In the Works: Fratricide Demo (EP) Part 4

Wow, time sure does fly. It's been a while since posting and I'm pretty sure the 2 fans I had who read this thing have gone on to greener pastures. They're cows you see. Ha! I'm funny.

Anyhoo, the Fratricide project marches onward. I just recently returned from Ohio last Monday (5/14) after spending 10 hours in the studio on Saturday and 12 hours Sunday.

Most of Saturday was spent with our session musicians laying down their tracks. Kellen did a great job with his drum tracks and we got through them rather quickly. I think the only annoying thing was that he didn't use a trigger system which would have made the drums sound even more thunderous and killer. Be that as it may, he's a great drummer and skilled up the wazoo. Curtis, our session guitarist, threw down his tracks as quick as he could. Unfortunately, I think we pushed through his tracks so quick that we missed a lot of mistakes that were not caught on the initial recording. Our engineer Dan Boyd helped immensely with patching up the holes where these mistakes were, but this was during the time I was laying down my guitar tracks. On hindsight, I probably should have just done all of the guitar tracks. I'm sure Rob (Hellfire) felt the same way. Saturday wrapped up with 3 songs almost complete rhythm wise which put us a bit ahead of schedule.

Sunday was crunch time. We started right off laying down the last guitar track for the last song (Attention to Orders). It took about 2 hours which was annoying as we were finding more mistakes made in the initial recording than any of the others we had completed. Before I could even lay down a decent rhythm track, we had to fix those things. Even now I can honestly say everything isn't perfect. But it's "good enough for government work." Next up was bass. I played on this sweet Fender solid body bass that was heavy as fuck but was absolutely the best bass I've ever played. It stayed in tune, had a thin neck, and the action was unbelievable. I pushed through the bass tracks very quick. Probably a total of 2 hours (if that). Sweating my balls off and needing to give my poor hands a rest before the lead guitar tracks, it was Rob's turn to shine in the vocal department. We spent several hours on vox as Rob's voice box slowly started turning to goo from all of the screams and growls he was doing. Normally vox would be recorded over several days, but we didn't have that luxury. He sounds great but him being his own worst critic, he may plan on rerecording some parts. The rest of the night consisted of laying down any lead tracks, beefing up some rhythm sections, inserting sound clips and whatnot, and finally trying to mix some tracks as best we could.

We did a good job for a 2 day rush studio and I'm looking forward to what the final mixdown sounds like. Wish we had more time but them's the breaks. A tentative release date is set for June 1, 2007. More later...