JUMPING DARKNESS PARADE: A DÅÅTH STUDIO UPDATE FROM EYAL!
Its 4:21 am on June 14th, 2010. We’re exactly one week into the drum sessions for the new DÅÅTH record. I’m sitting in a makeshift control room that was constructed for us at the Atlanta Institute of Music. After a very insane start, we’ve hit a great workflow.
Let me explain what I mean by “insane.” One of our stated goals for this record is to make it real. What I mean by “real” is that what you will hear is what we played. No smoke and mirrors, no trickery, no using the studio as a crutch. In the older days, when albums actually sold and recording budgets were high, albums would take months and months to create. Of course, the technology that is available to us today was not around back then, so things that now can be done in an hour would take a day or more. Like editing drums, for instance. It’s much easier to edit drums on a computer with a monitor than on tape that you have to cut together. For a good example of what I’m talking about ,check out that scene in A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica where they’re talking about editing together the drum fills. While the editing capabilities have gotten better, lots of people have taken these new tools to the level of completely manufacturing what in the 90’s and earlier would be performed. Why do you think bands these days sound so damn tight on record? Its not that they’re actually tighter. It’s that they’re edited better. Bands, for the most part, were actually tighter in the analog days, because they HAD to perform their parts. They couldn’t rely on the editing skills of the engineer to fix their shortcomings.
So anyways, our goal is to make a real record. Real like the bands we grew up listening to. This is quite the challenge when you have less than 1/10th the budget and not close to the same amount of time. Step one for us was to find an incredible drum room so that the sounds we captured off of Kevin’s kit would remain.
Because one of the modern metal tricks that I feel has been abused and overused is drum replacement. In simple terms, drum replacement is when other drum sounds replace the drums that were actually played. While this is a great way to fix horrible sounding drums, it’s also a surefire way to ruin amazing sounding drums. My theory on how this became a standard is that once upon a time, a producer that is now legendary received a project to mix. This project was tracked like total shit and he had the willpower and determination to fix everything. This project was successfully fixed. The album went on to become a hit and spawn a musical movement. As is always the case in music, once something becomes popular, waves of copycats flood the market. What was done to fix a piece of shit recording became the standard. Now, ten or so years later, people are so used to that sound that nobody bothers to question why we’ve accepted this.
That’s enough for now. I’m going to get back to work on the record now. More on our drum tracking soon.
-EL
