Tab. I would tab out everything I thought of and then arranged the riffs into songs. Power Tab supported MIDI playback of the tabs along with exporting regular MIDI files that you could import into sequencers. In fact, that's exactly what I used to do to use as a guide for sequencing drums. After I programmed the drums, I would export two sound files, one with the MIDI guitars from Power Tab, and another with the sequenced drums. Then I would put those in my multitrack software, Adobe Audition, and record guitars and vocals over top.

For our recording, Alex really wanted to use a click track, and I agreed with him. A click track would make it possible to punch in bad takes, and would keep recordings clean and at the proper speeds. Punching in drums is generally frowned upon, but we were strapped for time and cash, so it was inevitable that we would have to do it. Either way, a click track was needed. However, our songs aren't simple. We can't just set a metronome and record, so to speak. We have weird time signatures, tempo changes all over the place, and God knows what else. I just didn't have time to sequence a proper click by hand. So, we cut a corner, and I decided to use the powertab playback directly as a guide/click. In the studio, we would set up the session and record the output of my laptop while I played back the powertab midi (which has a built-in metronome). What I didn't know was that the realtime powertab playback isn't rhythmically accurate. Because powertab has to process the tab in realtime, there is no guarantee that it is perfectly on beat. In fact, most of the time, the powertab was early or late, and in the case of complex tempo transitions, totally off, sometimes by more than a beat.

The recording was brutal for Alex. Other than Undeceiver, he knew the songs pretty well, but we had very little time to perfect the takes. I think we booked 2-3 hours for a Tuesday evening and 3 hours for a Friday evening. We got there on Tuesday, and started setting up. After getting Paul's drums all ready and figuring out the microphone setup, we realized we had already used up about 45 minutes of our time. We quickly tracked our powertab guide and began recording. We did two takes of each song unless the first take was perfect. Most of the time Alex did a perfect job, but the powertab craziness made it very difficult for him to stay on beat.

After Tuesday, we still had three songs left to record, because we had only tracked Destiny In Flesh and Haloed Thorns the first day. Aspiration came pretty easily, and we kept the very first take Alex did of it. Solution went worse, and we had to redo it all the way through somewhere around ten times. We began to close in on the end of our recording time, and eventually passed it. Cory, our engineer, told us that the next band wasn't due for an hour so we could use that time if we needed it. We finished Solution and realized that we only had half an hour or so left. Not only was that very little time to record Undeceiver but we had so little time to finish writing and practicing it that Alex didn't even know the whole thing. It was an epic 7-minute song with a few very very hairy drum parts. Alex knew the first half pretty well, but the last 3 minutes were hazy at best, and had never even heard the bridge leading to the outro. We were all tired and discouraged, but we had nothing to lose really, so we decided to go for it and see how much of the song we could do. I decided to split the song into two parts, the first half through the slow atmospheric section, and the second from the end of that until the end. This way Alex wouldn't have to redo the whole song if he screwed up on the second half.

By some miracle, Alex was able to nail the entire first half in one or two takes. We had fifteen minutes left and Alex still had to learn the bridge. We played the guide track for him and I outlined what kind of beats I wanted. Then we just started tracking. After a few screwed up takes, Alex nailed the first few riffs of the second part, and then somehow got through the bridge with some pretty impressive drum-work. We were all so amazed that we actually recorded the song, but that wasn't even the end. It sounded good, but Alex thought he could do it better so we did a few more takes, and he spiced up the end with double bass rolls. Then our time ran out and we were done with the drums.

Then the summer started, and we had to figure out when we could record the guitar and vocal tracks. Chris was coming up to the Bay Area for a few days to see friends and go to a show, so we figured we'd also use the time to track guitars. I started mixing the drums almost as soon as I got home, so in two weeks, when Chris came up, most of the songs were at least in some rough shape. I had also bought a POD to record with, and found some good sounds for us to use. Recording was a pretty big pain in the ass for us. We knew the songs, but because I insisted on recording clean guitars and then re-amping them twice to layer a thick guitar sound, we had to wait 10 minutes to re-amp after every take so we could hear the results. Somehow, we managed to get all of Chris's parts recorded over two days in late June.

Also, my friend Nicky dropped in on our sessions and gave us a hand with some atmospheric keyboards for Undeceiver. We also kind of wanted a solo to lead up to the end of the slow interlude, so we had Nicky record an atmospheric synth solo. Evenutually this got scrapped because we felt it didn't really fit the mood of the song, along with the fact that it was strange to have a lot of keyboards in one part of the album and nowhere else. Nicky's still bitter, so just for him, I have that section with his solo up on here. Get it here if you really want to hear it. With the guitars done, vocals and lots of mixing were my priority.

Unfortunately, After I sold my Digitech RPx, I had no mic preamp to use for recording. I quickly ordered the Studio Projects VTB-1 tube mic preamp, and when it arrived began tracking guide vocals (and layers) for Paul. So actually, all the songs on the album had mixed versions with me doing all the vocals. Later when Paul recorded his stuff, we'd mute my tracks where we didn't want layering, and kept the choruses and growls. This gave us a very saturated vocal sound. We actually didn't record Paul for a long time. During the summer he got out of practice, and was also sick for a while, so when he came by my house to record, his voice just wasn't up to his usual strength. We decided to postpone recording until the Fall. We ended up tracking vocals two weeks before I was planning to release the album and have our first show. It took us only two sessions to record everything, and it turned out quite nicely.

The other aspect of the album I'm proud of is the usage of effects and filtering. We used a few subtle tricks to add to the dynamics. For example, there were a couple of places where I pitch shifted my vocals or Paul's vocals down and layered the sound underneath our regular voices. This is especially evident in Solution, where the verses are done mainly by Paul, but also have me going in the background with an extremely low raspy tone. The other section we did it on was the speaking part in the Undeceiver interlude, where I layered my own tracks an octave down. Another effect we used was a sub-sonic boom at the beginning of heavy breakdowns and especially big hits. Originally I tried just generating a 40-60 Hz tone in my audio program and then putting effects on it to make it sound good, but when layered with the songs, it just sounded too pure. Because the boom had no overtones and no attack or release, it was too identifiable in the mix. My solution was to record me playing a clean low open B on my guitar and then pitch shifting it down three octaves. Then I boosted the bass and added a tiny bit of reverb. After some enveloping and EQing, I added the sounds to the mix and it sounded perfect. The breakdowns hit with a ridiculously heavy sub-sonic boom and it more than makes up for our lack of bass.

Another fun thing we wanted to do was include audio clips in a few of the songs, just to break up the dense music, and also to make people laugh. Destiny In Flesh is about a leader who gets burned at the stake by people he's screwed over, so naturally I put together a clip of a fire burning, people cheering, and man screaming in agony. We inserted it in a silent part in the breakdown and it worked really well. For Aspiration, the breakdown was the climax of the song, so we wanted something really crazy to lead into it. I looked around online and found a long drawn-out female scream. I put it in and it sounded hilarious. It also worked very well because when the breakdown hit, it was without warning and it was crushingly heavy. I knew Alex could let out some pretty funny screams, so me and him got together almost right before the album was due to be finished and started layering some screams. Recording these pained yells was so funny we would crack up for five minutes after every take. Alex even started laughing in the middle of the recordings, and just kept going with it. The result was a really really disturbing clip of about eight voices all screaming and laughing in different ways. It was perfect.

In addition to the five songs we had been practicing and writing since February, we also decided to stick two instrumentals on the album, one written by me, and the other by Chris. These would showcase our different styles and help break up the heaviness of the other songs. Our songs are pretty dense, so hearing five of them in rapid succession would just be tiring. I actually wrote two instrumentals, because the first one was just too over-the-top for Inquest, and despite being good musically, it was hard to record and arrange. So, I scrapped it and wrote a simple finger-picked rhythm section spanning two minutes, and then put a crazy lead on top of it. It turned out quite nicely.

Chris's instrumental was far more atmospheric and dark. He didn't have it written and planned out as well as I had mine, so he came in and improvised a lot of it on the spot. Then we recorded a second track with distortion and another one for layering. It came out to four minutes or so and was definitely a good song to end the album on. The only snag was that it needed drums. At first I wanted to just sequence drums the way I had been doing it for pre-production stuff, but then surprisingly, we all got together for one last practice before our first show, and I used the opportunity to record drums. Since we weren't in a studio, and all I had was one Shure SM-58 mic that we were using for vocals, I didn't expect it to sound very good. Not only that, Alex had never even heard the song before. We quickly worked out the parts and I put the mic between the bass and snare drum and hit record. Amazingly, the sound was just fine. The one microphone emphasized certain aspects of the performance, and de-emphasized others, which worked out really well for the mood of the song. I filtered the track a little and made it less harsh, but what you hear is really one microphone on a performance done in one take.

After that practice, I spent a few days mixing and mastering, and then the album was done. Now we had a show to plan...