We've taken the heading for disaster, but at least the crew is the best possible. There's nothing quite like sinking with a ship full of the finest you can find.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Gtrs and voxs for the second set

So we had some excrement get in touch with a fan again last sunday. Yours truly hungover pretty bad from an awesome Tool-cover gig I saw on saturday, and the Indigo-people of choice Peb and T in mint condition. The agenda was guitars and vocals for Retreat and ElPez, with Samu recording, Sami occasionally supervising and then me grapping the wheel as S&S had to go celebrate fathers day.

The guitars we did couple of weeks ago were good, in terms of what Peb had rammed in. Tero's parts were done in a hurry, so those needed a little check-up. And they were actually done over all of them. Peb patched in his parts pretty easily, and then Tero took his turn. All though, I might not have been in the best possible shape, i still made a personal note that everything flowed a lot better with just two guys there. With all four of them fuzzing around there's a whole lot of nonsense flying in the air. This time everyone was more focused and everything was just easier all together. Tero did the Retreat parts easily and even picked up an acoustic after a pretty definitive conversation with Samu:
- What kind of a sound are we lookin' for?
- Something kind of on the acoustic side.
- Well, nothing sounds more acoustic then an acoustic guitar...

Samu had to leave a little after three, so we were left on our own after that. We got most of the guitars done by then though. A huge solo by Peb was but in at the last minute before Samu left though. After hearing this one, you surely can't say there isn't fast-as-f*ck fingerworks on the album, altough it might be in a highly sarcastic manner. And P did it twice. On top and intervined with each other. It sounds messed up. And damn brilliant. We must have listened to it afterwards like twenty times or something... It's genious, and you won't even know what hit you. It's like trainwreck, but in a positive manner. I can't explain it. Or emphasize it enough. You propably got my drift by now though.

So after Samu was gone, we went to the vocals. Retreat was a run through. The guys have played it for years, so no suprises there. Both of them, T & P sing the whole song through, and we did some minor operations on Tero's vocal harmonies, to make them even more interesting. ElPez was a bit harder, as it needed some drastic changes in the feelings interpreted, but it didn't take P that long still. Going on from a full throttle grunt to an easier mellow mood in a second or so isn't as simple as it might sound.

Last but least, there were some forgotten clean guitar parts by Tero, so we tackled those with a Schecter hollow body, altough the guys did have slight problems with the heavy string set. The Schecter just has a more warm and full sound to it than Tero's PRS. The PRS is more... ...lirputtelua... don't know the word in english. There probably isn't one actually. Perttu even brought his own axe with him for the first time to tackle the forementioned solo, because he needed the flexibility for the strings. Anyhow, the last guitar parts for Tero proved out to be a little troubled, as the solo was a damn hard one. An idea of layering it with two a bit different sounds was thrown on the table by Peb, and it actually sounded really nice, with the long notes still going under each other. At this point the clock was tickin' around 7 p.m. so everyone was getting tired and the last part of the solo was just too much. We got it almost clean, with just one miss on the very first note, but then phychic meltdown was inevitable and we just decided to call it a night after 9 hours of work.

With only a few sips left of their whiskeys, we hit the road with the one guy that was hungover in the morning now being the only one able to drive. Got the first grub of the day at around 8.30p.m and then hit home at 11p.m with Tero still working on some investment-money-whateverhedoes thingmabo in the car and after a bottle of Speyburn. A full days work, I can tell you that much.

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