Recording New Moon

It's only two weeks before the studio sessions for our new album, 'New Moon', when we started really rehearsing the new songs in our rehearsal space at Lutakko, Jyväskylä. The Finnish President of Drums Kai Hahto is coming to rehearse the new songs with us, and we'll have to get everything ready within a week - we just don't have more time.

Even though we had a really busy schedule, we got everybody playing together and the songs started to sound good. Naturally there was some uncertainty at start, but we are quite sure about what we can do and we didn't have to fall too deep in to depths of desperation. After the rehearsals brainstorming the new album continued at local bars and discotheques while enjoying a few drinks and other refreshments - "an important part of the process", because in addition to rehearsing the album we also have to talk it through.

We also had one show booked in a small festival in Lieksa, so in addition to rehearsing the new material we had to rehearse a full set for the show. After all, we made it through the week surprisingly well. It seems that sometimes haste and stress does well for our orchestra and it gets us lazy so-called musicians to get up and rehearse. After the rehearsal week we are going to have one week off, and then enter the studio.

For the first time in history of Swallow the Sun we have decided to go for a studio outside Finland and see how they do their thing over there. After hearing Opeth's and Katatonia's latest albums our apparent choice was Fascination Street in Orebro, Sweden, where we would work with the studio wizard Jens Bogren. We are aiming for a natural sound for New Moon, and that's what we think he's good at. What we'll end up with is a different thing, but that remains to be heard after we get over the compulsory recording and playing period.

-- Matti

It's Saturday-Sunday night at 02:00, 14th of June, and it's time to head for Sweden, first taking a bus to Turku and then a ferry over the sea. After the ferry we are taking a bus from Stockholm to Orebro. Only Juha, Markus, Matti and Kai, and Kai is flying from Vaasa to Stockholm after playing at a wedding, and he'll actually be in Örebro some time before the rest of us. Mikko we'll come to the studio after we've finished with other instruments, and Aleksi will record keyboards at Noisework Studios in Jyväskylä with Hannu Honkonen.

According to Finnish traditions for what it comes to spending time during weekends we boarded the bus feeling more or less like partying. Beer is a friend when travelling, and when we ran out, we bought more from the people boarding the bus in Lahti. Some are trying to sleep, and when the sun starts to rise the last of us fall asleep too.

When we get to Orebro Kai and Jens come to pick up us up and take us to the studios. It's nice to see that everybody that's needed to start the sessions is here and nobody got lost or anything on the way.

Studio is really cozy and the recording room looks really professional, as it should. Upstairs in studio is dedicated as a sleeping room and downstairs is for recording and other living. There's a red leather sofa, a ghettoblaster, TV, XBOX and such ways to kill time, which is nice.

During Sunday night Kaitsu decided to set the drums up in the recording room, and then we watched Iron Maiden's 'Flight 666' DVD and went to sleep at 03:00.

-- Matti

At 8:00 in Monday morning Jens came to wake up Kai to finish setting up the drums, change the drum heads, do some tuning and mic the drums. Nice idea, but the drums turned out to be on less professional level than we had believed. The lower drum heads had never been changed and some essential parts of the lugs were crooked like the basic nature of Finnish man.

Being a professional, Kai fixed the situation with some creative hammer use, and after some hassling and against our expectations got them sounding really, really good. Then we had to choose a proper snare drum from few options, which was surprisingly easy.

Then Kai and Jens started working on the drum sounds and micing, and we got a sound out of them that pleased us all. It was time to start recording the drums.

Monday was over fast, and we get a few songs on tape. Jens was wondering on how things went so easily, and was digging the drum parts with approving nodding. There wasn't too bad difficulties, and we didn't have to go over any parts too many or force try anything. This is how it should go.

At the evening we got acquainted with few bottles of something we bought from the ferry and started watching Iron Maiden's 'Flight 666' DVD the second time at the studio - excellent movie. It was again about 03:00 when we decided that it's better to get some sleep so we are fit to record some more drums next morning.

-- Matti

Tuesday morning at 8:00 Jens's voice is our alamr clock. "Wake Up! Wake Up! Wake Up!". We just have to get up and get on with the drum recordings. We can all still feel the effects of last night's movie session, but it really doesn't matter, everything goes smooth as always. Kai keeps banging away and get everybody smiling which results in a few beer cans being opened, both in the recording room as well as in the playing room. Playing is going as smoothly as a Saab on asphalt on downhill. There's some really progressy drum fills, 'this works', 'this is going to the album'.

The day is over really quick and we get half of the drums on tape. When the recording is done for Tuesday we decide to continue getting acquainted with the various bottles from the ferry. The movie for tonight this time is Iron Maiden's 'Flight 666', damn it's a great movie. 'Tonight we are going to get some sleep!' - yeah, right. It's rather late when we go to sleep.

-- Matti

Wednesday morning at 08:00 we hear a 'WAKE UP!' from downstairs. Nobody says a word. We just have to start working on the drums to keep schedule. Nobody feels the effects of travelling to Sweden and the night spent awake then anymore, but the movie sessions are getting heavy.

Kaitsu is on fire again, plays a few extra-special beats and almost finishes with the recordings. He's steady as fuck, as usual! Only the last track of the album remains to be recorded next day. Jens is nodding his head approvingly again and is surprised how well things are going even with the tight schedule.

Our starting to run low on bottles when we gather on the red leather sofa and start watching the night's movie, Iron Maiden's 'Flight 666' for the fourth time during these studio sessions. Our guitar player is missing though, he's spending time with his girlfriend’s mansion some 30 km's away in the forest. He's seen the movie already in a movie theatre. This time we also watch Rush in Rio and Toto's DVD, which, in spite of great doubts turns out to be much better than tolerable. Enjoyed refreshments might have something to do with that, though. Even though we visited Swedish 'Systembolaget' earlier to day, we run out of everything. It seems that this night was destined for partying.

-- Matti

We sure can feel the effects of last night when our "alarm clock" goes off at 08:00. But that doesn't stop Kaitsu from getting the last song on tape and we are all pleased with the result. Jens is going for a vacation while we record the basses and the other studio dude, Johan, is going to record us. Jens stayed assisting us with the bass sound.

We got a pleasant sound quite easily, and we even didn't have to listen to reference CDs. Although with instructions like "Anything between Metallica's Kill 'em All and Tool's 10,000 Days is good, besides only dogs can hear bass in metal anyway" expectations aren’t really that high. The final sound was achieved with Mesa Boogie's guitar head, Ampeg’s bass cab and with a line sound from the bass. Then the sound from the amp and from the bass was combined, simple as that. If they did something else for the sound they didn't tell us, and we didn't ask either.

We got one song recorded on Thursday. Kai was leaving to Spain to work as a drum tech for a certain well known band, so we didn't really feel like partying, and this time we got some decent sleep.

-- Matti

On Friday we really started working on the bass recordings with Johan steering. We spent the whole day on that and got about half of the songs on tape. Johan was really strict with the bass tracks too and gave hard times for the Matti. All of us were really pleased with the results, so after the day we left to spend our midsummer night to the mansion in the forest where our guitarist had been earlier. So, midsummer night was spent working instead of following the tradition of getting dangerously drunk, and no one slipped on snails or fell in to a grill, as usual, so we stayed clear of accidents.

-- Matti

On Saturday morning we continued with the bass recording, and got everything 99% done by evening, while guitar players spent a day off in the mansion.

-- Matti

We started by fine-tuning and checking the intonation on all the guitars. With tunings at dropped C there might be some problems and we don't want to spend studio time fixing and re-recording bad guitar parts afterwards, so we spent a good deal of time to make sure everything ok.

After getting everything tuned up we started to think on how the guitars should be recorded and finding the perfect guitar sound with Jens and Johan helping. For amps we got offered three choices of Mesa Boogie, Marshall and Krank, of which the latter one wasn't even considered. "Are you serious?!? Crap, even without trying". I guess that the ghosts of buzz saw sounds were haunting the lead guitarist Nosferatu. The Swedes agreed, it's a waste of space. For cabs we went for Mesa Boogie and some other cab that used to have a label somewhere but had been long lost. Well, the main thing is that they sounded good together.

After some testing we decided that both guitar players play rhythm guitars for all our songs twice, first with Mesa Boogie, then with Marshall, and the actual rhythm sound for both of them will be combined of those tracks. Easy, but time-consuming and draining, so it sucks ass. Anyway, after getting the sound right things started flowing nicely and we got two songs ready on the first day.

-- Matti

We started recording keyboards June 22th with Hannu Honkonen at Noisework Studios, Jyväskylä. We decided not to record keyboards in Sweden, because we have worked with Hannu a lot in the past (Hope, Plague of Butterflies, forthcoming Insomnium album etc.) and we knew that it will be the easiest way to achieve the sound we are aiming for.

My vacation had just started, so I was in good mood when heading to Hannu's place and knew that there won't be any distractions when recording. We had five days to finish the job, and Hannu had updated his studio equipment since the POB sessions. He was running an impressive setup of 8-core Mac with some 18 gigs of memory and - best of all – 4 wide-screen monitors, which make midi-editing a real pleasure. Well, you could do well with only 3, but more is more!

Basically, our keyboard recording always follows the same pattern. First, before the studio, I'll prepare the songs at home so that I have all the keyboard tracks in midi. Then we start splitting the orchestral parts to voices, so that we can set each individual voice to have a certain sound. Usually we are doing with a setup of 2 violin sections, a viola section and a cello section, so it'll become a four-voice part. This way any of the voices can be made louder or quieter in the mix, which makes them easier to work with, and it gives a way bigger sound than having them all on the same track would.

After splitting the parts, we start choosing sounds for them. It depends on the song and on the song part which kind of sound we'll be going for, some parts need different kind of articulations, some need more aggressive sounds while some need more syrupy and lush sounds, and so on. Usually we are using East West Orchestral sample banks, but Hannu had gotten some more samples since we last worked together, and we did find some useful sounds from the new banks.

After we have chosen the sounds, we'll start working on the automations. We have to go through every note on every part of every song and set its modulation and velocity so that it sounds natural and that it suits the part it's played at. We can affect all kinds of parameters here, such as the note attack and tone and shit. This is the part that usually takes most of the time, but it's probably the most important part of the process.

With the non-orchestral parts - such as pianos, lead synths, pads and such - we usually just use something we can get our hands on. This time we used a lot of Spectrasonics' Omnisphere for the synthesized sounds and Steinbergs' Grand 2 for pianos, although we had some other plug-ins here and there. We'll split the synth parts to voices as well, if we feel that it's good for them, but not always.

Well, as you probably can imagine, when working on a full-length album all this takes shitloads of time and patience. Because I had recorded Insomnium's latest album in May, I was used to working with Hannu's setup, so we got all the crap described above done quite fast, only in three days. That left us two full days to check that all the songs are properly done, fine-tuning sounds and articulations here and there and polishing some parts.

So, when compared to Matti's diary from Sweden, this is a lame one – no drinking, no Iron Maiden, no hangovers (except on Friday), but such is life when recording keyboards. It's more like flying the bloody Enterprise instead of recording heavy fucking metal. But it gets the work done: I think that the keyboards on New Moon are going to be the best we've ever done, and the whole album is going to be phenomenal; it's really dark, varied and the songwriting is top notch. And no fast songs on this one!

-- Aleksi

Is there anything more boring in the world than to write or read about recording guitars?? Well, I guess not, but here's something for you anyway. As Matti mentioned earlier, we recorded 4 rhythm guitars for each of the songs, and that's always a huge head/ass blowing thing. Johan recorded all the rhythm guitars and let me tell you that the guy is fucking awesome, but he's stricter about playing than Steve Vai and Yngwie J. Malmsteen's kid, if they could have one together.

Well, boys and girls, it wasn't that hard after all, even if you sometimes felt like killing some Swedish recording guys. And after all, when the guitars for the songs are really well done, it makes the whole band sound so much tighter. So it’s really important to get them fucking good even if it means kicking some Finnish asses from time to time... or all the time. And when we told Jens and Johan in the studio how anal they are about the playing, we only got the answer that "you guys are the most anal band that we have worked with when it comes to your own playing and tuning", so I guess we have learned something during these years too. Ok, enough about anal for now.

Now, after doing the rhythm guitars for a few days we started to record the clean guitars, lead melodies, some solos and a bunch of strange noises. The first thing that made me really happy was that all the effects for the clean guitars and melodies were done with real pedals, no computer plug-ins, AH YEAH!! You can get really good effects through the computer, but using old effect boxes made an old prog fart like me smile like Geddy Lee having a bass shaped lollipop.

Jens and Johan did a really good job finding the right sounds and getting the right feeling for the playing. Many times we had to do the same parts over and over again cause the "atmosphere could be better", even when there was nothing actually wrong with the playing, that's anal... but so is our music because we are the Lords of Pussy Doom!!

So, recording all the guitars for the album took about a week. Big thanks to the studio boys, sounds and playing couldn't be better… well… maybe with Vai's and Yngwie's son...

-- Raivio