Today is Sunday, possibly the day of your lord, the day of rest, whatever. This is not the case for us. For us, it was finally time to add some balls to this record. Time to record some bass!
Will has been a continually evolving bass player since he joined Orwell back in 2005. Out of all of us, I personally feel that his progression has been the most drastic. Will wouldn't argue with the fact that he basically joined this band after having played bass for a only a few months. This wasn't really a huge deal at that point, as the year was 2005 and we were all listening to bullshit music that left us all at a very stagnant point in our musical development. That said, I feel like Will and I really learned how to play together, and more pointedly, as a result of Erik joining the band, we were being forced to step it up.
The new tunes give Will some room to breath, to play around, and experiment with his instrument in a way that he was never able to in the past. His presence on this record is going to be much less subtle than it has been on past releases. Don't get me wrong, he hasn't morphed into Les Claypool by the magic of some witch doctor that lives in his beard, and that's not what we/he wanted anyway. On AVOHFASIH, Will is going to be laying down the foundation of everything, along with Cris of course. On top of that thick layer of wonderful bass balls, he's also taking some subtly leads here and there, and deviating from following the guitars as closely as he has in the past. Again, he has a bit more room for his instrument to breath, and enhance the music, versus just being "the heavy." (that in reference to the fact that on most metal cds the bass is either completely in audible, or mixed in so muddy that it literally just provides thickness and no actual musical value)
So, we took a good 3-4 hours dialing in the bass tone, which is absolutely awesome. It's rumbly and earth shaking, but fuzzy and nasty at the same time, all while retaining the definition we wanted in the first place.
FOR THE GEAR NERDS:
Ampeg Avt 3Pro
Ampeg 8x10 cab
MXR DI
Ibanez 4 string bass (not sure on the model....maybe Will can help me out here)
Schecter Stiletto 4 string
After finding the tone, we jumped right into the first track on the record. Will though it would be best to just go through the record song by song. This is kind of where the fun started. Will got into playing and we all just thought "yah, sounds good!" After mulling that thought over for a bit, we again decided "good" wasn't good enough. This had nothing to do with Will, his playing, or his writing. It more had to do with the fact that we had spent so much time on the guitars and added so much additional content and emotion to the songs, that they just weren't as simple as they were when we started the recording process. I guess we felt as a whole, that we needed to give the bass parts the same attention to detail that we did with the guitar. (all you bass players out there, please cover your ear boners throughout the remainder of this post, your band will remember you are there eventually! hahahahah)
So we spent a while going through the song, modifying Will's parts, allowing him to find spots to really pull through, and just finding the "spot" in the mix where the bass would add the rumble, but still be recognizable as an instrument. All in all, we got 1 and 1/2 songs done on bass, and Will decided he wanted to take some time outside of recording to go back through everything and refine his parts to the level that the rest of the music had reached. It seemed like a setback at first, but just like with everything else that took twice as long as expected, it's what needed to be done for the art to be driven to the level we wanted it, and we are 100% happy that we not only have the time to do it, but we have a producer, and a bass player, who are both in agreement that more work means better. Will spent a lot of time getting the songs to where they were, and as a musician, it's exciting for me to see someone who has already put in that many hours be able to recognize that maybe something isn't quite to the point of personal satisfaction. It's fucking hard to work on something for months, then sit down to finally put it out there, and effectively call it finished only to pull back at the last second so you can put more work into it. Bravo Will!
Lastly, as you probably could have guessed by now, we spent the remainder of the night on guitars. Which I should add are about 3/4 done at this point. More overdrive, slightly clean, and effects tracking. Again, I can barely express how fun this part is. After the main guitars were done, it's been all fun and games for us 6 stringers. Adding atmosphere, lots of ethereal things that only devout listeners will get to enjoy, it's by far the most enjoyable, and least nerve racking part of this process. Without the amount of time we spent on this part of the process, the record would have still been heavy, but not nearly as hypnotic and emotional.
-T
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