"Epilogue"

Not, it´s not really an epilogue. Though I wish it kinda was.

The last week has been literally so busy, that as Virta put it, most of us have only had time for eating and sleeping besides the studio. Some not even that. So, let´s start from last week´s thursday.


Thursday, day 16

Virta and Vreth got to the studio at 10, and started to make Halkodisko better from what it was yesterday. It was top- notch, and after that they made all the choruses for Rivfader, as they were "screamed" while the actual verses are in a bit different style.
After getting to the studio from work at the afternoon, we continued with some keyboards. We got three songs ready, got something to eat and Tundra came as well. B.Dominator also visited us briefly. Then we unleashed Vreth, who sang Rivfader´s missing parts, did vocals for Soutu and....and...hmm. Something? I´m really sorry, but at this point- especially writing it down a bit later- it´s all a goddamn mess in my head.
Then we realized JUST IN TIME that one song´s keyboard/guitar- intro is going to be hell of a similar with another song we´ve done in the past, so we actually spent two hours for think- tanking how should we change it. We tried different sounds, ideas, arrangements and quite a few approaches until we found the exact way we wanted it to sound like. Everybody was very happy with it, and our "business meeting- lookalike" with papers and maps paid off big time. Now said corporate approach doesn´t work with producing metal music?
I dropped Tundra home at 1:30 AM and headed home.

Friday, day 17

It´s all groundhog day. Vreth and Virta were doing takes while I got to the studio, then I started to play keys again. Then Tundra got there. I saw one guitar player briefly on monday, and the other last week. Do we actually have guitarists in this band? We played keys with Virta, poisonized everything with such awesome sounds called as "kanala", "der alte", "munapää" and "pallinaama" and laughed our asses off. With all the keyboards now finally performed, Vreth continued filling his row of X´s with some great takes and we went finally home at 2AM.

Saturday, day 17

I left my car home today, because I swore I will start drinking beer 9AM today. What happened in reality, is that I started doing it seriously at 2AM. But before that happened quite a lot.
We started Beasty D´s Percussion Helvete at 9, and by the time the others got there, we already had recorded quite a load of them. Then I started running around the studio, picking up all the acoustic instruments and played them....a lot. So much different shit. Acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolin, bouzoki...and of course I forgot the guitar leads. >.<
It took a while for me to check out the drum sound Nino (the studio owner) had pre- produced and as I wasn´t prepared for starting producing and mixing at the same time we were supposed to sing, the singing took the hit. While most of the people were drinking beer at the lounge and listening to music and amusing themselves partying, we were at the studio booth trying the compress the snare with an old Urei squasher. So...much....distortion.
We started FINALLY recording the choirs and background shouts at 10PM and decided to only use three guys first in order to get the most "tight" result. Then we backed them up with the "football- choir" and saw it was perfect. The last takes were ready at 2AM and we finally got the chance to sit down after working 17 hours in a row. At 5:30AM I decided I´ve now relaxed enough and went home, leaving still some people drinking beer.

Sunday, day 18

The "some people drinking beer" were actually still there drinking more beer when I got back to the studio the next afternoon. "Cool", I thought, and decided to hit the control room after enjoying loud death metal, general droopyness and awesome drunken stories for half an hour. Gotta admit a spontaneous sunday- afternoon beer sessions would had been quite fun, but also finishing your tasks, preserving your marital status and eating something next week would be even more fun in the long run. Me so boring.
Vreth arrived a half an hour later with a pizza. Me so jealous! Then Virta came as well, the beer- drinkers went to a bar and we started doing the last vocals for Nexro and Marilyn. While I was editing Nexro´s final takes...

"Snap", said the electricity.

"Crackle", said the computer monitor.

"Pop", said my blood pressure.

We found out that a faulty laptop- charger had gone berserk, caused an overload and destroyed the fuse. Replacing that after some phonecalls and general twiddling, we switched on the computer with a drop of sweat. We still didn´t have backups from yesterday´s 17 hour sessions with "guest stars" so if the hard drive would had been FUBAR, we´d be screwed for good.
Luckily it ran smoothly, and we found out that everything was still there. Pheeeeeew.
After backing everything up, we continued with Nexro´s vocals. I had to leave before Marilyn got finished and we still had arrangements to do. What now? A wild brilliant idea appears!
We made the rhythmic arrangements and the phrasing together with Vreth and Virta, but I actually spoke them to the hard disk on the top of the music, so that Vreth could check out from there how we decided it to go. MUCH more faster to do these kind of "notes" instead of either...
a) writing rhythms down for him on paper for three verses and a bridge
b) him screaming everything two sentences at a time, while we´d also had to take care of the overall sound, performance and general "feeling" of the vocal takes which would be the final ones.

I called the guys 22:30 and they had just finished the rest of Marilyn.  Hurray for them! Monday would be mixing the shit down.  Let´s see how that´d turn out! So much to think still, and files and tracks to transfer between computers. More on that later.

"Bowling For Tentacles & Mail This To Siberia"

Monday, day 13.

I´m not sharing any names, but one of the guitar players didn´t show up to play his missing parts this morning. Luckily, the other one performed those as well, so when I got to the studio everything was played just as asked, with some extra awesome stuff as well. So kudos for this other guy!

The rest of the day was spent by editing the bass. Playing some parts again, making it sound like it should and finally having MAJOR problems with the tuning, I used all my professionality I could possible have to tune the parts digitally. Then we realized that Tundra´s bass playing wasn´t actually that bad at all, but the autotune had actually fucked up the timing in most of the places, so the more we used it the more the timings went astray. The joys of digital signal processing, I guess.
At the end we had a perfectly pitched bass- track.... which was played like someone who just got his first bass guitar.
After hours, bugged Pro Tools and tons of "FUCK THIS, delete, start from scratch" we finally got it sounding right like it was performed in the first place. And before you ask, no, there was no fucking way we´d play those songs again from scratch. Using 4 hours for editing is less than using 12 hours for playing AND editing.

We got home at 1AM- No keyboards were done due to the bass editing,but at least we sound now like we should.

Tuesday, day 14.

So, with all the "band" now finally done, lagging behind for only three days, it was finally time for me to do something else than edit, repair, instruct, scream and cry. So, enter the keyboards! FINALLY.

We rigged my (t)rusty N364 with Virta´s two better hi- end Korgs and started to ruin all the songs. That was so fucking fun compared to that hell I´ve been through for the last two weeks.

We first layered the "basic" stuff from my N364- Analog Pad, Choir and Strings. Seriously, the strings just sound so good in that machine. It´s the exactly same sound that e.g. Nightwish, Bal- Sagoth and Dimmu Borgir have used, and afaik, Tuomas Holopainen still uses.
Fun trivia: If you got access to that machine (or X3/ X5), pick up Prog C07- "The Strings" and start playing "Mourning Palace". You´ll be surprised. Not to mention that one...whatever, "Festival!" or something, which is exactly this sound. Hailz for creativity.

My wild guess is that back in the mid 90´s when me and countless of other metal keyboard players had access only to one piece of equipment, we got the best overall synth with a reasonable price, thus ending up getting that particular piece which was very popular. However, the number one rule of keyboard players:

NEVER. USE. LAYERED. PRESETS. ALONE.

Get it? Seriously. Never use them. On the other hand, we found out that Jeremy Soule has a Korg as well. Shame on you for laziness, Jeremy. Then again, we used it for too. We also used some Nintendo- sounds just because it turned Lolbster into a platformer game from the late 80´s. And then it started to sound like Giana Sisters. Yet, even though we love to take the piss on everyone, we´re not actually putting them that audible, so fear not. We´ll still be sounding like Finntroll instead of playing some uninspiring Göteborg- metal with occasional C64- sounds glued on top. No names mentioned.

After playing keys for Blodsvett (using Shakuhachi as a "old school Finntroll tribute I could swear I´d see Somnium clapping his hands for this one"!), Kyyppari (ended up sounding like a Turkish scifi- movie from the 60´s at some parts. Black Metal, no compromise!) and Kylskåp (Ever thought what happens if Demented are Go, Darkthrone and Nightwish clashed together?) , I went to visit home quickly (I live only 12 kilometers from the studio), had dinner with my wife, went to sauna, shaved face and head, and got back to the studio where Vreth already had started to do the vocals. The joys of recording near home. :D

I wasn´t very fond of the vocal sound so we sat down and started to tweak it into more violent. In the end we went with a guitar distortion plugin (!!!) and a compressor so tight you could hear the guy fart in the next room as loud as Vreth screams. The result sounded so uncannily aggressive that we decided to go for it as a template. We did vocals for Blodsvett and Kylskåp as well and headed home at 1:30 AM.

Wednesday, day 15.

I got vacation from work for today, so I headed straight to the studio and started to edit the trumpet and trombone takes. Virta got there half an hour later, and Vreth followed soon. I brought the upright bass track for Piraatti which I had recorded at my office (!!), imported it in and started to lay keyboards for Piraatti with Virta. We had some akward ideas, tested many, and finally started arranging the keys more to suit the upcoming vocal lines. That was one helluva task, yet rather fun. You see, we just got the lyrics for it, and realized that they are not fitting the way we thought they´d do, so we started to think how to "fill the blanks" in the chorus with keyboards.
 After finally getting Piraatti sounding like it should, we ruined Lolbster with all sorts of cheesy organs, 8- bit sounds and horns and whatnot. Then I ended up playing all cool shit into Halkodisko, including something so weird I´ll leave it as a surprise. Let ´s just say that our metal got even more black with this one.

After amusing ourselves with the keys, it was Vreth Tiem. We did vocals for Kyyppari and Lolbster and started to get rather hysteric at some point, after working for 13 hours in a row. We heard Vreth singing lines like "Vi skinka, vi gurka", "Penetratzioon" and whatnot, but finally got everything sounding perfect. Little whipping, little whiskey and he´s topping himself once again. Halkodisko started to sound a bit tired at some point (you try to scream 3 hours in a row at night and let´s see how your voice sounds like, hehe) so we decided that it´s 1:20AM and we should probably hit home after doing a 15+ hour workday.

When we got off from the studio, I realized it was freezing, extremely windy and there was snow everywhere. I dropped Tundra home and drove small roads back home, at max 40 km/h. Every turn was like bobsledding, and I certainly don´t need a smashed, unusable car at this moment. Some World of Warcraft soundtrack on the background, and we ended up chatting with Tundra about....yep, World of Warcraft for the whole trip. Hey, it´s very nice counterpart for doing metal for the whole day.

Got home at 2:10AM, remember pressing the snooze- button at 8AM.... woke up 9:20 with a phone on my hand. FUCK!  Looked out of the window. More snow. FUUUUUUUUUUUUU.
Had to get tires changed and ended up being at the office at 11 instead of 9. Fuck yeah.

"The Purple Army"

Friday, day 10.

Bass, so much bass. I edited guitars for hours, and played some of them again. Then Tundra played bass. Loads of it.

Saturday, day 11.

I came to the studio to EDIT MORE GUITARS. Tundra continued with his bass at the afternoon while I had some family- stuff to take care of. After taking care of that, I got the studio with my son right away, and edited more. And played some while Tundra was taking my son to a "studio- tour" to see "all cool stuff". I also sweared like a seafarer for 10 seconds in a row until I realized my son was right behind me. Nice parenting! Tundra was left playing more bass.
Went home, realized how much we´re lagging on the schedule and had a beer. Is it ok to cry if you´re 34?

Sunday, day 12.

OH FUCK YEAH MORE GUITARS. Don´t even fucking get me started.
Then we started recorded trumpet and trombone. At 17:30 I realized I was already supposed to go to the store in case we want to eat something at home and pick up my son from my parents. After I somehow managed to do these all, I tucked my kid to his bed and drove back to the studio to replace the last out- of - tune guitars (which I had actually played, so this time the blame´s on me solely).

At 22, those guitars were finally replaced. I ended up playing those parts with only the clean DI- sound. This way, we could be 100% sure there´s no tuning problems. Especially Skrymer´s guitar (just ask him about the frustration with that, hehe) has so horrible fine tuning due to...something...maybe crooked neck, don´t really know, that every time there´s a chord present, it has to be tuned "wrong" in order to get that chord sounding right.

Then we started to check and edit the bass takes. That was pretty much a fucking picnic compared to the guitar- concentration camp. Did four songs, we played some parts again and I got home 1 AM, only to wake up 7 AM again. And guess how well I slept while MARILYNBASSLINES HALKODISKOGUITARS trolololol TROMBtrytosleepONE....zzzz.....SURPRISETRUMPEzzzzTLINE....fuuuu....oknowigottopisswhattimeitis.....

>.<

"Future Basement & U-Suck"

Previously happened on "Stargate SG-1"

As you know, we are lagging in the schedule quite badly as the guitars got destroyed. So, another hit would be a death- sentence for these sessions. So the poor guitarists (and the respective bandmembers who have engineered the recordings) have done "quite" long days in order for us to make this possible. So, everyone was doing their best on wednesday. The guys actually sat there until 2:30 AM while Beast was recording at the point until they couldn´t do it anymore and went home. So, everything went smoothly and all the guys were definitely pushing their limits and doing their best.

And now, the conclusion.

*enter opening credits*

Thursday, Day 9.

Did you know that smoking can actually save lives? Or at least teeth. You see, when I rushed out of the controller room in a red- hazed rampage, so furious that I have no words to describe it here, Routa was very lucky to be at the downstairs at the moment.

But let´s rewind a bit.
If this is "too long, didn´t read" for you, here´s a spoiler. It wasn´t Routa´s fault after all.


While I was at the office, Routa was playing guitar at the studio. I got there about three- ish while he had already played from four hours and three songs. I edited some stuff and went straight to Kylskåp, on which song we agreed that I will play the both guitars after all. I had played Skrymer´s part on monday, and now it was time for the other guitar then.
So, I started to play. A bit "clean" guitar sound didn´t bother me at all, as I was used to hear the DI box (=clean sound channel) quite loud. I just thought that Routa most likely wanted to hear more of that while playing and I don´t mind playing with the same setup and sound.
While I had performed the other, newer guitar track to Kylskåp, edited and "glued" it together, I noticed that the guitars are not in tune together for some reason. So I deleted everything I had done today and started over. When it was finished, they still were out of tune. Then I realized, after trying and checking everything I could (even using Auto- tune on the clean signal to see how it analyzes the pitch) that the previous guitar track I had played was the one to blame after all. And of course lowering the pitch afterwards caused the sound to go totally fucked up due to technical shit I won´t bore you with (for the studio geeks, one word. Phase.).

"Well, I guess I know who´s to blame...", I snorted ironically and started to play the first guitar again. But using Tundra´s just arrived (15 minutes ago) tuner instead of Skrymer´s, because I knew that Tundra´s one is super. After I had performed the fourth fully recorded take for this one fucking song, the tune was super indeed. There are differences in tuners, trust me on this one. You don´t want to go with the cheapest when recording stuff.

Fast forward. Long story short, I also played Nexro´s other guitar. After I had edited, glued and blabla, I was very satisfied with it. At this point, it was already five o´clock and I was supposed to leave in 40 minutes. So, we started to do the bass sound. The cables and cabinets were rigged earlier in the afternoon, so we only had to put the microphone on, switch some cables and boxes and basically would be ready to start molding Tundra´s sound into something unintelligible. While I was still doing channels for bass in Pro Tools, Virta was rigging the setup.

Then I heard his voice.

"Ummm.....these guitar pedals are not on....what the hell?"
- what pedals, huh...., I mumbled while still occupied with the channel- creation.
"Noise suppressor [hum and noise eliminator, engl.note] and distortion...hmmmm"
-Whaaaaat?????, said yours truly, turning instantly around in the chair, suddenly not interested in the bass sound at all anymore.

"Are you telling me....no, you will NOT, PLEASE DON´T tell me...."
- Yeah...uhm, just how long have these been switched off?
- Well, I didn´t touch them at least before I started to play. I was continuing Routa´s takes and using exactly his sound.

 And now, let me re-phrase again something. Remember this?

"So, I started to play. A bit "clean" guitar sound didn´t bother me at all.....""A bit "clean" guitar sound...."

"clean guitar"

I grabbed Routa´s guitar instantly in a panic, accompanied with a loud "EI.....VITTU" (english translation would be rather desperate "oh fuck no") and pressed record, starting to play.
"Ok, switch the Noise Suppressor on", I said to Virta. He stomped it on, and it didn´t affect anything sound- wise. "Pheeeeew", I said and continued playing....."Ok, now the distortion pedal".
Time seemed to be running in half speed as I was playing the guitar, not seeing what Virta is doing behind my back.
"Please tell me you switched the distortion on already"
- Not yet....wait....ok nnnnnnOW IT´S ON!

At that very second it became extremely clear to me that everything we had recorded today, EVERY SINGLE NOTE AND EIGHT HOURS OF WORK (including me playing Kylskåp three times which seemed like a slap in the face at that point), was unusable because the day´s first player (whose responsibility it would had been)  hadn´t turned the pedals on when the sessions started in the morning.
My heart made two extra pumps. Then it missed four. I grew two years older in a fraction of seconds and lost probably ten years of my predicted life span.
I started screaming. Or rather, roaring. First Routa´s guitar flew into the couch from my lap. Then, flew the chair. And then there was a cry of war. A huge, distorted cry of war, accompanied with me storming out of the control room, looking for Routa to punch his teeth in, to violate him most brutally and bang his head to the metal door. Luckily for everyone, he was at the street, four floors down, having a smoke, completele unaware what is happening upstairs.

Roaring and outbursting my rage, I leave you also unaware on the not- very- nice- things I yelled and the amount of stuff that flew throughout the studio. Not the mention the studio´s metal door at all. Lucky thing it´s made from metal. Thick, solid metal.
After about half a minute of that sort of rampage that would make Donald Duck´s rage seizures look like a sloth on Ritalin, Skrymer said something.

"Dude, DUDE! Wait! The DI box- sound! Fuck, we can RE- AMP IT!!!!"

And there was silence. Accompanied with "OH...MY....fucking.....god....... eivittujätkäonneroeijumalauta.......aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa". This would mean that we could actually just drive the clean DI- signal through the amps, this time with the distortion and use everything we had recorded after all. So, only 30 minutes waste of time instead of 8 hours. Also, please note that after the earlier guitar- mishaps, this really was the last straw that snapped the camel´s back for the sessions. We would had been seriously fucked for good if we had wasted one more day and would had probably cancel the mix and postpone it for months.

I jumped two meters up and hugged Skrymer for at least five seconds. And that´s a lot for a brohug.
Nevertheless, I was very fucking pissed still at Routa at that point, so when he came back up, I said to him what was happened and told him to fuck the horse he rode in with. He said that he was EXTREMELY SURE AND ANAL that everything had been switched on when he started. In fact, he even checked battery levels and everything. So, "fuck you too".

I apologized him quite a lot and we started to think what the hell had happened. The only possible explanation was that someone, while rigging the bass in the afternoon, had switched the pedals off- either by accident or on purpose, in case while forgetting to put them back on when he was finished.
We know by now who was behind it, but it´s not really necessary information to badmouth people here. Especially, as technically, it is us who´d have to notice these things even though there wasn´t any suspections that something had changed.
What happened, happened and the most important thing is that it can be fixed.
And no, it wasn´t Routa. And not Virta either, because that´s what you´d think next. Let´s just say that it´s a big studio with a lot of people coming in and out, and people are sometimes in a hurry and things may get fucked up if you do them too quickly.

After I had restored my balls from somewhere between my navel and throat where they first jumped when I realized what had happened, we calmed down (or to be honest, I was rather the one who needed to calm down) and started to mold Tundra´s bass sound. Seemingly the Gods of Karma were pitying us, as we nailed it in 10 minutes. Tundra started to play his parts very excitedly, and I had to leave to pick up my son from my parents.

2:21 AM I received an SMS from Tundra.

"Let´s start about 1PM- ish. Just got home from the studio.
Zzz..."

I just have to lift my hat to these guys´ work ethics. Let´s see how today´s turning out!

"The Human Show"

Wednesday, day 8.

Seriously. The guys played over half of the missing guitars in one day and managed to do it even better, just like some people actually predicted in the internetz. I went there with my son for an hour, edited Soutu into final and left the guys ripping again.

This morning all the brass arrangements got finished, Mp3´s extracted, notes scanned and finally printed. And I can tell you there were quite a many. Close to hundred pages, to be exact.

And below you can get some perspective on the amount of them. Seven songs are getting a brass- treatment, with different stems for trumpet, trombone, alto and tenor saxophone. I´m not sure who´s going to sweat more- me writing and arranging those or the players at the studio when they start recording those. :D

It looks like I´m going to edit the guitars in another computer while Tundra´s playing his bass, starting today. We should be ready with the guitars and bass on saturday afternoon, which makes us only half a day late from the schedule.

After the guitars are edited and bass played, we will do some additional feedbacking for them as well. As you can probably imagine (or I´m crushing your delusions, in which case I´m horribly sorry) normally people don´t play guitars in the same room the amp is located as it´s FUCKING LOUD.
So, that means the guitar doesn´t feedback at all as it´s not close to the amp. And if you have thought of having some feedback somewhere (in, for example, some "mid- part" where the guitars are having a long and open chord) you have to do it afterwards while standing in the front of that FUCKING LOUD amplifier. I have already marked all the feedback- sections down so it´s pretty much one hour and we have captured those. Then we just glue them to the actual rhythm guitar tracks and are having a blasting feedback all the time it´s needed. A bit cheesy, I know, but unless you´re playing everything live, it´s almost impossible to create the sound otherwise. The guitar amp is blowing over 100dB, so imagine how loud your headphones would have to be in the recording session.....not really healthy at all.

While the guitar adventures continue, I will accompany the guys in a couple of hours after I get away from the office. Meanwhile, riddle me this. What´s in the picture?

I´ll leave you thinking.

Later, peeps.

"Tentacle Jail"

Tuesday, day 7.


I didn´t cry. I didn´t even scream. In fact, my first reaction was laughter. Ironic laughter, that is. Followed with a very long sigh.

All of the recorded, edited and polished guitar tracks were gone for good.

It all started with a innocent, "...yeah, I´ll just start backing up the stuff and then we can leave it be and go home for the night". And then, something went horribly wrong and the guys were left with a stupefying expression on their faces. Backups had somehow being replaced by four days earlier backups and as a bonus, the latest versions were gone from the actual hard disk. I heard that Vreth was literally shaking when he realized that every single note we had recorded since friday evening had been blown up into cyberspace forever.

It could had happen to anyone, so I don´t give a rat´s ass who pressed any buttons at the moment they got destroyed. When the computer says "no", you fucking dance to it. No options.
Then the guys made the computer dance, but it was already too late. Nothing could be found for good. So they actually stayed the whole goddamn night AT the studio, trying to figure out what the hell can they do to restore the files. At morning, when Nino (the studio owner) got there, he was explained what had happened. Needless to say, he was quite frustrated for us. Especially as he know what kind of a battle it had been to record those guitars.

[studio_jargon]
Luckily, when I had edited and gone through every guitar part, I had consolidated them as 100% mixing- ready files with all crossfades and edits done. This would also help me to keep in track in what was 100% approved as I could see that if the file´s in one piece, there´s nothing that I should do to it. So, when we realized that if we can recover anything, we don´t do a flying fuck with thousands of "gtr_mesa1_57_fade.wav" files which last for 0.5 seconds each....until we realized that my consolidating was a gift from Gods at that point. If we could recover, we´d have the exact guitar tracks in one piece instead of thousands snippets. And on the top of that- if we could only find the consolidated DI- track, we could re- amp from that in case we´d miss e.g. Skrymer´s cabinet #2. 
(The tracks per guitar were Mesa + 57, Mesa + 421, Orange + 57, Orange + 421, DI). The only recorded songs I hadn´t consolidated yet were Blodsvett and Soutu, because they were played just before everything got destroyed while I wasn´t there and thus I hadn´t had any chance yet to check, edit and consolidate them first.
[/studio_jargon]

So, the guys started recovering the files with some software. After three hours, we found snippets from someone´s Orange amp miked with a SM57.... 1 minute of Halkodisko´s Skrymer- side and some years- old drums from some other band. And then, we found Piraatti´s guitars! Or, at least....the DI´s. So, we re- amped them and.....yeah, that´s about it. 40 hours of time wasted. Ten songs recorded, of which NINE were destroyed.

"Fuck", said Skrymer, and grabbed his guitar. "FUUUUUUUUUUU," said Routa, and grabbed his cigarette pack. And "FUCK MY LIFE", said yours truly and bummed a cigarette from Routa.
I quickly made some estimations, we thought a perfect plan how to proceed and decided that there´s no time for cursing, being cranky nor going all drama here. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So here´s another plan for now.

We know 100% sure we can´t rescue Blodsvett or Soutu because I hadn´t consolidated, a.k.a "glued" those guitars together before the Great Destruction. (read the studio jargon- part if you want more on the subject) So, tonight´s plan was Blodsvett again, Soutu again and then Kylskåp and Nexro (of which both hadn´t been touched yet). And after that, the guys leave and leave a "deep scanning recovery" doing it´s job for the whole night. That will take MANY hours but might be more effective than the normal recovery they ran yesterday.
So, if the deep scan finds anything usable, great. If not, Skrymer starts to play his parts again from the beginning. It should be faster now, as he has already played them once and knows exactly what to do. And when Routa comes at the afternoon, he continues.
It´s going to be a 4- day job in two days if we want to keep the schedule even somehow, but it should be manageable. We´ll see what happens, but I can assure you this won´t be exactly a picnic.

There will be no shit captured, were it a hurry or not, so this may turn up quite a task. "This is good enough", is not good enough. And we have basically only today and tomorrow. But we can do this, because we are Finntroll. Wimps and posers, leave the studio, we´re here to CRUSH and no fucking hard drive failure will stop us doing so, even if it took us 30 hours per day.

Let´s see how this will turn out.

EDIT:
I just talked with Virta and Skrymer on the phone. Seemingly, the deep scan had found shitloads of files, yet NONE we could use. So, we´re back in saturday afternoon. Skrymer starts playing this moment until the point Routa arrives after 4 hours, and then Routa will play his parts to the songs Skrymer has recorded today. I´ll come to do editing for at least two songs at the evening with my son and continue editing tomorrow after office work. The plan is to have everything recorded and edited by saturday morning. Fuuuuuu.

"Tentacle Headquarters"

Monday, day 6.

I had taken a whole day off in order to concentrate on the guitars today. So, Skrymer was already at the studio at 10:15 when I got there and we started to check how Mitävittua was caught on Pro Tools. A couple of hours of tweaking, editing, some "play this tighter" and "we weren't sure about this one ending so we left it out" and we were ready to wrap it up and start with Marilyn.

After several hours of serious cursing, we finally got Skrymer's guitars recorded. I have to admit it's simultaneously fun, yet quite a double- edged sword to start demanding more from people playing- wise each session.
This time, it was Marilyn's main riff, consisting of small rythmic variations which really are the core of the riff- otherwise it would only sound like some bad ZZ Top- esque. And the whining of yours truly when it sounded like that. "There are no gaps, you have to punctuate the off- beats as hard as the main rythm in between while playing it as militant as you can...and please, remember that first syncopation on the second round".
Well, at least I'm still alive writing this. After Routa had his parts recorded, we noticed that -despite of our completely anal approach on the issue- the guitars sound that they are slightly out of tune with each other. We ended up downpitching Skrymer for 3 cents (yes, it is that accurate for you studio geeks out there) and most likely it did the trick. Let's see what the rest of the instruments will do, if it's still too "chorused", we might have to play it again. Noizzzz.

We hopped into Soutu, I clarified a couple of riffs and parts to the guys and gave them a lesson how to read my guitar notes I had made for myself with both guitars. If they can read the rythms and notes from those, they can also use those as the final FINAL double- check if they can' figure the stuff out from the rehearsal Mp3's.They seemed to get the idea so I'm glad I had made those!
I had to leave the studio at 18 in order to pick up my son, and Vreth hopped into engineering- part while Virta was supervising the playing. Tomorrow morning there should be Routa's part of Soutu as well, and both guitars of Blodsvett. I'm going there at 13, and should have enough time to check and edit today's playing. I have no doubts the guys are doing their best, so thumbs up! We'll get into the bass sound most likely on Wednesday, so the schedule is looking like it should.

This will be one hell of a record if everything keeps going as planned, I can tell you. ^^