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 ;-)