Finale (2)

Yesterday the acoustic part of the Finale was recorded properly, but when we went through the takes this morning we noticed a few glitches that we need to fix later on...

Unfortunately there will be no opportunity to work on this track this week, due to Don DeVallado's hectic tour schedule.

As posted earlier, on Thursday there is a gig with Indo project Di Sini Kini in the TAC in Eindhoven. For details, check http://www.tac.nu/ (free entrance).
On Friday, another side project of Don DeVallado, the metalband ScenarioII, will play the Little Devil club in Tilburg. See the link section.

For those of you who enjoy outdoor dancing, Di Sini Kini DJ Strange Attractor is throwing a big party somewhere in a forest near Eindhoven on Saturday. Considering its highly illegal character the location remains a secret. So how can you possibly get there?? Check www.metatron.nu.

We will continue with the middle part of the Finale on Sunday...

Finale (start)

Last weekend we visited the Markant studio to observe the recording of the vocal parts. So now we know what the songs are actually supposed to sound like ;-)

Having worked with Ad Maas before it was not new to us seeing him conducting the way he does, with headphones falling off and his hair and conductor stick flying all over the place!

We also met this crazy lady who turned out to be the director of the whole thing. Being close to insanity ourselves it is needless to say we liked her immediately *LOL*.


Sunday afternoon we began at the end: we started laying the foundation for the Finale track.

This song can roughly be divided in three parts: An acoustic intro, a funkier middle part and a heavy end.

A draft version of half the acoustic intro was recorded on Sunday evening, ignoring the World Championship match of Holland vs Portugal. (The Don's are supporters of their motherland Spain anyway).
The intro will consist of two guitars, one will play the melody and the other one will provide counterparts in the bass section.

Johann Sebastian Bach, we salute you!

Out for a spin...

Yesterday we decided to leave the studio to go out and unwind, so we loaded friend and Zilver drummer El Baso into Don Rápido's car for some cruisin'.

photo by B13visuals.com
We think the Fresh Prince said it best:
"put your car on cruise and lay back cause thisissummertime"

Kyrie (finished!)

On Monday all guitarparts were done. Listeners who are familiar with the works of Quentin Tarantino will definately recognise the guitars in the second half of Kyrie, since they were shamelessly inspired by the Kill Bill soundtrack ;-)

Kyrie with mariachi guitars, a strange combination at first but somehow it works!

Yesterday Don Rápido recorded the fretless bassparts and today the final mixing will be done.

Tomorrow we will present the result to Ad Maas, always a tricky moment because we have the tendency to go completely gung-ho on his compositions.

Kyrie (continued)

Yesterday we started with throwing away everything we recorded earlier because the recordings turned out to be too noisy.
So basically we started from scratch again.

After listening back a few of the new takes we could here a sparrow singing in the background. Apparently this bird nested in the magnolia tree right outside the window.

Since the sparrow was singing in key combined with the fact that we have a great sense of humour we decided to keep the takes. So careful listeners should be able to spot this sparrow singing in the background of Kyrie ;-)

Unfortunately the feathered creature in the tree outside wouldn't stop its Celine Dion imitations, ruining take after take. Our patience wore thin, it just wasn't funny anymore, up to the point that Don Rápido stormed outside and actually shot the bird out of the tree.

So at last we had a nice and quiet environment to record. We finally had to stop at 2 'o clock at night because the neighbours started banging the walls.

We have something like 8 bars left to complete...

Kyrie (kick off)

On Wednesday we kicked off the works for the song Kyrie. Since this is a classic song we needed a classic sound.

Most of the day was spent experimenting in order to get a guitarsound that would fit the song. Eventually we ended op using the same Fender acoustic that was used for Op De Kermis, but Don Rápido changed the 0.010 D'addario strings for a thicker gauge 0.012 DR strings. The guitar was then downtuned a half step: low to high Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb.






Don Rápido changing strings








To make this guitar with steel strings sound like a guitar with nylon strings, the sound of 2 microphones were blended with a Dean Markley Pro Mag acoustic pickup.

During recording an annoying rattling sound was audible coming from the machine heads. Don Rápido solved this by putting a sock over the headstock ;-)







Don DeVallado laying down the intro of the track





By the end of the day the temperature in the Fast/Fence studios had reached insane altitudes, up to the point we were actually starting to hallucinate. So we quit, leaving the second half of the song for another day.
The rest of the evening we treated ourselves to lounging on a big couch and watching the World Championship on tv…

Zwarte Raven

Don DeVallado pictured with his stage gear
The second song, Zwarte Raven, turned out to be an enormous challenge which took over more than a week to record. The final mixing by Don Rápido was completed on Sunday 11th of June.

Apparently this song is used to introduce the villains, so Ad Maas wanted a dark/evil atmosphere.

Therefore we decided to go brutal and completely over the top. The song was devided in three pieces: a heavy intro part, a clean middle part and a heavy final part with a guitar solo.

For the heavy parts we downtuned a Schecter guitar to drop-B (from low to high: B -F# - B - E - G# - C#). We used the amp setting as pictured above: A Mesa/Boogie TriAxis preamp set to the Lead II Red channel, a Mesa 20/20 power amp and a Mesa 2x12 speaker cabinet loaded with Celestion speakers.
We created a heavy sound inspired by (Nu-) metal bands like Korn, Deftones and Linkin Park.

For the middle part we wanted the guitar to respond to the vocal lines. For this Fusion/Avant Garde part we listened carefully to artists like Meshuggah, Allan Holdsworth, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton. We even put in a tongue-in cheek reference to the Twin Peaks soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti.
A lot of effects were used to create mysterious/weird sounding guitar parts: a Cry Baby wah-wah, tremelo, Digitech Whammy, delay/chorus effects from a Rocktron Intellifex. Even a cooling fan was used in front of the speaker to "break up" the sound.

When the the heavy third part is entered, the song bursts into a freaky guitarsolo inspired by shred players like John Petrucci (Dream Theater) and Michael Romeo (Symphony X).

Zwarte Raven is by far the heaviest song ever in the history of Theaterplan/Echt Eindhoven. It will certainly push the audience back in their seats!
Ad Maas requested dark & evil and that's exactly what he got ;-)

Op De Kermis

Dinner time at The Don's mansion.





On Friday 2nd of June 2006 we completed the first track: Op De Kermis.
This track has a sort of medieval ring to it, so we decided to play on a steel string acoustic Fender guitar that we borrowed from Di Sini Kini DJ Bluestorm. (Di Sini Kini, by the way, is one of the side projects of Don DeVallado and consists only out of musicians of Indonesian origin. They will play their first gig on the experimental stage of the Temporary Art Center (www.tac.nu) on June 29th.)

The musical inspiration for Op De Kermis came mainly from gipsy players like Django Reinhardt but we were also highly influenced by the music from the Bertolli commercials ;-)

For the chorus, a second guitar was used, a nylon string acoustic.

Los Mariachis

Los Mariachis on tour in Barcelona

Today we will start to keep this online diary about our work for the production "Het Marcus Mystery" (www.echteindhoven.nl).

Eindhoven based composer Ad Maas has asked us to provide all the guitar parts for the pieces that he wrote especially for this project. Every week we will record a new song and we will describe the process here.