Toontrack Metal Month: Exclusive Interview with Producer Jocke Skog
As part of our partnership with Swedish recording software company Toontrack for Metal Month all November, MetalSucks and Gear Gods will be bringing you a series of exclusive interviews and features to highlight Toontrack’s new products designed specifically for the metal recording engineer and player. Check out our interview with Jason Suecof, Mark Lewis and Daniel Bergstrand about their Metal! EZX pack and our interview with Andy Sneap about his own guitar and bass tone expansion pack if you didn’t yet: must-read material for any aspiring recording engineer.
The latest of Toontrack’s metal-focused products is the brand new Metal Amps expansion pack for EZmix 2, a collection of 50 guitar and bass tones based on impulse response and modeling of some of the most well-known, high gain amps and speaker cabinets of the past several decades. All presets were custom-made by renowned engineer Jocke Skog (also of Feared) and designed to cater to a broad use spanning all the fragmented genres in classic and modern metal. Learn more about the Metal Amps expansion pack and purchase it right here.
Check out our interview with Skog below about his new Metal Amps pack, how he achieved the tones therein, how he gained his engineering skills over time, his influences and more.
You have spent years and years recording guitars, modeling tones and looking for sounds. Where does your fascination for guitars and guitar tones stem from?
Jocke: From hearing awesome tone, starting with Scott Ian, James Hetfield, Dimebag Darrell and Fredrik Thordendal palm muting their way into my brain stem. When we made all those Clawfinger albums I heard guitar sounds in my head but we weren’t able to achieve them and I couldn’t understand why. We had awesome gear and still… My dad taught me to always ask myself “why” and I couldn’t answer that question, and no one that I knew could either, so I just had to start digging.
Explain briefly what an impulse response is and how it is possible to capture a frequency and translate that into a guitar tone.
An impulse response (IR) is a way to capture the acoustic characteristics of a location, or in our case, a cab. It works fantastic on rooms, like halls and churches, but anything that a microphone can record can be turned into an IR. I think. It’s used to measure the frequency and phase curve of transducers (speakers), speaker cabinets and rooms. That’s how we get a 4×12 into the computer. We play a special audio file through the gear we’re using to make a great sound and the resulting audio is compared to the original file and the difference is compressed into a small audio ”finger print” and voila, an IR, ready to be used!
–> Read the rest of this interview with Jocke Skog over at Gear Gods. <–
Check out this video of Feared’s track “Mylingen,” from their new album Vinter (streaming in full here), mixed by Jocke Skog using exclusively Toontrack plugins:
