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NAVIGATION
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Epiclore Studio Blog 2006-2007 by Olli Hurskainen Prologue
We set out to record our fifth release, hoping to have it finished before December 2006... well, we'll see about that later... nevertheless, the album will be called "Labyrinth Alpha" and here are the track titles!
1. Cold For the record, the song "Riverball" will be a theme song for a local football club »SC Riverball for which also our very own Ercci plays. The people from the team asked if I could compose an anthem for them and I promised to include it on the album.
In July we had our first setbacks (traditionally everything possible goes wrong with our productions)... The following two news items were posted at that time: Wednesday 19. 7. 2006 - Drummer suffers hand fracture So that things would not work out too easily this time either, our drummer Panu has severely injured his right hand. Several bones were fractured in two of his fingers. He underwent a surgery and is forced to wear a plaster for several weeks, and we might have to postpone the recordings of the new album because of this. He is however doing everything he can to learn the new songs despite his injury, and we hope he recovers in time for the recordings. At this time it's hard to tell how it turns out. We'll keep you up to date as these dramatic events progress!Friday 28. 7. 2006 - Guitarist's finger damaged as well Dramatic events progress, as promised. With only two weeks remaining before entering the studio, Olli has damaged a finger in his left hand during a volleyball match (a clever choice of sport, don't you think). Consequently, he is unable to play guitar for the time being, and it's hard to say when the finger heals. With two members of the band now unable to play, it seems the recordings will have to be postponed. We will try our best though, and inform you with the details later.(Also Petri suffered a slight injury afterwards and hurt his knee. After this, Ercci claimed there was something wrong with one of his ribs; we saw fit to ignore him.) Despite these unfortunate events, we didn't cancel our studio booking. Panu will move to Helsinki in the end of August, and so the recordings MUST be finished for his part by that time. This blog tells you how things work out!
Monday, August 14th
Our booked studio time began today. We didn't actually bother go to the studio just yet, but agreed that we'll try to start the recordings some time this week. Panu still had his plaster on, so we couldn't begin with the drums, which we prefer doing.
Tuesday, August 15th
Working on some final adjusting of the pre-production with Petri at his place... we discussed some arrangement issues and made some decisions about sounds that we'll use and so on... almost all of the keyboards, which were the main subject of the day, are now arranged at this point.
Wednesday, August 16th
Panu had his plaster removed. Two metallic pins that had been inserted into his hand and which kept his bones in order while the hand healed, were removed as well. It'll take at least a few days before he regains his touch with the drumset...
Thursday, August 17th
Panu is still completely unable to use his hand. Besides, he left for Helsinki today and will return on saturday evening. So much for this week's recordings... we agreed that his drums will be brought to the studio on sunday, and that we'll try to start the recordings on monday. We also heard that he will be on a gig with his other band, The Ruby Foos, on the 30th. This means we will have only one week's time to spend on the drums.
Sunday, August 20th
Meanwhile, Petri stated that he had had some trouble trying to move the basic demo tracks to the studio computer and that he'll be working on some mixdowns very late tonight! :P Something tells me this isn't the last we've seen of technical difficulties... Anyway, in the evening, we took Panu's drums to the studio and managed to have them properly mic'ed as well. If Petri is able to have the studio ready and our basic tracks happily on the computer, the recordings will commence tomorrow.
Monday, August 21st
His fingers are surprisingly well, but instead his wrist is very sore because he hasn't been able to move it for weeks. He will complete the recordings while wearing a wrist support. He says he's in constant pain because of the strain caused by the playing... and he's having trouble especially with drum fills and right hand snare hits because of the difficult angle he has to use his hand in... but he does what needs to be done! And we're proud, of course.
Today he was able to record drums to two whole songs (#8, #6). Of course, we had to spend a lot of time rehearsing before he could play anything useful... Song #1 was rehearsed for a long time, but we decided to leave it for tomorrow. It turned out to be more difficult than expected. In that (as well as in almost every) song there is a ton of things to remember, which I of course hadn't quite thought through at all while writing the songs and drum arrangements... (Lesson learned, next time I'll consult the drummer beforehand.) Bad news of the day: Panu will be going to a job interview in Helsinki this friday, which means the drums must be taken away on thursday. Thus we have only two full days left and six more songs to go... it shouldn't be a problem though, we're well within schedule.
Tuesday, August 22nd
Panu and Petri began to work at one o'clock (I joined them a few hours later). We re-arranged some of the drums of the opening song of the album because they seemed to cause a lot of trouble yesterday evening. It took only a few takes this time and we were able to move on rather quickly. After this we recorded two "easy" songs, #2 and #4. After that we took a break, and I had time to go play a few sets of volleyball. :) After returning, Panu wanted to start to work on the longer title song. Ercci showed up as well to listen what we'd accomplished so far, and to rehearse some of the bass lines as well. Panu managed to record a few takes of the title song before the drumhead of his bass drum gave in (obligatory setback of the day).
Panu returned surprisingly quickly, and something strange had happened to him: after installing the new drumhead, he was suddenly making a lot less mistakes and playing much more accurately in time... maybe the new drumhead had magic powers or maybe he was just appropriately pissed... :) Anyway, the title song was quickly finished after this. I was very happy with what we'd accomplished. Only two songs left, and plenty of time to go.
Wednesday, August 23rd
Setback of the day: a large-scale power failure which caused a 4-minute blackout in almost the entire city, including the studio complex, managed to mix up the studio software. At first it was thought that the settings on some of the hardware hadn't been properly saved prior to the blackout, which would cause problems after the restart. However, this was not the case and it took some time to locate the real problem.
After the problem was solved, the day was about only one song (#3), which turned out to be a pain in the arse. A slow tempo combined with a difficult bass drum pattern required Panu to "think too much" and he said that if the song had been faster, he wouldn't have had a problem with it... but again, after he got pissed enough with the song, he recorded it with but little difficulties. We agreed to leave the last remaining song until tomorrow and wrap the day up relatively early.
Thursday, August 24th
As for the rest of the recordings, we don't know exactly what happens next and when. Petri will be doing some tweaking with the drum tracks as well as re-recording of some of the synths once he has time. After that it's probably time for bass guitars. We'll see about that later...
Sunday, October 15th
So, it's been quiet again for some time... The studio has been pretty much reserved for educational purposes for the last one and a half months, but now we've been able to squeeze ourselves in there for the next week. We intend to record all of the guitars during this period.
Monday, October 16th
Everything should be ready for the recordings now, but since I still have some unavoidable study-related issues tomorrow (an English exam to be exact, hehe) the recordings won't probably commence until Wednesday. I'm confident though, I'm sure we'll be done by Sunday. And even if not, we can leave the acoustic parts out for now. They can well be recorded later, since we obviously don't need the amp for that.
Tuesday, October 17th
Setback of the day: my injured finger showed some symptoms again. It had healed to the point of me being well able to play with it, but it seems it can't endure much strain after all... I hope it holds out until I'm done with it! :P
Wednesday, October 18th
Time and time again I'm faced with the question why I have to develop my ideas into complex compositions which I lack the talent to actually play. Sure it sounds nice on the synth but once you try to play it accurately with the guitar... Today I had to recognize my incompetence with one of my own licks. Well, since we eventually moved on, I think I finally nailed it at some point... or maybe our ears just had grown tired and didn't hear anything correctly anymore... Setbacks of the day included trouble with a malfunctioning control console and mysteriously changing microphone levels... we had to change one microphone and a few cables only to notice that the problem was in fact in the mic preamp... All in all we spent about six hours on the studio, recording the rest of the rhythm guitars. Now they're done and we agreed to give it a rest for the rest of the day and start working with the leads tomorrow.
Saturday, October 21st
 Obligatory pose Well, only acoustic guitars remain to be recorded at this point. We were pretty sure we'd have enough time to take care of them tomorrow, so we didn't bother start working with them today.
Sunday, October 22nd
Since I was going to have to attend other duties at four o'clock, we had to get to the studio already at 9 AM in order to have enough time to record everything. My finger hadn't bothered me much during the week, but now while playing the acoustic guitars I started to experience some problems again and had to take breaks to give it some rest once in a while. Luckily there aren't that many acoustic parts, and I managed to record them all in time, though again, I had arranged guitar parts too difficult for my abilities... especially now with a sore finger, I had some trouble trying to play some picking parts correctly and properly...
Well, all the guitars are now finally recorded nevertheless. Bass guitars are probably up next at some point, when we manage to book some more time at the studio, that is. That'll happen probably some time in November.
Monday, March 12th
OMG it's March already, what happened? It seems five months just disappeared somewhere... at least that's how it feels like. And I just remembered the other day that we have an album on the way, waiting for us to finish it! :) So, I thought it would be best to give you an update on the situation. Well. There isn't much to tell as you can imagine. Of course, I had to change the title of the blog, since apparently we couldn't finish the album by the end of the year as we originally intended. And I don't expect anyone's surprised we didn't. But this doesn't mean nothing has happened! Well, I can't say much has happened, either. In fact, the only thing that has happened are the bass guitars, which are now happily recorded. Ercci and Petri spent a weekend in the studio in December working with the bass tracks and recorded the whole thing. I was out of town, so I couldn't really supervise the process... I was a bit nervous at first but in the end I have to say I'm happy with the result. Some parts were not played exactly as I had them in mind but I'm only glad that different views get to influence the result. After that, well... the renovations that begun in the studio facility in the beginning of the year and that were supposed to be finished by February, even yet haven't finished. Besides, in the past two months I've been having a day job again, so I wouldn't have really had any energy to focus on the recordings anyway, should we have had the opportunity to continue working with the album. Nevertheless, the process has progressed to the point where only vocals and some of the keyboards remain to be recorded. After this we (or mostly Petri) will of course still have a wearying mission with the mixing of the album, so I wouldn't be too optimistic about the release date at this point. While other matters continue to distract our concentration on the project, we will find the time and the place to carry on with the task at hand! I know some of you are enthusiastically waiting (and I can't tell you how happy that makes me) but all I can tell you is to have patience. As I've said before, the previous album was released nearly two years after the first deadline, so I'm sure our most devoted fans are already used to delays of this magnitude, hehe... but don't worry, I'm pretty sure it won't take two more years this time! ;)
Thursday, May 3rd
At this point I shall make the announcement regarding the guest musician appearing on the album. Tuula Tolvanen, a friend of mine from the University Choir, has sung a duet with me for the album. I had talked to her about this possibility already years back, and now that we are finally getting somewhere with the new album (which has a bit more proper atmosphere for this kind of experiment compared to the previous one) I presented this possibility to her. The song I chose for this purpose wasn't originally written for it, but since I decided I didn't want to compose another song (the album gained a bit more length than what I thought) I rearranged the final song of the album and changed some of the lyrics to make it more suitable for this purpose. It is a powerful, melancholic song and differs quite a bit from our back catalogue. Nevertheless it's one of my two favourites of the album.
Wednesday, May 23rd
However, the world isn't yet spared from this record. We had made a temporary mixdown of the whole record with drums, guitars and basses, which we now plan to use for the post-production. The sounds and the balance are tolerable. We still have the synths from the pre-production stage, and vocal recordings that were saved in the Catastrophe, so I'm hopeful we'll end up with a satisfying result after all. We still have some major issues to deal with... but luckily no one knows how this record was originally intended to be and therefore I'm confident we'll get away with most of them somehow, hehe... After these terrible news I though I might as well use the material I had in my hands to make at least something concrete. The people from a local football club »SC Riverball have been anxiously awaiting their theme song (which I promised to compose and include on the album) from day one and I thought I'd give them something at this point. The version of the song "Riverball" that I delivered for them to use with their own video footage etc. won't be the same one that we'll have for the album itself, and therefore I won't release it on the website at this point. Go see a Riverball match and you might hear the song... :)
Tuesday, May 29th
I'm seriously beginning to think that this album just isn't meant to happen. Today Petri announced that his computer, on which we were supposed to finish the work with the keyboards and do the mixing and mastering, is apparently falling apart. Something wrong with the motherboard or something like that. This means the work has to be done on my computer, and therefore I will basically have to record most the synths again, because I don't have the same sequencer on my comp that he does. Luckily most of the synth audio files are still on my old comp, so I can burn them on a dvd and drag-and-drop them into place. Not that I'm very happy about that task even still. For the rest of the parts I still have the MIDI files, so at least I don't have to play them all again, just find the according sounds and record. Again, after the bad news I just had to do something productive. So I went into one of the piano booths in the basement of one of the University buildings with my comp and a microphone, and recorded all of the backing vocals. It took me about 5 hours, and towards the end I felt like throwing the whole project down the drain, hehe... but at least all of the vocals are done now. So we're one more step closer to the end. Or are we? I don't even want to think about all the work we still have to do with the keyboards. Anyway, we talked about going to the studio one more time, once we're done with the recordings, and doing the mastering with professional equipment. Good plan. We'll see how that'll work out in practice... now, I'm not a pessimist. But a week ago I thought we can only go upwards from here. And was wrong, obviously.
Friday, July 27th
After another few months of doing absolutely nothing about the album, we reviewed the situation and (surprisingly) concluded that the project just may have lingered on long enough already and agreed to finally finish the job by the end of the week (wow). I carried my laptop to Petri's place on Wednesday and we began working with the songs. As usual, we had trouble with the software at first, settings disappearing, programs freezing and so on, a lot of cursing... well, we've got used to it. It worked out fine after all... I had done some preliminary mixing work and we found a pleasing sound and balance to four songs relatively quickly. We were both a bit surprised about the overall sound... after the Catastrophy where we lost almost everything we'd recorded, we initially thought the result with the mixdowns of that time would be far less than satisfactory. Luckily Petri had tweaked the sound quite a bit already during the recordings. I spent the next day (and part of the night) working with track automations and today we set out to finish the first songs. Well, for sure the moment we began working, someone decided to start mowing the lawn just below the window, making a diabolical noise much to our delight. There is little doubt at this point that we are subject to a vast conspiracy aiming to prevent the album from being finished.
*Shakes head rapidly* Anyway, Petri recorded a synth solo for one of the songs and we went through the already mixed songs once more. And believe it or not, we've now actually come to the point where no less than the first four songs are finished. We live in significant times, don't you think! It seems this saga has an ending after all... *Sings Eternity X* We will spend the next Sunday working with the remaining songs. There are still a few solos left to be played and a lot of mixing and automating to be done before we can call it a day. Admittedly, my over-positive estimates of the progress haven't proven to be the most accurate but nevertheless! I believe the album will be finished that day. Production-wise at least, that is. We still have the CD artwork to work on... we'll see how that works out.
Monday, July 30th
Well then. This marks the end of this studio diary *weeps*... We didn't quite make it to the one year mark... :) Anyway, it surely was worth it, and we're happy with the result after all, though it seemed at one point that the whole thing was doomed. The production work is now finished, and any further activity will be reported on the news page. We'll try to have the artwork done soon. The CD's will be available some time after that. Hopefully that will happen still in August. Thank you for reading!
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