The Art of War Pt. II

This is a second part of a longer entry named "The Art of War", where I go through the whole preparation process of the new, yet untitled Finntroll album, namely to be out 14.8.2020 by Century Media Records. You can read the first part here. Now, where was I again? Yes, it's....

The Art of War, pt.II

a.k.a "a little less conversation, a little more action". 

STEP FIVE – The (sadistik) Exekution.

November, 2019. We had three ready songs, three reworkable ideas, a zillion of new ones, half a tank of nicotine liquid, it was dark out and I wasn't wearing sunglasses. 

The plan, ca. late December 2019.

“Hit it”, I said to myself and started working. At this point, I had the idea that as the album should be more about energy and less about developing and prolonging musical ideas, it shouldn't be too long either. In fact, it should last less than 40 minutes in order to not to become too tiresome and my plan was to have nine full songs and a proper intro. And an outro, if I come up with something. 

Being at the point my plain text file just wasn't cutting anymore to keep my ideas structured, I came up with a spreadsheet instead. Which is actually what I always do at some point. I wonder if Cannibal Corpse uses spreadsheets too? That would be so cool. 

The first draft was just having all the ideas marked down with tempos, musical keys and possible comments. It was only to keep myself sane within the countless ideas I was juggling around, and letting my instantly see what I had. Or rather, didn't have. 

There was now simply an “A”- list and “B”- list for the songs at this point. The A- list was full of ideas I wanted to develop into full songs for the album and the B- list had songs that don't seem to make it. And every time I came up with a better idea for a new song, I replaced the worse ones in the A- list with it. (I can also happily reveal at this point that there hasn't been any of those "worse songs" anymore in the A-list since late January. Yay!) 
I still didn't bother to finalize any songs except for the one that I had already did on late August, but just on kept writing, evaluating, and iterating things until to the point I was completely exhausted.

Yes, it's piano and drums. Can you play Slayer with this?

Whenever I used the computer for making quick demos, I wrote down everything with a piano - yes, even all the "riffs" as well - and a shitty drumkit first in order to find out if it actually works. My general idea was to “fail fast” - something known from the games industry as well. There was simpy no point on polishing something that wouldn't work in the first place, so it was crucial to see first how the initial idea worked. Because if it worked with a setup like this, it would most likely work within the actual context as well!

Every now and then, the idea evolved into an actual, structured song. At that point I played quickly one guitar on top of it to give it some “glue” and a synth string patch for general atmosphere and melody emphasizing. And if I was really "in the zone", I sometimes added some Ville's (Moonsorrow) vocal syllables I had sampled earlier to mark out the vocal parts. (Yes, I actually have a sampler-patch made of those and it's a godsend when marking down those vocals!) The demos sounded absolutely horrible but contained everything that could tell if it's a good song or not. The guys laughed about the shitty production and performance, but admitted that the tactics worked really well as I could push out new ideas faster than ever for evaluation. Naturally, this approach doesn't work in anything that demands the actual production being a crucial part of the outcome- say, hip hop beats or a trailer music piece- but for more traditional, melody-and rhythm-based music it works wonders.

STEP SIX – Phase 2: What the hell is "phase 2"?

Come December, things were looking rather good. I had done a couple of more full songs, worked two older ones into a state where I finally found them finished and had quite a many potential ideas to evaluate. I also had talked way more than usual with Katla about the song lyrics and sending him some raw demos and we kept feeding each others' inpiration. I really liked the lyrics he had written and the themes around them (although a small part of me still hoped -like in every album- I'd get more of those pig-riding trolls sharpening their axes :D ) and we talked a lot about the images and settings those awoke in our minds.
Then came Christmas and I needed to lay my brain (and my family) a bit rest from this all. We agreed with Tundra that come the holidays, we'll catch up with the ideas and work together on them to finish the album.

In the very beginning of January 2020, we sat down one friday and made a full new song with my quick setup based on our mutual ideas. Having been giving my brain a couple of weeks rest, that particular session cranked that poor organ straight to eleven and I felt like exploding on creativity. You know those video game characters who go completely berserk at 30% of their health left? Yeah, that was me. 

When Tundra left my house, I was basically jumping in my chair from excitement and decided that today will be the day the second phase begins. I mean, right after I had spent some time with my family, had dinner and stuff. And picked up some milk because we used it all on Tundra's coffee. Damn that guy just loves his coffee.

But what the hell is a “second phase” anyway? I'm pretty sure I've gone through this earlier, but going through this little blog I couldn't find anything related to the matter- so here's a small recap.

- I always make two (or sometimes three if the "proto" one is a complete draft) separate demos of every song in every album I do.

- The first demo, referred universally as “paskademo”, a.k.a “shitdemo” is the one which has the compositional idea. It has the basic structure, drum arrangements and the basic arrangement of the song. Bum notes, fucked-up drumfills and rarely any vocals included. If we were to compare it to e.g. art, this would be the equivalent of a pencil sketch spiced with a couple of colors. It's fast and efficient, and I don't waste time on polishing anything at all.

- The final demo is very close to the album version. This is where I spend a considerable amount of time polishing every single instrument arrangement, bass line, vocal phrasing and everything else. I decide the “colour” and density of the arrangement (not actually so far away from orchestration), add rhythmic hooks and pay extra attention to each guitarist's “common style” and playing skills when splitting their parts. Besides that, I mix it as close to the sound I want the album to be to make sure my instrumentation will work in the context as well. These are also the versions I will send to the people who are not involved in the actual songwriting process to give them a 100% finalized version of my idea. If they don’t get that from the demo, the blame is on me.

As mentioned earlier, I hadn't started the fullblown pre-production on any of the post- August songs yet. Mostly because I wanted a clear vision about most of the material until I’d start to mold a finished and cohesive album out of them….and also, because compared to creative composing, it was the more analytic part which took a lot of time. I also wanted to make sure that we had enough material before I start doing the final versions in order to avoid the scenario where we’d have four awesome and polished demos and nothing else because I spent all my time on thinking how the kick drum should be sounding in a pre-production demo. (Yes, I get fixated easily on things. Just ask my wife.) While the creative process is done with the right side of the brain, the logical part is pretty much left (see what I did there?) for the other side. In other words, the composing should come from the heart and the intuition while the final arrangement and instrumentation should be done with a more analytic and even theoretic approach. Compose with heart, execute with logic!
 
Should the bass go up in the next riff, I need a line that naturally leads there. And if I'm going from a denser part into a more sparse part, I need to make sure the contrast between the two isn't too large unless specifically meant to be so. Add an extra bar here, do a half-note break here, and these guitars need to play a different inversion of the chord in this riff because otherwise it will suck the life out of the vocal part. I try to pay a great deal of attention to both the flow of the whole song and the density of each part in the terms of instrumentation. And just to make things even more difficult- making everything too fluid, and you soon end up with a song almost too solid without any surprises and things that keep the listener interested.

The empty production template.

Due to having done a fully mixed version of that first song I did, the most natural approach was to continue with the exact same palette. Operating with a setup like this and having the whole demo being not only 95% mixed already but also including the mastering processing chain (which is very rare for me usually) speeded up the process extremely.

My plan was to use as much sampled stuff I could due to the endless iteration of the instrumentation and the fact that it's way faster to replace a couple of notes with a mouse than e.g. rig the bass up or start miking an acoustic guitar for two notes. First I laid down the drums for the whole track, followed by the first version of the guitars. Usually at the time of keyboards, I was already in the process of changing some of the guitar arrangements and switching all processing on to really find out how the instrumentation will behave in a fully mixed and mastered enviroment.

STEP SEVEN – Tools of the Trade.

With this album production, I had two things in my mind. First of all, I wanted to make this a bit less guitar-driven than our latest offerings and put the keyboards and melodies more into the spotlight. Secondly, I wanted those keyboards to be more “keyboards” instead of top-notch orchestral stuff. That would mean that I abused the fuck out of my sampled Korg synth and some official Korg VST's as well combined with stuff from e.g. Roland. I didn't want them to sound “too real” and wanted to use the digital synths from the 80's and 90's I grew up listening (and using) to.

For the drums, I decided to go with a custom- built kit in Superior Drummer 3 which was then then routed into separate mixer channels and mixed like a real drum kit. I even used some Trigger 2 for the snare and kick channels in order to bring the sound more closer to what I wanted, hah! The guitars – being the only live instrument in the template if not counting the vocals- were driven through Bias Amp Professional 2 with a Tube Screamer emulation in the front. As I didn't care much of the guitar lead tone as long as it “ok enough”, I just stuck Guitar Rig 5 to the channel and blasted away!

The bass track was even more simpler. In the last album I gave the bass a snappingly good “Rom 5:12” (or Korn, if you prefer! *snicker*) - treatment but my vision of the album production was a bit different this time. I wanted the bass just to provide a solid low end with a lot of distortion and compression to keep it constantly rumbling. Don't tell anyone but I used Kontakt Factory Library for that. Slap Cubase's stock bass amp (!) for that, crank up the distortion and it's a solid Finntroll bass sound prototype for this album!

As mentioned, most of the keyboards were either my personally sampled Korg sounds or VST versions of their older stuff. I also used a lot of Omnisphere 2 for other synth sounds and sometimes dug up some weird EMU samples and whatnot. The folky stuff I was a bit more elitist with due to the fact that many of them were actually planned to be replaced by real instruments, so in order to actually test them out in the proper environment, I needed to match them as closely as possible to the real deal- the only exception being the nyckelharpa (which will be doubled with a real violin, though) which will be used “as is”. That's from Tarilonte's ERA II and it's the best fucking sampled nyckelharpa I've ever heard. For the other folky stuff, I used Native Instrument's Session Acoustics, Ilya Efimov's Accordion, Project Sam's and Impact Soundworks' various ethnic flutes and Orange Tree's Mandolin. One special mentiong goes actually to this fucking old Hurdy Gurdy VST from Soundbytes which is the only one I've encountered having a proper control of the chanters. That's actually ending up to the album as well, I'm pretty sure.

“But Trollhorn, where's the symphonic awesomeness of “Nifelvind”? I want my 12- player French Horns on FFF, timpanis and full orchestral strings everywhere!”

Yeah…..well, albeit for timpani, I decided that I leave those for the thousand hollenborgirs and whatever cradleofangrens. These songs -being rather furious with a lot going on full speed- didn't really need that sort of bombastic approach to clutter them even more. And then again, I think I've developed a bit "attitude" towards the whole “symphonic black metal” genre where all the bands sound like each other blasting those FFF horns of top of syncopated chugga-chugga riffs. While Progenies of Great Apocalypse sounds still cool in it's all quasi-evilness, I've heard that song already and nobody needs to make it again every year.

(But in case you want even something orchestral, I can probably comfort you with the fact that there will be an intro which will probably please you...just hope you like World of Warcraft! :D )

Codename "Trollstorm", the arrangement window.

Codename "Trollstorm", the mix window.

STEP EIGHT – Finalizing, rehearsing and fighting.

The plan, just a month later.

At this point it was the turn of February and my little spreadsheet was looking way better than I was afraid. As a flipside, I couldn't fall sleep anymore due to my brain now being completely overtuned 24/7 and had to get some pills from the doctor which supposedly helped me to do so. (No, not “sleeping pills”. Those are bad, mmmkay.) I've been suffering from severe sleeping problems since child and every time I'm working on an album or am in the studio the problems shoot through the roof, so this was expected. Luckily I'm not doing albums constantly anymore!

While I was still working on those final demos, I had started providing those specifically tailored rehearsal files from the earlier ones already in January in order to make sure people have time to practice their parts. I've opened up the process a bit more here, but this time I used over 50% of completely clean guitar signal to make absolutely fucking sure a deaf monkey on Ritalin could hear what the guitar is supposed to be playing.

Mörkö was blasting the living crap out of his drum kit at the rehearsal place, and being a professional he is, provided me a constant flow of Mp3's where he was playing the fully-miked kit to his DAW on top of the drumless demos to discuss about the style and overall feel of his drumming. It took a couple of sessions for finding the good balance between his own more technical touch and the certain "simplicity" Finntroll needs. Tundra was practicing his parts at home and I was constantly bombarding Vreth about small arrangement details and some minor alterations to lyrics. I still hadn't hear anything from the guitar players at all, so even though I had prepared to play all the guitars myself, I still provided them those rehearsal takes in case they might be interested to participate.

As all good comes to an end, about a week ago I finalized the last song for the album and after some iteration, fiddling with tempos and trying out different things with Mörkö we called it finished. But there wasn't still time to celebrate as I still had a ton to do, starting from the intro to providing music sheets for the guest players and being in constant contact with the studio about all practical things. And of course going through every track for the zillionth time, planning the order and make any last-minute changes for things that may have slipped me earlier. And – as an inevitable part of the process- finally quarreling with certain bandmembers about “why the fuck there is an album coming consisting mostly of my songs”. Lucky for me, and you readers out there, most of the members thought that the songs are actually good.

And as promised, here's your first chance to take a small glimpse to each of them (in random order) to hear what's the fuss all about. As these are demos only, don't take anything you hear for granted- especially the vocals, as they are all screeched in by yours truly. So no, Vreth hasn't suddenly gone sour. :D And I personally think the guitars could be a tad bit lower in the mix to give even more room for the keyboards. Oh, and as a sidenote, I might have another one coming a bit later with a bit longer (and different) snippets if the band agrees. We'll see! [EDIT: Sorry, that never happened! So don't bother to search for it later. :( ] I'd humbly ask that you won't spread it around too much as we're not putting it officially anywhere... and to be honest, I don't know how well our record label takes it (even though these songs are my personal property). Consider it for "true fans" only in a way that it's more my personal "thank you" for you peeps keeping up with us for all this hiatus and reading my babbling here and in Twitter. ;)

The files won't be available forever, so make sure you check it out before 29.2. which is the day we will finally enter the studio to actually record these. I hope you like what you hear in this short teaser, because we've tried out best to make up the last seven years of absence with providing you guys something we believe we and you both will like.

I'd love to babble more but you're probably already listening that demo and writing a furious comment underneath why the song clips are so short and "did I actually find that one thing funny in 2020", so I will keep it short. Besides, I still have that ton to do. :D

(Like, writing that long blog text about the upcoming album intro. ^^)

Signing out for now,

Trollhorn

PS: I try my best to update things from the studio as well! Make sure to check out my Twitter @trollhornmusic for the quickest way to know about any updates. Meanwhile, I think I've deserved some Lego Harry Potter with my kids. I just love that game- and especially the music (which you probably knew at this point)!

PPS: To point it out also here (and not only in Twitter), I'm fully aware that these texts may also give an impression of me being a pompous fuck who works in his high castle while writing long texts about "how hard everything is and woe is me". However, I have no personal quarrels with anyone in the band as far as I know- but the truth is that some people were kind of understandably a bit annoyed at the end due to the fact that I had done so much new stuff alone which didn't include the older material we had made together.

While I understand the viewpoint on that for some it may seem that I basically just "rode in with my high horse, destroyed everything in the process and did everything by myself and ignoring everyone's contribution", the fact is that we all were given the chance to make that music. And we had fucking over six years to do it. As much as I would had loved to include even more musical creations of other people, nobody- including me- didn't know what to do with the older material! So I concentrated making new music instead (and sending raw ideas to people until the point they were probably completely tired of those already) and thus was fully tied with those new songs. I told everyone that we can record every freaking song everyone has made as long as they are actual, fully-made songs which can be recorded! But in the end, the songs that were made for the album as we speak were the only ones being in that condition.

For what it comes to democracy, I have never got to decide alone what comes to the album and what doesn't. In fact, not a single song in this album I have made either alone or with Tundra wasn't approved by everyone who wanted to hear it and everyone of those has contributed to them at least in either just approving them or suggesting/confirming/and even plainly denying things concerning the riffs, structure and even the demo production. I'm still to make that song some day which I think is so good that it doesn't need anyone's opinion. :P