Wally Crying

"Trollhorn demanding more Korgs, 1998"

I decided earlier to continue the stupid tradition of giving the studio blog titles names from my favourite video game soundtracks, even they tend to confuse also me a lot when I need to find something from the previous texts. I mean, surely a blog post called as "Bowling For Tentacles / Mail This To Siberia" is a clear indicator that it was about recording synths for our last album.

As the smartest of you have probably expected, this text is actually not about crying ex-cartographers in a sinking pirate ship, but synths. And WHAT kind of synths, let me tell you!
Brace yourselves and prepare for a sonorous blast from the past, as this is a story of our keyboard recordings, a.k.a....

"MAKE DIGITAL SYNTHS GREAT AGAIN" 

As I told before, we thought this album should be more about keyboards and less about folk instruments. Not that we don't like real folk instruments anymore - quite the contrary - but after the rather superfolky Blodsvept we wanted to bring most of the good old synth madness back. (Yes, there will still be banjos and whatnot. Don't worry.)

In the comment-section of that last album's keyboard blog text, I mentioned that "This time we´re purposedly taking the "extra shit" from keyboards away because there are so much other things for the listener to hear." Well, guess what? The extra shit is back with a fucking vengeance! We talked about just a couple of days ago with Virta and Vreth how the keyboards were not in a very prominent role on Blodsvept and wanted to do something different this time again. But in order to put a ton of synths, you have to start from somewhere. So let's start from the basics, and to quote one of my favourite persons in the video games industry, mr. Jason Graves; "steal my sound!"

The meat and potatoes of our keyboards have always been the same three sounds of my (still main workhorse) Korg N364 which I mention also in the earlier Blodsvept- keyboard blog text. I have never recorded a metal album without using these in pretty much every song:

 - An analog-styled slower synth string pad for layering the basic chords underneath the guitars usually through every song non-stop. Depending on the context, it's either playing simple doublings of certain notes of the guitar riffs or just providing a tonal chord pad underneath the screechy guitars- usually omitting the third note of the chord in order to keep it less overwhelming. I use a lot of fifths instead of triad chords in general- something which just stuck onto me from the 90's, hah! When combined with a rock band, it can mellow even a nastier guitar sound into a more pleasant one and carry the basic tonality of the song together with them.

- A traditional choir ("aah") pad which has a slower attack and mellower timbre when played lightly and faster attack and more brighter sound when smashed mercilessly. Usually used for either for punctuating more important parts which need to stand out more with chords, or as a single "pedal point", usually from a lower register.

- A fast-attacking full string patch, which sounds exactly like this, because it's the same patch, haha! I usually don't use it for chordal work, though, but either for doubling most of the melodies in the background usually with block chords (which is kind of the same when you have a pop song with backing singers singing harmonies underneath the main vocal line), punctuating important lines and doubling many guitar riffs. (Yes, you read that right. I do a lot of that.)

Due to being over 25 year old synthesis, all of those three sounds have a certain "digital processing" going on - meaning they sound rather artificial, wide and lovely wobbly reverbrant- and they blend with the guitars and bass remarkably well, making the whole sound more glued together and giving the overall palette a timbre which suits the processed metal sound really nicely. While I'm a great fan of acoustic instruments in general, there's something unexplainable awesomeness in the synths of that era. Some might consider if blasphemy, but if you know what is referred as "the Lexicon sound", these sounds are basically providing the same gluey loveliness to the overall timbre. I personally think that a real orchestra doesn't suit processed metal music generally very well, and tend to enjoy more processed and "unrealistic" sounds on top of the usual wall of guitars. For that, nothing beats the digital keyboard sound from the late 80´s and early 90´s.

From left to right: M1, Triton, N364

In order to take full advantage of that sound, we decided to ditch the more high-end stuff usually complementing the N364 and take a step back. At the end we decided to use three older Korg keyboards as our main setup: My N364, Virta's Triton and an old M1 we borrowed from the studio. All being the same brand because we are very familiar with the Korg sound and PCM synthesis in general and know well how to operate them, and also because we couldn't get any decent other brands on our hands. For technical info, the M1 is from 1988, N364 from 1994 and the Triton from 1999, showcasing the "high end" of our gear in this session. Due to being rather well-used, all of the synths have the typical failures of malfunctioning and even missing buttons and some even some broken keys, but utilizing midi cables and some clever workarounds they all could be controlled and programmed as needed. In order not to go too deep to that rabbit hole, though, we did bring a couple of wild cards such as a newer Korg M3 and Novation K-station but at this point of the session they haven't been used, as we've got everything we wanted out of these three.

DAY ONE - FRIDAY, 20.3.2020.

We began layering the first tracks down in the late morning, and spent a considerable time at the start on making choices between different auxiliary sounds ranging from timpanis to flutes, pads and whatnot. For our disappointment, the M1 didn't have any extra memory cards installed so we were stuck with a way smaller palette than we originally thought, but the sounds we got our from it were good and useful. While on Blodsvept and Nifelvind we tried to get as realistic sounds we could got out of the synths, on this new one we ditched that idea completely and decided the result on the matter of how the sound fits to the overall timbre of the band. That being said, we did avoid the most horrible synth violins and shakuhachis in order to not to sound like an early 90´s relaxation music CD but on many cases we chose the N364 over Triton, because the more artificial sound often just fit the music so much better. That's also why I'm not keen on using high-end sample libraries in black metal albums either- they are a tad bit too realistic for this orcish stuff we're doing or just generally impossible to fit into the mix without sounding completely superimposed. There are some exceptions though, as I'm going to use some sample libraries to utilize some sounds which are impossible to pull of with an old (or new) synth, such as the nyckelharpa and Irish low whistle.

The Quality Assurance team in action!

As the keyboard days are usually a huge definition for the general timbre of the album (both in overall sound and density), we had some extra mental pressure to make sure that the songs that were "almost" there in the demo phase would get that small facelift needed while the songs that were already sounding great could become even a bit greater with better sounds and performance. The first three layers (Analog Pad/ Choir/ Strings) are always the more boring part, followed by a bit more interesting pre-written parts for piano, harps, flutes and whatever "basic" stuff. After that we go all nuts and try all sorts of different things with doubling, introducing completely new elements or just generally scattering some fun extra stuff everywhere from orchestra hits to pizzicato runs and weird synth sounds. As I do the basic arrangements myself, most of the decisions done in the keyboard days with Virta and Vreth bring certain personality to all songs- and especially to those ones which lacked a bit of it. There's only so much you can do with guitars after all!

The first song, codenamed as "Trollstorm" was one of those ready-sounding ones, which didn't need much new ideas albeit for the demoed ones. It was stormed (...) through in a couple of hours in the afternoon as a good simple starter for the session. Another easy one was decided to tackle next, and a song codenamed as "Urfisken" (!!!) was banged in during the next hours. It was fast - even faster at the studio than the demo version was - and we had some fun challenges playing everything as tight as possible in a furious 195 BPM speed. Due to sharing certain similar characteristics with another song in the album, we had to make decisions concerning the main melody instruments in order to avoid repeating ourselves....ending up using my 19 year old live patch for Jaktens Tid for the main flute melody. :D Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it!

"Nightwish" was one of those songs which lacked "something". After replicating faithfully everything what was written in the demos we started to experiment with different sounds in order to give the song a bit more uniqueness. We did all sorts of cool and weird things but still couldn't figure what to wo with the main melody. I had tried EVERYTHING at home, but just couldn't get it working in the way I wanted- until I suddenly came up with an idea which definitely wasn't something we'd usually do, and suggested a piano to the guys! After quickly trying it out, there was a silence in the room first, because everyone was too ashamed to admit at first they loved it. And I loved it too! In the end we decided to put even more piano to the song and it became so bombastic we went home with a huge smile on our faces.

 DAY TWO - SATURDAY, 21.3.2020.

Technology to the resque!

No, I can't remember all this! I'm old!

Due to having quite a many synth tracks going on in the songs, I was playing them out of my memory on friday and when I had played everything I remembered, I did a double-check from the demo if I could hear something I didn't play. Opening the Cubase-demoprojects at home, however, revealed me that I still had missed some small things from here and there. We continued the work at saturday morning, but this time I was prepared a bit better, because I had actually taken screenshots of every demo keyboard parts and kept them visible on my tablet while I was playing. With that I could actually see what's playing and where, and wouldn't miss a thing anymore. (I actually forgot some things at friday and had to play them on saturday morning after double-checking them at home)

After filling the missing parts from the three songs we had completed yesterday, we started laying down stuff for another fast one. For my dissappointment, there really wasn't much room for anything extra fun or new innovations as the song was pretty straightforward and very "complete" sounding already in the demo stage. I was struggling a bit with the arrangements as some of the parts were shitty as hell to play (moving block chords from G# minor, thank me and fuck me) as I didn't really "rehearse" anything beforehand, but with some practice I managed to perform even the nastiest parts in. We decided to not to start filling it with futile and forced ideas and decided to hop into a next one which needed a bit more of that famous "something"- let's call it "personality" for the lack of a better word. And boy, did we get that something out from the synths!

Codename "Hermanni", did include some (plain) piano in the demo but we decided to take it to a next level and go full HD 90´s on that one. So instead of going with just a plain piano, we used a layered combination of piano, digital bells and an pad which is very, very familiar from many great albums as well. ;) On your left there's a sneak peak on what's coming!
We also utilized Vreth's idea of "Wardruna-esqued low bronze horns" but due to wanting to be more faithful to our current sound, we ditched the idea of using real samples and went for a pitched synth Flugelhorn instead, hah! At the end Hermanni was so full of synths we couldn't fit anything to it anymore and hopped to the next one.

We had quite much fun with the next fast one, which sounds like a violent crossbreed between early Emperor and a typical melodic Finntrollesque fun, featuring pizzicato runs, orchestra hits and even some church organ! After the song was completely cluttered with anything we could think of, it was time to move to the next one.

We started playing something called "Kampela" but at the second chorus stopped to listen that something was horribly wrong. Either our keyboards had been weirdly damaged or the guitars were out of tune- neverthless, everything sounded like a demo band from 1994- and despite for our love to the more oldschool setting, this definitely wasn't our plan to bring that element to our music.
After spending half an hour on finding out what was the problem, we then came to a conclusion that there is some seriously fucked up intonation problems on the guitars which clashes against the modulated keyboard sounds in a full context. You can't hear it from the guitars alone, which is why we couldn't spot it at first. I played the first usual three layers to Kampela without the guitars and we decided to call it for the day.

EDIT 26/03/2020: Against all odds, the problem wasn't with the guitars, but it seems heavily that the three first synth layers are actually about 20 cents down in tune. We have no idea how this is even possible, but will investigate the matters later in the weekend.

DAY THREE - MONDAY, 22.3.2020.

Come sunday, I was actually a bit sorry that we decided to have a day off, because I was really in the mood for playing the rest of the keyboards in. Nevertheless, it was a perfect time to finally prepare all the violin sheets for the marvellous Olli Vänskä (of Turisas fame) who is going to play some of that for the album as well. I spent the morning writing the notes for him while my wife was entertaining the kids and making food, and realized that I have become my late father in the 80's, who often was busy in his workroom "preparing sheet music for the musicians at the studio" while we kids were pestering our mom who desperately tried to keep the house running meanwhile. Kudos to my mom and my wife, me and my dad are sorry. It's amazing what the spouses of musicians sometimes have to go through due to us, and we should never take those things for granted.

We continued the synth boot camp on monday afternoon as soon as I had got rid of my real job assignments. On my way to the studio I realized that also Kampela needs more of that good old layered synth piano, and we spent some time figuring out the best way to arrange it with Virta and Vreth. As a rather dominant sound, you need to be careful not to clutter the whole arrangement and the upcoming mix, and need to figure out carefully which notes of the chord are enough to bring the element there and how much rhythm is really needed. The more there are elements on top of each other, the more careful you need to be with the arrangements and also keep in mind that not every layer can be the "main" one.

After a couple of hours, we had succesfully lifted Kampela from the category of "almost there but needs something" into "one of my personal favourites". Sometimes that happens! We hopped to something called "Angrybirds" (!!!!) which was rather quickly done due to the fact that there will be a lot of acoustic instruments and pre-arranged sample tracks (hurdy-gurdy, etc) for which we need to spare some room from the synth madness. As the clock was ticking and I had the absolutely most hardest and complicated song saved for the last, it was time to go completely nuts with some serious bal-sagothesque (hails!) keyboard work.

The last song took me over three hours to play in, and it had a TON of different stuff going on ranging from trumpets to harp glissandis and back. Some of those were so difficult to play from the key we operated in that I actually had to transpose my keyboard in order to get rid of some of the most fucked-up fingerings...which in the process made simultaneously my brain completely melt. I have what they refer as "absolute pitch" and if I need to play a familiar instrument with a "wrong" tuning, it's extremely hard for me to comprehend it because my brain keeps telling me that "this note comes from this place". When I press "C", there should be "C" coming out, or my system will go all syntaxerror. That meant that I actually had to play relying on muscle memory without paying attention to what I hear, and it took a considerable amount of time to actually get it done.

My face indicates that I probably played horribly wrong.

When the absolutely last part was performed in with a pan flute patch from M1 (MEGAHAILS 666), it was a perfect conclusion to end our three-day Kamp Keyboard journey. Everyone was really pleased on what we had achieved and I stormed out of the studio door two minutes after the last note in order to drive to pick up groceries from the store before they shut down. On my way home I was really happy of the work we had done and felt that not only this album is actually finally happening, but it sounds fucking good even though I say it myself. But hey, if I couldn't say something like that at this point it'd probably be quite alarming, right? ;)

While Vreth started to perform his vocal duties yesterday, I have still a ton to do with the rest of the guitars, reamping, some extra samples, editing the bass takes and preparing everything for the upcoming acoustic/percussion/choir sessions later this week. Stay tuned for the next update and hopefully you got what you expected for from this rather in-depth post!