STUDIO DIARY: Recordings of Thaurorod debut album `Upon Haunted Battlefields`
Hey folks!
So everything for the album is now recorded! The final mixing is yet to be done and the mastering will take place at Finnvox Studios in few weeks when Mika Jussila gives the final touch for the outstanding debut of THAUROROD.
The latest recordings we made with our previous vocalist Lumi who did some speak parts onto songs “Cursed in the Past” and “Into the Realms of Hidden Me”. Then we had few crowl parts which we recorded with Henri Villberg who is also responsible for many previous graphics for Thaurorod like countless amount of gig posters and for example Thaurorod logo and the coverarts of our two previous self-releases. Henri did the crowls on “Cursed in the Past” and “Scion of Stars”.
Adding some East West choir orchestrations at Emppu's place.
Working on the song "Tales of the End" with Teecee at E-major Studios.
More news about the release dates etc. will follow shortly so keep checking this site. And don’t forget there is a music video on its way from the song “Warrior’s Heart” The video was filmed in Sweden and in Finland on Feb-March 2010 with a Swedish film crew… The music video will be released in May-June. There will probably be some -making of –diary- with lots of pics and videos from behind the music video shootings or teaser video so check it out when there’s something online.
Have a great Spring time!
Pasi / THAUROROD
Hey, and finally some more updates to this studio diary.. So as you probably have read some news already we have now recorded pretty much everything on the album except some additional musicians. Today Emppu starts to record album's female voice as Johanna Lesonen comes to sing her parts on the album.
Last few days we have been working on keyboards and converting midi tracks into wave tracks this includes selecting the keyboard sounds we want to use on the album.
So at the same time Emppu is recording and working to complete the recordings we already have our all basic tracks being mixed by Tero "teecee" Kinnunen at E-Major Studio.
Okay 'till later!
Pasi
Emppu's home studio.. where he has been working all summer...
Listening the mighty keyboards in the chorus of the song Scion of Stars.
He he...I have started my duties for -Upon Hanted Battlefields- album. I started with a song "Cursed in the Past" too and continued with "Elämän Tuli"... All went well and I hope you get the idea from this video. Stay Tuned.... MJK
My recordings have begun, I have recorded something for 3 songs this far. I started with song Cursed In The Past, and it's almost ready. This song lack only some pianos and some brass. I'm very pleased with the result! We have recorded both midi and audio tracks, though the audio tracks are quite useless at this point since all the sounds will be carefully decided later. .
Emmi with her new Yamaha Motif XS6
Next there was our newest song, The Bard. It was easier than I thought, recording it was quite painless. The Bard still lacks all the melodies but that'll be a piece of cake :)
The latest song I've been fighting with is Scion Of Stars. #%&##!!! As some of you may already know, it's quite fast and there are a lot of transitions. Yesterday I started to lose faith with this one, but in the end I managed to play the hardest parts of it. I think I've now conquered our hardest song, so I think the 6 songs left will be a lot easier to play.
Emmi
Today is the day I got my new keyboard!! I spent ages thinking about which keyboard I'll choose; Korg M3 or Roland Fantom G6. Then I finally ended up with Yamaha Motif XS6. I cannot even describe how beautiful and intelligent my new Childe is, it's just the instrument of my dreams :)
Emmi
I woke up and had some breakfest then drove to Emppu and we started the recordings with acoustic parts and continued the recordings for maybe 4 hours. Then after that there were nothing but 2-3 small parts left..
Pasi
Some acoustic bass...
I drove to Emppu and finally after one hour of recording I finished all the bass guitars for the album! It sure didn’t go as planned but what the hell all 9 songs were now in and these are the best bass guitars I’ve ever recorded so I’m happy! It’s time for Emmi’s keyboards next..’till later folks!
Pasi
So today I brought my bass gear from my place to Emppu´s home where the recording computer was waiting for the rest of the bass guitars to be recorded. Well we just put everything ready for the recordings and tested it all worked. We listened through all the songs and wrote down the parts we needed to re-record. For example in the song `Guide for the Blind` I had already recorded all the acoustic bass guitars earlier but they had somehow vanished so I had to do those again.. It was time to finnish for the day and we decided to head to a pub for one beer.
Pasi
Almost two weeks of struggling with misfunctional Pro Tools and we still haven’t been able to solve the problem. Pro Tools can’t even play the projects for more than five seconds and then there will be some sort of error. Not even professional sound engineers could think of what could cause the error.
Well since there seem to be no locical explanation what so ever to this fucking situation we are facing we consider this problem is caused by some fucking unwelcomed computer bug and because of that we will curse Windows systems as part of the studio computer to the lowest hell and tomorrow it’s time to turn these recordings once more into a bit more expensive ones and purchase Mac-computer.
Though Windows should work with a powerful computer and with original softwares it seems it necessarily doesn’t. This studio computer had never been connected into internet and there have been nothing attached to it except the removable hard drive that included nothing but these Thaurorod projects. Well original Windows XP that was optimized for the studio computer just didn’t work. And as we were just at the first stages of the recordings we thought that there is no way we can continue with unstable Windows system if the risks exist! We could have re-install Windows and Pro Tools and probably everything would have work then but we just felt safer with a professional Mac computer which should be as stable as computer gets! Also at the same time we will update Pro Tools Le into Pro Tools 8.
So MAYBE ..at the end of this week I am finally able to complete the bass guitar recordings. It’s funny that I only have basses to record for 2-4 hours of work and because of these computer problems it takes two fucking weeks to do this!!
Pasi
Friday 6
Okay, It’s been a while since there have been any updates to this studio diary. Well here you have something.. During the previous days I have recorded all the bass guitars including some really nice-sounding acoustic bass guitars into some slower parts of the songs.
Well after I had recorded all the bass guitars I went through all the songs listening carefully if there would be some parts not so great and would had to be re-recorded. There were few parts in every song that I wanted to replace with a bit better bass playing. Mostly those parts that needed to be fixed was all just small things and easy to re-record also there were some rhytm parts that me and Emppu decided should match more with the rhytm guitars so it would sound more tight piece of playing!
So I started to re-record them today and I had prepared all the Friday night for this in order to complete the bass guitars and to be able to continue the recordings with keyboards and guitars. I had re-recorded about half of the parts that needed to be fixed and then while I was in the middle of fixing a song `Guide for the Blind` Pro Tools didn’t want to co-operate anymore. Somehow it just went out of order and nothing was to be done at that point.
Pasi
Saturday 24th January 2009
It’s a weekend so I just finish with the song “Morning Lake” and continue with the remaining 4 songs from Monday on.. I will put in “Upon Haunted Battlefields” next!
Pasi
Friday 23rd January 2009
Like I mentioned earlier possible the trickiest song of the album “Scion of Stars” will be recorded today. Yesterday I recorded two whole songs in half a day but today even though I have all the day from the early morning to late evening it takes almost all the day to record this song! Well I still manage to put in half of the“Morning Lake” song.
Pasi
CHECK OUT A VIDEO OF PASI RECORDING A SONG `MORNING LAKE`!
Thursday 22nd January 2009
Today I managed to record “Cursed in the Past” and everything exept acoustic bass guitars to a song “Guide for the Blind”.
Pasi
Wednesday 21st January 2009
A bit more than a week after the drum recordings I and my bass guitars were ready for the bass recordings. Couple days ago Emppu brought me his Pro Tools and his computer so that I could record the bass guitars at my home. We checked the bass sounds with our vocalist Markku and now all is ready.
I record bass guitars into two tracks other is pure line track and the other is through the preamp of my Mesa Boogie Big Block Titan V12.
Okay I’ll start with a song “Tales of the End”. This is the first time I’m personally working with Pro Tools and I’ll have to say it’s much smarter music production software than for example Cubase or Nuendo that I’ve used earlier. It’s also very easy to use so I higly recommend it!
Pasi
Saturday 10th January 2009
The final studio day is on! There’s really nothing more to do than just downloading the Pro Tools projects on our hard drive and packing the car. I have to say I’m really happy with the drum recordings! Jonde did some unbelievable piece of drumming and the drumfills that were in my opinion a bit more ...groovy than the ones on our previous cd’s. I’m really exited in starting the bass recordings with these drum tracks!
Pasi
Friday 9th January 2009
The final song “Tales of the End” was recorded and rest of the day we were editing the drums with our recording engineer Arttu Sarvanne.
Pasi
Thursday 8th January 2009
The songs for today were “Upon Haunted Battlefields” and “The Bard” which is the fastest song on the album with the tempo 203 bpm and also probably the opening track for the album with a very catchy and kick-ass chorus!
Pasi
Wednesday 7th January 2009
Today’s songs were “Morning Lake” and “Elämän Tuli”. In "Morning Lake" there are some new solo parts before the last chorus that wasn't on the earlier version of this song..
Pasi
Tuesday 6th January 2009
Jonde started with a song called “Guide for the Blind” which will be the longest song on the album though it´s no longer than 6.30 minutes. Other song of this day was “Scion of Stars” which is maybe the trickiest song on the album, quite fast and a lot of signature variations.
Pasi
CHECK OUT A VIDEO OF JOONAS PLAYING THE SONG `SCION OF STARS` IN STUDIO!!!
Monday 5th January 2009
Last night we drove 250 kilometres from Hyvinkää to Jyväskylä to start the drum recordings at Studio Watercastle. It was a surprise how much we could pack our gear into my Renault Laguna :) There was whole drumset with 3 snares and a lot of cymbal stands etc, bass guitar, guitar me(Pasi), the drummer Joonas and our guitarist Emppu and our personal stuff.. well the car was full!
So at ten ´O clock we arrived to a studio and started to change the drum heads and set up the drumset.
Changing and tuning the drum heads.
Opening the background tapes for Joonas to play with.
Our studio cat felt bassdrum needed some more filling :D
Complete drumset with mics.
The drumset
So finally everything was ready. Jonde started the recordings with a song “Into the Realms of Hidden Me”. The next song was "Cursed in the Past". This song have become quite a lot faster than what it was on “Morning Lake” cd. I think the tempo was then something like 174bpm and now the song’s tempo is 190bpm.
Our working method was basically that Jonde played the songs 3-4 times and then we gathered the complete song from the best parts of those different takes. We ended the first day as these two songs were recorded and partly edited.
We took off from the studio and went to Ode, a friend that accomodated us on our stay during the drum recordings. So the next day would be a holiday in Finland and we decided to kill a few beers at the apartment and had some sauna and also visited local bar Pub Katse where we actually played our previous show on October last year.
Pasi
