Manufactüra Studios

Beating like a Drum

2008-02-02T17:22:00.000Z

Here's the first mix after we recorded the drums last Wednesday. I don't know what to think of it since I spent too much time tweaking and my ears are tired. It sounds perhaps too bright to me, there's too much cymbals but I refrained from reaching for the EQ for changing the overall sound of the drums at all. We were supposed to record in a much larger room, the same one where we first recorded the rehearsal, but it wasn't available this time. Pity because I really liked the sound of it. I had planned to do between 9-12 takes using different mic positions, and recording three takes for each:

1) M/S recording with fig-8 + cardioid mics as overheads, but angled at 45 degrees in front of the drum kit, pointing directly to the snare. I predicted that we would probably pick up a little bit too much of the front tom than we would like, but if I had placed the mics directly above the kit using the same M/S arrangement, I'd get no kick and perhaps too much of the beater/pedal mechanical noises. The way both crashes and ride sounded was more pleasant to my ear from that spot than from directly above. With only two microphones and a stereo recorder, this was my preferred approach so we recorded this way first, knowing that it was a question of what to compromise, as usually is. We ended up using the third M/S take on the final mix.

2) AB overheads. The problem with this is that my mics aren't matched, nor they are identical, so the stereo image would end up being all over the place. The advantage is that you get a drier sound than with M/S, but mono compatibility can easily be compromised if you're not careful when the Left and Right signals are summed if they're out of phase. I tried this as an experiment and was surprised to see that the end result wasn't as bad as I expected, and there was plenty of vintage snare in it but with crap imaging, as I had placed the mics too far apart resulting in an extremely wide and unfocused stereo image. I thought that the sound worked very well if you were listening to the drums in isolation, but didn't work well for the entire song with the remaining instruments in.

3) Mono recording with single mic in front of the kit and second mic capturing the room sound. I didn't even give this one a go, because the room we got in the end was simply too small and shit-sounding. I decided we would use the time we had left for recording every piece of the kit separately just in case there would be any need to fix or reinforce anything later with some sound replacing or blending.

Here's a couple of pics showing a typical M/S setup with a cardioid mic at the top pointing to the sound source and the figure-of-eight mic at the bottom picking up the sides. You later duplicate the track corresponding to the recorded signal of the bottom mic, and invert it. Like this if you listen to the three tracks simultaneously in mono, the track you duplicated cancels out the sound of the original track, leaving you with the mono recording you captured through the top microphone. Note that you don't necessarily need to place the figure-of-eight below the cardioid, so long their capsules are aligned like this:

Mechanical Failure

2008-01-14T13:21:00.000Z

Check out the new song from the Rebel Art Centre we produced at Manufactüra Studios! You need to select "Mechanical Failure" in the player.

The Good in You

2007-12-18T11:51:00.000Z

Sam Dawson writes a new track: "The good in you" will be the music theme featuring in a documentary Manufactura are just finished working on in partnership with Frontier Media. More on this will be published later.

For the backing vocals we had a contribution from Louise Stock.

To listen to the song refer to the original "Rebel Art Centre" posting where you will find a playlist with the music we've recorded and produced so far.

The Old Whores of San Pedro

2007-12-16T13:20:00.000Z

Manufactüra have been busy working on a new track. Sam Dawson whom apart from song-writing for the "Rebel Art Centre" also plays and writes for "The Old Whores of San Pedro" - a 60/70's sounding band from Sheffield. "The Old Whores..." already had some previous recordings but never had the opportunity to work closely with an engineer/producer, and like many bands who don't have access to their own recording facilities, have been subjected to availability and good-will from diverse people in order to produce these, so we've been asked to assist. The track in question was to be "Beating like a Drum", and we recorded their rehearsal at the Yellow Arch Studios so we could get familiar with the song.
The recording process would happen in 3 stages:

1) Record a backing track consisting of guitar and bass played simultaneously to a click onto separate tracks
2) Record vocals and rhythm acoustic guitar on top of that with no click
3) Set up a single mic in a good sounding room to record the drums separately while feeding the drummer with a basic headphone mix

Upon listening to the material on the first recording day, it was suggested adding some Hammond organ which worked very well, and to check whether the proposed recording method for drums would fit in the mix later on, some of the rehearsal drum recordings were used as a test. Indeed the fears that a mono drum recording could possibly sound dull and small vanished from our thoughts as we listened to the result. The recording microphone used for the rehearsals had been an AKG 414 XLS gold which picked up a very consistent image of the drum kit. Because of the high-end boost very characteristic on these large-diaphragm vocal mics, the ride cymbal used heavily by Greg was very noticeable, but had also a very natural decay - which was a pleasant surprise.

Next session took as little as an hour, as usual when working with Sam. With vocals and guitar now in the mix, it was time to balance things a bit and sit back and take some notes on what could be improved. We didn't want to take advantage of Pro Tools' editing and time-correction facilities as this would certainly spoil the analog tape-like approach we were trying to get as much as possible, however given the fact we were not using any real vintage equipment - everything had to be done in the box.

This is the point at which the producer's creative mind starts to work, and vocal harmonies were added and spread around the panorama to blend them better with the rest but not bury them too deep. The aim was to place them side-by-side with the guitars which in turn sound very gritty and close to the listener. We chose not to use any real compression for any of the elements in the mix. Instead the preferred approach was to use the sound of a saturated preamp on each track to build the mix, resorting to a character-shaping strategy and working the gain levels instead. Obviously since we were working on the box, the recorded material was mostly D.I-ed and digital plugins were used for recreating a vintage feel.

Listening to old 60's and 70's music one notices that the use of stereo wasn't anything like in these days. Specially in the 60's, stereo was a relatively new thing, perhaps like 5.1 surround is today, and there were no real guidelines to how mixing in stereo should be done. So it was up for the engineer to do what he felt needed be done. The most common approach to take advantage of the separation provided by two speaker systems was to shift everything to either side, so you would end up with bass, drums and metals on the left, and maybe an acoustic guitar and vocals on the right. The advantage of this approach was that the mixes would normally also be very mono-compatible, a good thing as the mainstream systems were still mono. Engineers back in those days really knew how to take advantage of reverb and how to place a microphone in a live room in a way that allowed them to capture exactly what they wanted to hear on the recording. I personally really like the sound of vintage compressors and if you listen to Serge's Gainsbourg music you can verify a real example of this. The vocals are huge and picked up with extreme detail, and it almost feels like your ear is glued to the singer so you can hear every whisper, breath and saliva, however they somehow leave lots of room behind them for the remaining instruments. Of course the quality of the arrangements play a vital role on building a balanced composition of sounds, but I won't dwell into that now.

So with our recording sorted with backing vocals and Hammond, it was time to decide upon a mixing strategy. As always various things were attempted and thrown out, only to come back a couple of days later with a more objective mind and a day's worth of listening to Velvet Underground, Nancy Sinatra, The Who, Nick Cave and others as an ear freshener.

We are still due to record the drums since the drummer is currently, in his own words "as sick as a dog", and we had the misfortune of having a PSU problem on the TASCAM field recorder which was sent back to the factory under warranty, but here is the first mix which hopefully leaves just enough room for adding the drums later. On this mix you can still hear the drum intro I took from the rehearsal material - I'll just leave it in for now. In the future Greg, the drummer may replace my own backing vocals for his and I'll want to ride the fader levels on that Hammond. Other than that I think we may want to add some clapping in the chorus, otherwise Sam is happy, I'm happy, Greg is happy, Steve is happy. We're all really happy.

Strings & Sutures

2007-11-07T20:08:00.000Z

The short film 'Strings & Sutures' produced for the Competition organised by Ford Mondeo and The Daily Telegraph is now online and would welcome your vote!

Visit: http://fordfilmchallenge.telegraph.co.uk/site/
Simply Select: View Entries
Quickly Register and Login;
And Select/Vote For: "Strings & Sutures" from the List

Bleak Hill Documentary

2007-11-07T20:07:00.000Z

Rebel Art Centre

2007-09-05T16:37:00.000+01:00

Since the preambular recordings of Sam Dawson's demo songs we did a few weeks back, Manufactüra Studios have been hired to produce two of his tracks. The project's name is known as "The Rebel Art Centre", featuring Sam Dawson on the vocals with Nishal Ranchhod's production. Future contribution from other musicians around Sheffield is expected for more tracks to come.

"No Promises" & "Easy on the Eye"
Written by Sam Dawson
Guitars, arrangements and engineering by Nishal Ranchhod
Recorded and mixed by Nishal Ranchhod at Manufactüra Studios

"The Good in You" & "Mechanical Failure"
Written & performed by Sam Dawson
Piano / Organ arrangement, recording and mixing by Nishal Ranchhod at Manufactüra Studios

Shouldn't have bothered

2007-09-05T16:10:00.000+01:00

Two new tracks coming from Matt Richardson have been recorded this month. They are "Shouldn't have bothered" and "Lonely Ride". Matt played his new songs yesterday at "The Washington" on their open mic night. Please refer to the original posting to listen to the tracks.

Sound Engineer for Hire

2007-09-05T15:53:00.000+01:00

Sheffield-based sound person available for recording and mixing your music project. Whether you need to record a demo with just guitar and vocals to a full band recording, don't hesitate to get in touch and we'll be happy to discuss the options for a good price.

MUSIC SERVICES OFFERED:

Recording and mixing in Pro Tools project studio
Music production
Mastering available upon request
Addition of original music and Sound Effects to your film

GENERAL AUDIO SERVICES:

Location recording for film
Audio for video editing and post-production
Live sound engineering

TO DISCUSS YOUR PROJECT NEEDS, CONTACT:

Mobile: 0792 051 06 88
thearchit{at}hotmail{dot}com

We also work with Sheffield's Yellow Arch Studios if you require access to their great sounding recording rooms or to finalise your project on their specific analog or digital equipment.

The Art of the Kitchen Goddess

2007-08-07T08:29:00.001+01:00

Once again Manufactüra Studios have recorded music for film. This time we brought in the skilled classical guitar player and luthier Melvin Maccallaugh with his crazy tune in unison to Corinna Flight's humorous and dynamic-paced one-minute short film "The Art of the Kitchen Goddess". The track is played against a mechanical metronome device which adds a special analog feel to it. The addition of a toy-like Casio synth playing a vibraphone sound imprints the tune with another layer of madness as you will be able to see from the audio sample below. The film will be screened at the Showroom in Sheffield on Tuesday 27th November 6pm-8pm.

Tape sessions conversion

2007-07-18T18:59:00.000+01:00

"Today I'm picking up where I left off in '95: The tedious process of converting my old Cubase VST projects to Pro Tools sessions. All of the audio was recorded in .wav format so I will have to convert all the files into something my old MacOS9 version of Cubase can handle, in this case .aiff files. For that I'll be setting up a batch process to re-save all the audio in .aiff but preserving the original file names, including the .wav extension. Cubase then shouldn't have any trouble locating the files and placing them in the correct places within the song. After I finish recreating the songs in Cubase, I'll be resetting all the VST effects, inserts, automation and fader volumes, and start exporting each track into a single, continuous .aiff file starting at 0:00:00:00. Finally I can import the audio into a Pro Tools session set to the same bpm as the original Cubase arrangement, and all the MIDI as well." - Nishal Ranchhod

Sam Dawson's Demo Tracks

2007-07-11T21:15:00.001+01:00

This week at Manufactüra Studios we welcomed Sam Dawson - Sheffield-based independent songwriter who also plays guitar for "The Old Whores Of San Pedro". Sam came to us through MySpace with the intention of recording his ideas in the available studio time, and left with nine complete songs mastered onto CD and ready to demo. All of the songs were recorded at first take. If you're viewing this post through MySpace, click on this article to listen to the tracks.

"Duchess [...]" on Sky Channel

2007-07-08T00:25:00.000+01:00

We've been recently informed that the feature film "Duchess, Duchess" for which Nishal Ranchhod composed the main theme in 2004 will be broadcasting in Sky Channel 195 on Tuesday 17th July at 23:02.

Dead Language

2007-07-07T23:10:00.000+01:00

Three new songs are currently in production at Manufactüra for the "Dead Language" project, featuring Nishal Ranchhod doing the music writing and João Paulo Simões on the vocals and writing the lyrics. Relevant musicians from the Sheffield musical panorama will be kindly contributing as guests in this early project, so it might take some time until samples of the ongoing work can be published due to everyone's busy schedules and other work commitments. However, there are good expectations as to the prospects of these promising new compositions grabbing the interest of many.

So far, we will hopefully be able to count with some skillfully played double-bass on the hands of the remarkable singer/double-bassist Nicola Farnon and the classically trained violinist Patrycja Kujawska - who has performed with Sieben in the past - on the track "Clear, now that it's Dark". We are also in touch with James from "Firegarden" to give us some of his solid rockin' bass-playing for "It's the Monochrome Shores".

We should release a preview of these two tracks very soon and let everyone know.

End of Free Recording Period

2007-07-05T07:38:00.000+01:00

As a note regarding the end of the free recording period announced last month, Manufactüra have recorded two more songs for Matt Richardson which should already be available on his profile or on this blog through the original post. A good pint of Guinness at the end of the rainy day settled matters, and in addition to "Party in the Sky" and "Whirlpool" you can now enjoy "Cravings" and "Hope at Heart".

Manufactüra Studios on MySpace

2007-06-24T06:04:00.000+01:00

While improvements in the layout are an ongoing project, Manufactüra Studios can now be found and contacted for commissioned work through MySpace. Be sure to check us out at http://www.myspace.com/manufacturastudios and add us as a connection!

Captüra Filmes Introductory Logo

2007-06-11T18:54:00.000+01:00

The sound design for Captüra Filmes' introductory logo was based on a section of a script for a film. On this particular scene, the girl is at the library, sitting in front of a computer screen where you can see random words appearing in sequence.

Contacts and Services

2007-06-07T17:59:00.000+01:00

A range of services are available from Manufactüra Studios:

Music Technology educational work
Audio for video levelling to broadcast standards / cleaning / finalising
Field Recording
P.A. Live Sound Engineering
Music / Gingle / Theme composing
Sound design, Sound Effects & Sample Libraries

For quotes/rates, contact us using any of the methods below.

Contacts:

We can be reached through our page on MySpace. If you are a member and wish to send us a message, click here.

Via direct email:
Manufactüra Studios: thearchit{at}hotmail{dot}com
Captüra Filmes: perugina{at}gmail{dot}com
Nlinear Mastering Facilities: nlinear{at}gmail{dot}com

Free Recording Sessions

2007-06-06T20:21:00.000+01:00

Manufactüra Studios are supporting Sheffield's local unsigned talents by recording demos completely for free during this month on an attempt to introduce these artists' quality to the record industry. Our first guest was Matt Richardson, who brought two of his own compositions: "Party in the Sky" and "Whirlpool". Matt can be contacted through raybentos{at}hotmail{dot}com

New mastering facilities

2007-05-29T18:52:00.000+01:00

Manufactüra Studios announce their partnership with nlinear Studios, the new mastering facilities located in Portugal. nlinear are very well equipped for this sort of task, owning an impressive array of top the range dynamics processors.

To contact nlinear directly, please use: nlinear{at}gmail{dot}com

Otomana

2007-05-29T18:26:00.001+01:00

Recording sessions of "Otomana" have begun. We've set up a small vocal booth where the beautiful, multi-talented Portuguese actress Ivania Elena could read her parts under the direction of João Paulo, the author. Approximately half an hour later we had finished the first four chapters, leaving us all filled with a sense of accomplishment. This is an unedited preview of the recording sessions.
"The unpublished Portuguese-language novella “Otomana” was written by João Paulo Simões eleven years ago in Lisbon and has been regarded by the selected few who have read it as the blueprint of all of the author’s subsequent film work." - Captüra Filmes

Bleak Hill

2007-05-26T07:38:00.000+01:00

Manufactüra Studios present the latest production of original music and sound effects for the "Bleak Hill" documentary. As the documentary focusses on a historic village of Barnsley, the ticking clock at the beginning of the sound track representing years passing by seemed appropriate. A music box just helps adding some bleakness to the music.The sound effects of the convicts who built the "Convicts tunnel" were fun to build. I just took my Tascam recorder and dragged stones around in the garden or hit the cement ground with a shovel repeatedly. I could then slice the audio, load it into the sampler and "play" the sounds the convicts made while they were working.
For more information on this documentary click here.
To view the documentary, it has been made available here.

Gear List

2007-05-26T04:08:00.001+01:00

The mighty Korg Wavestation EX. This dream machine has been used extensively for film. It is a robust piece of gear. I've owned mine for 10 years and it just carries on delivering. Nice key weight, superb quality of internal FX, balanced outputs, big LCD screen for tweak-heads like myself who like to build sounds from scratch. Can't get enough of it. It is an unusual module capable of unusual sounds.

The Genelec 8030A are perfect for a small project studio as near-fields. I like their clarity and rugged construction. I would have chosen the Dynaudio BM5A or 6A over these, but they a bit more expensive and require a bit more care when moving. Still, Genelec is Genelec.

The first release of the Digidesign Mbox features two extremely clean Focusrite preamps. I have used it to record on location straight into the laptop before I got my Tascam HD-P2. However, I still use it a lot for editing in Pro Tools with RTAS plug-ins. For tracking bands, I have access to the TDM systems.

At the core of Manufactüra Studios, a G4 MDD provides the hardware platform for running Pro Tools. This was the last G4 model capable of running Mac OS 9, still useful if you have a Mix Plus 888/24 digidesign system.

What a life saver when you are out there in the field! The Tascam HD-P2 might not be as rugged as a Sound Devices field recorder, but I can't complain about the solid performance and sound quality of this toy. Its plastic body makes it very light to carry around in its protective case.

The revised XL series of the industry-standard AKG 414 range provides even more features over its predecessors. You can hear it as an ambient mic in our "Bleak Hill" documentary, connected to the HD-P2. This XLII model has a bit more brightness than the XLS around 3Khz. I simply adore the versatility of this condenser and its solid body. Dare I ask: Who needs EQ with this mic?

This is another versatile mic with its built-in bass roll-off and attenuation pad. Very flat frequency response around the axis. I like it for instruments but I have used it also on location for picking up environment / dialogue at close distances. I was surprised with the bass response and low self-noise.

This is becoming my favourite piece of equipment around the studio. It was about time someone came up with a mixer without unnecessary things for modern DAW-based studios. I use it mainly for switching monitoring from and to the headphone amp when recording in the control room. This piece of kit will always be useful in the long-term.

This is probably the only use I would find for any Behringer audio gear. The coloration of sound is very obvious, but the only use I give it it is allowing the talents to listen to the mix while recording. And without spending a fortune you get 4 outs and if you need more, get another one and daisy-chain it.

Platform Change II

2007-05-25T06:42:00.000+01:00

It was while working in an IT company that I got my first Apple Macintosh. They were upgrading their systems to the new G4 and had a stock of obsolete Macs lying around taking up storage space. I must have taken around four 8500 and one 9600 machine along with bits and pieces of computer hardware that I found in a big pile at the basement. After testing all the machines I built one working 8500, and a strong 9600 with a G3 upgrade card and an ATTO Express PCI Ultra-Wide SCSI card. Although somewhat noisy, I was very happy with my free Apple Mac and started playing with Pro Tools Free there. The level of integration between several different audio programs was impressive, and I felt a rejuvenated will to compose in this inspiring new environment. The addition of Opcode's OMS (Open Music System) made me feel I had been spending too many years missing out, and everything made absolute logical sense now. The change of platform from PC to Mac was indeed very welcome and smooth. Pro Tools felt as familiar to me as analogue equipment and even with it's MIDI and track count limitations, it was very usable for serious editing. Automation seemed like a miracle compared to what I was used to, and there was a lot more headroom when mixing than in other multi track software I had used in the past. Even latency was low enough to monitor through the software using just the built-in sound card of the Mac. Since then I simply haven't used a Windows PC for anything any more. After two years using the 9600 for recording demos that I could later open seamlessly in Pro Tools TDM at the studio, I sold it and bought myself a second-hand G4 MDD running both OS9 and OSX.

Mixing in Cubase

2007-05-25T00:40:00.000+01:00

Most of the VST effects I used in "Cubase" were actually free plugins. For the vocals and many other tracks I would often use a version of KwikKomp as an insert, which worked perfectly well and I could use many instances without bogging down the CPU too much leaving it free for other tasks. There was another free package of excellent VST plug-ins one could use as send effects or as a creative tool for sound design: The mda package.

But before even thinking of plug-ins, one of the methods I resorted to for delays was through repetition of the section I wanted to affect in a separate track or tracks. This had the advantage of letting me hand-draw the delays in the same way I would now use send automation combined with different timing settings in the delay. But it could be a time-consuming process.

Automation wasn't really usable in Cubase. Double clicking the automation track didn't bring up individual controllers for faders and effect knobs. It would instead present you with the mixer window, hinting a "do it again" bad attitude at you. My workaround was to automate a soloed track and bounce it after I was happy with the results. MIDI though, was much more usable, since you could always work directly in the MIDI event list or in the track edit window and select the controller data you wished to change.

Duchess, Duchess

2007-05-24T07:37:00.000+01:00

"Duchess, Duchess" is another film by João Paulo Simões. The main theme consists of a two-guitar piece I built around the voice of the renowned Portuguese "Fado" singer Carlos Zel, who has sadly already past away in February 2002. My friend Paulo Godinho was once showing me some of the recordings he did at the MDL "Meninos da Linha" studios in São João do Estoril, Portugal when I stumbled across this wonderful voice and found the inspiration for my track. Despite never having played Portuguese guitar before, being from Lisbon myself, I was familiar with the way it is supposed to be played in "Fado" as its distinctive sound is imprinted deep within my roots. Since this was going to be the first time at it, I tried keeping those parts from becoming too ambitious. As to the classical guitar, I came up with something that could possibly accommodate the singing, but didn't necessarily stick to the original arrangement - an interpretation. I would rather have it evolve and take a life of its own.

When asked to tell us more about the original recording, Paulo Godinho said:

"This audio material was supposed to be taken to the U.S. for mixing and mastering, but I lost track of it and I think it never got edited in the end. I kept the recordings here in my computer, because I liked the poetry in the lyrics of some songs, and thought about doing something with them."

The equipment we used for recording the "Duchess, Duchess" theme was the following:

AMEK - 9098EQ (x2) Mic Preamp + EQ
Tube Tech - LCA2B Dual / stereo compressor
Apogee - AD8000 AD converter

Artist: Nishal Ranchhod
Sound Engineer: Paulo Godinho
Studio: nlinear Studios

Torpor

2007-05-24T06:36:00.001+01:00

Many years had passed since I composed the piece that would now become the main sound track for "Torpor". As to the second piece required for this film, we were talking about Bach. Recreating a Bach aria using a computer and yielding realistic results wasn't exactly what I would call an easy task, maybe not even a possible one. I knew someone who was used to singing in a church choir, and perhaps she would be suitable. The third challenge concerned me less, as I would be recording a professional - Natália Luiza - for the narration of the film, so I didn't expect any problems.

The foundations for the main theme were laid by the cellos, that I knew were mainly what the director was interested in. I tried different arrangements including violins and brass, and saved them in separate Pro Tools sessions as variations that could be used for different moments of the film.

For Bach's aria, "Kreuz und Krone sind verbunden", I started by importing the track into Pro Tools and listening to it repeatedly until I could sing every part by ear and had learnt all the nuances of the cello and oboe. I enjoyed listening to the piece so much indeed, that I would play it around the house and sing it in German, which apart from amusing myself and my neighbours also helped me understand better the interaction between the soprano and instruments. The other important thing to analyse was the timing of the song. Building a tempo map in Pro Tools to match the original track and then recording the MIDI would have been a possible approach, but it would make it very difficult for me to play the notes since the metronome wouldn't sound logical at all, and since I knew where the pauses were and what their duration was, I simply played the instruments over a steady metronome and then introduced the slight fluctuations in the tempo and all the pauses afterwards. I would have to ensure that this job would be done as close to perfection as possible, since I knew that once the vocals had been recorded, I would have very little chance to further perfect the groove of the instruments in this classical piece. As to the choices of sounds, I knew that more important than that would be filtering them using automation to simulate the tonal changes and dynamics of the instrument when played by a human. So I resorted a lot to riding faders, controlling effects sends and cut filters on the sampler in a very subtle way. Although any trained ear would perceive the difference immediately, in the context of a film, I hoped that it would trick the spectators into thinking this was a real performance, or better - not even thinking about it.

Tracker Tape Sessions

2007-05-21T18:57:00.001+01:00

This is a collection of some of my songs that were rescued from tapes. Listening to them now, more than 10 years later I find them rather naive, but the original intention never was for them to sound perfect or "serious", but to serve as a proof of concept at the time and as a hands-on means for learning the basics of sampling, music sequencing and engineering if you will. I believe they demonstrate that it is possible to create with minimal resources, and to understand that production, composition and sound engineering are different things. Dwelling into the technical aspects of sound production at an early stage can easily kill the creative process, and in most cases, it is the quality of the arrangement that dictates how the final mix is going to sound like more than the reverb and compression settings used. Only afterwards do the elements involved in the recording chain come into play, starting with the performer, the quality of the instruments, choice of sound sources, recording levels, and finally, the actual recording equipment. As to recording software I learnt that it doesn't really matter what you use, as long as you are proficient with your tools.

"Opus VIII" was pretty much done in one night. I had been recently playing with a borrowed Korg X5D and decided to sample some of its sounds for use within "Fast Tracker". I ended up sampling the whole drum kit, basses, choirs, strings and pads, and while playing about with the samples, the initial melody got laid down. A particularly interesting thing that the tracker made possible, was bending the pitch of an individual note in a chord without affecting the other notes, which is what I did on the last synth note at the end of the pattern and had trouble recreating later when working with MIDI. All the sounds in this track come from the X5D samples, with exception to the lead which is a simple looped saw wave. I don't know where the idea for the track came from. I think I was just inspired by the sounds and let them take me wherever they wanted. At the end of the track you can hear a sort of a frequency resembling the sound of an old ZX Spectrum computer loading games from tape. This sound was generated by loading a text file into the tracker and let it interpret the ascii as audio. I then looped the region I found more interesting and adjusted the pitch so it would affect the duration of the loop in a way that made it fit the pattern.

"The Old Railway"- This is a track of which only this version exists now. It is a remake of one of my original "Fast Tracker" songs, but totally within Cubase. Much more rudimentary versions existed before the hard disk crash that wiped all my songs, but this one features already a guitar solo I did my best to record according to what I had in mind, not worrying too much about technical perfection, and nice Korg Wavestation strings played by my friend Rui Veiga who's initial reaction upon listening to the first edit was: "I think the notes you're playing sound a bit basic...". The rhythmic sample was essentially slowed down by manipulating the pitch of the original sample by approximately an octave, then processed at the beginning of the track using a ring modulator and then panned. A sharp remark made by João Paulo Simões - the author of the lyrics - regarding this song, was that the loop resembled the sound of a slow-moving train, which suited well the title of the track. Vocals were sung by myself as with the majority of the remaining tracks, mainly because there was no one else around to sing. The ending piano also comes from the Wavestation, which isn't the right synth for that kind of task, but it would have to do.

"Termit" is hereby presented almost in its original form: Every instrument was sequenced in "Fast Tracker" and the mix was exported onto a stereo file. Then, in Cubase I added the guitars and the vocals. They were both recorded through the Alesis Quadraverb GT effects unit and Marshall JCM 900 I had. While I find these two elements to be particularly loud in relation to the rest of the instruments causing them to not sit very well in the mix, I tried keeping things simple in the arrangement. The solo guitar is a four-note piece and the rhythm guitar likewise, as I thought this was what the track needed. None of the reverbs and distortions were used as inserts or sends. Everything had been processed separately and destructively in a sample editor.

"Xfm" was the background work that would later become known as "Lost Control". It was entirely composed and sequenced inside "Fast Tracker". "Xfm" is the name of a radio station I used to listen to a lot during the 90's in Lisbon, not really a song title. The consistency of this track comes essentially from the bass line and the 8-Bit snare - which I still love. From a composition point of view the song gradually progresses from a mood of suspense towards obnoxious experimental sound textures whose purpose is to destroy any notion of order that could have accidentally survived the first part of the track.

"Lost Control" inherits the same bass line and drums from its tracker predecessor "Xfm". To recreate the tight feel of the original track, many different versions were made using different strategies.

The "Ambient remix II" was the first attempt, well, second attempt to recreate "Xfm" and featured an extended introduction where you can hear the result of hours working with "Rebirth" just to come up with that fat synth and lead. Since "Rebirth" could not be used as a synth module via "Rewire" into Cubase, but only as a pattern sequencer, triggering the notes via MIDI wasn't possible. Notes had to be sequenced inside "Rebirth" itself. To achieve such long duration of notes, the song speed in "Rebirth" had to be set to halve whatever BPM measure of the track in "Cubase". Maintaining a tempo map in Cubase acting as a master controlling "Rebirth" through "Rewire" was troublesome. For the sake of simplicity the two programs were used independently, exporting audio from "Rebirth" into "Cubase" as audio loops as required. Drums were sequenced in "Fruity Loops", and in an attempt to achieve some stereo separation, the built-in phase effect got overused. Since I was already using "Rebirth", I decided to use it also for the main bass line, although it didn't sound as punchy as the the original bass in "Fast Tracker", so I laid a one-octave, two-note arpeggio on top of it to see how it sounded and it brought an eighties feel to the track which didn't bother me at all, but motivated me to continue experimenting things until I lost the thread and finally gave up.

The "Yamaha XG" version as the name indicates, used this General MIDI PCI board throughout the track for the bass and drums. I don't know why I used so much reverb for the bass intead of keeping it dry and tight. But I like the obscure sound of the vocals, despite not having used a much needed hi-pass filter at around 250Hz to get rid of that low frequency boost introduced by the proximity effect when recording at 5AM trying to keep the noise down so I wouldn't wake up everyone in the house. Keeping my voice down while singing helped not picking up those dreaded room acoustics that the cardioid pattern of the Shure SM58 mic was prone to. In the chorus section you can hear one of the features that made the Wavestation stand out as a revolutionary synth: Wave sequences. I programmed that patch specifically for the song, so I could play the underlying melody while it cycled through different waves in the Wavestation's ROM.

Version VIII of "Lost Control" shows evolution over the previous versions. The mix sounds better (to my ears) because this time the approach changed from trying to use the software beyond its purpose to working with what I had. Since the bass consisted on a single note played repeatedly throughout the track, I used "Rebirth" to give me that note mixed with a kick drum, and then I processed the audio through tape saturation, resulting in a fat, tight bass note with plenty of attack provided by the kick, but I saved it for the ending section of the track. For the drums I stuck to the drum loop I was already using, but chopped it into sections manually because I didn't have a specific tool for the job such as "Recycle". Then I triggered the audio segments in their relevant places of the song by manually reordering them directly in the audio track. A second drum loop was brought in to provide toms for the drum solo. Since I was only interested in the toms I applied the same procedure by slicing the audio and muting the segments I wasn't interested in using the "Cubase" mute tool in the track's arrange window. An accidental but desirable side-effect to this was that the mix between the different grooves of each sample added a human character to the drum solo. I don't recall the exact details of what I did to the vocals but I am sure I saturated them a bit to make them sound louder and to add a bit of presence without having to overdo compression and EQ. This brightened them up a bit but unfortunately also made the sibilants much louder, so de-essing was necessary and I think I got carried away with the amount I applied. You can hear the result of the "North Pole" filter plug-in in the processed vocals behind the drum solo.

Roots, Bloody Roots

2007-05-20T00:36:00.001+01:00

Although Metal seemed to contain a kind of unique substance I couldn’t detect in any other musical genres, it did not provide every musical nutrients I needed. The days were those of “Nine Inch Nails – Downward Spiral”, “Prodigy – Fat of the Land”, “Cassandra Complex - Sex & Death”, “Fluke” and other industrial kind of influences I had been feeling increasingly more attracted to.

I had never been particularly attracted to spoken word, despite enjoying some of Laurie Anderson’s avant-garde music. This remained true until exposed to what I had been waiting for all my life: The divine music of Sow’s “Je ‘m aime”, whom of all people only my brother could have introduced to me. At the end of the first uninterrupted listening session of this masterpiece, to our own amusement João Paulo Simões registered for all eternity in his prodigal memory my reaction of the moment when excited words started pouring out of my mouth to articulate in a confused state of absolute awe: “…more powerful than any Metal...”

If on one hand, the combination between sampled full orchestra and ruthlessly programmed electronic instruments was enough to raise some hair at the back of the neck, the disturbing power of Sow flowed relentlessly from a dark literary corner embodied by a female narrator - a genius with the incredible ability to dissociate herself from any unnecessary morality and act with her voice to the essence of the lyrics with mastery. Only later I realised such ability rendered useless any need for singing.

Metallic Glitter

2007-05-19T21:34:00.000+01:00

It was in a visit to the local music shop to look for a Wavestation PCM Data card, that I met my old friend Paulo Godinho who goes by the nickname of "LordFader". As a new member of staff he struck me as the most atypical employee of a typical Portuguese music shop. After explaining my troubles to him, I was presented with a torrent of insightful information regarding the history of the Wavestation, and how I could look for Sysex on the Internet for my keyboard. Unfortunately the shop didn’t stock what I was after, but he seemed keen on knowing more about myself and what music I did, since I wasn’t probably the most typical kind of customer either. As we drifted in our friendly conversation we discovered common ground for both musical taste and production. Little did I know that I was before someone with years of experience under his belt working in the audio recording industry and live sound engineering for national talents I personally admired. And this is how a casual visit turned into a pleasant afternoon, and a pleasant afternoon turned into a long-standing friendship. It was only after many many moons of late-night philosophy, smoking and wine drinking sessions that it occurred to us that we could put that Pro Tools of his in record mode while I did my best to remove the rust off my fingers on the guitar.

You can checkout our work, where I contributed with many industrial/metal guitar parts by going to:

Lordfader's Palco Principal
Lordfader's My Bedroom Studio
Lordfader's Myspace

The "Baba de Esgoto" track features the talented singer/guitarist/songwriter and good friend "Belathauzer", from the reputable Portuguese Black Metal band Filii Nigrantium Infernalium. The track and lyrics were mostly the result of experimentation and improvisation. Godinho's mysterious methods and techniques for recording and mixing depend a lot on what he's had for lunch. You may very well find that those riffs that deserved so much disregard on the minute you played, magically turned into songs after a few days. And I mean many songs.

Platform Change I

2007-05-18T21:38:00.000+01:00

With the days of MS-DOS on the personal computer coming to an end, and the need for better sound and more powerful recording and mixing tools, revolutionary and disastrous events were to come. I didn’t totally move away from my reliable tracker application at first, but found a new use for it as a simple drum machine. The array of complete songs I had already created lacked proper guitars and vocals so I started by bouncing the tracks digitally and importing them back as stereo tracks into Cubase to add these missing bits. For the first time I was experiencing recording and monitoring straight from the application, despite my PC’s struggle to keep up to the task while running Windows. Adding more RAM didn’t really help other than giving me a few extra tracks, and an additional hard drive was great to make room for the larger .wav files generated by Cubase’s audio tracks, until it crashed taking with it my whole sample library and tracker songs. Backups were non-existent since RAM had seemed more important than a CD burner at the decision making time. All of my tracker creations had been making extensive use and abuse of the features offered by the extended module (.xm) format, resulting in modules too big to fit into floppies. On the bright side, this meant a new beginning was necessary, and I’ve always welcomed change. A secondary damage control analysis made me realise that maybe not everything was lost, since some tracks had already been bounced onto stereo .wav files and a few friends had been keeping different mixes of my music on tape. I just couldn’t go back and edit them any further in my tracker.

At this point I was working essentially with Cubase VST and Sound Forge as a sample editor. Because I had no sound sources whatsoever for percussion and synthesis, I started looking for possible solutions. I could still use “Fast Tracker II” for sequencing drum loops and sampled synths, but the process of having to boot into MS-DOS was painful and uninspiring, and I noticed that the internal clock of “Fast Tracker II” wouldn’t match Cubase’s internal clock. So a one-bar, 116 BPM loop wouldn’t fit the grid with precision inside Cubase. I turned my attention towards the wave table in my soundcard. 16 MB of internal sample RAM were usable and could very well hold complete drum kits and maybe a few stereo looped synths playable through MIDI, but the process of creating the banks of samples involved so much craftsmanship using a seriously unpolished proprietary editor, that I was spending hours just to get the sounds I wanted in place, when I could have been composing. I thought of going back to “Fast Tracker II” and forgetting all this jazz, but after having tasted the sweet flavour of real-time effects and a proper edit window to arrange audio, I couldn’t just turn my back away.

A partial answer was found when I purchased my first hardware synth: A Korg Wavestation EX. And such a wonderful and unique instrument this was…! It would have been all too easy to have surrendered before complexity and purchased a General MIDI synth instead. But I knew from the first time I heard this beast, that this was something special to keep – and indeed, here it is after 10 years, still in action.

My setup was becoming more interesting: The addition of a 16 track Soundcraft mixing desk would carry all my signals through to the monitoring section and the auxiliary channels would feed the inputs of the soundcard. Percussion was being taken care of by a combination of “Fruity Loops”, the Wavestation and single-shot samples triggered directly from Cubase. A borrowed Yamaha XG Wavetable PCI card would cover General MIDI. A myriad of several different little utilities floating around the Internet aided my workflow, like aWave for reading and converting from different audio formats. I used it for extracting the instruments enclosed in tracker modules. AudioMulch was also a very interesting modular synth and processor capable of delivering unusual results.

Now it was time to focus on my old tracker songs. The possible approaches could either be to just record my guitars and vocals on top of them, or to recreate the whole thing using the available tools. I tried both.

As I initiated the work of recomposing my old tracks with the software and hardware now at my disposal, yet again inescapable limitations would impel me towards searching for possible remedy.

“Fruity Loops” as it were, was fine for loading custom drum-kits and some basic mixing, but it didn’t really cut it for clinical drum programming or anything other than 4/4 patterns that could be suitable for some of the tracks but not all. The Yamaha XG’s high noise floor and poor variety of drum sounds made it nearly useless except as a means for quickly laying out MIDI tracks. What I needed was a sampler, but since I had none available, my attention turned to unexplored features of the Wavestation.

The Wavestation featured two ports at the rear labelled “Program Data” and “PCM Data” respectively, and the manual mentioned the existence of rewritable cards where uncompressed audio could be stored for building programs. If only I could find one of these cards, I would then be able to choose the drum sounds I wanted to build my own drum kits, turning the Wavestation into the sampler I lacked.

Tracking into production

2007-05-18T20:47:00.000+01:00

The first experiences I had in music production were back in ’96. After having left my former band, “Sacred Sin”, I found myself digging into shareware compilation CDs distributed with pro audio magazines and at computer gaming shops. Albeit not being much of a gamer myself, I was attracted to the unknown technology behind MS-DOS games that allowed them to contain full-length background music tracks within such a small computer application – sometimes with surprisingly good sound quality. By intuition I thought the game itself probably enclosed a group of audio samples and a separate track triggered these samples in the desired order, hence keeping the application down to the size of the executable itself and the samples required to play the music. If there was a way of me to get my hands on the software that created these music tracks, I wanted it badly. Further research into the file system structure of the games confirmed my initial suspicions: the omnipresence of a file with either a .mod, .s3m, or .stm extension for which a number of sound players existed. I rushed into a cyber-café looking for more answers. As I was fairly new to computers at the time, this was giving me enough reasons to overcome my illiteracy, completely unaware that this eagerness for knowledge would one day grow into the field of UNIX and large-scale Internet servers.

The music files used in those games were in fact called modules, because of their original .mod file extension – something that Commodore Amiga users were probably familiar with. The overall sound quality of the songs was essentially down to bit and sample rate of each sample, the samples themselves, the DAC of the soundcard on the PC, and the sound engine of the tracker. Pitch and duration of the sample was determined by its playback frequency, and in busy songs the amount of computing power required for playback could build up in a program that was simultaneously a sampler and multi track sequencer, especially when using envelopes, loops and sample layering for instruments. There were also some built-in effects one could use, like vibrato, but I never really used any in my songs. Trickery was possible to overcome some limitations of the tracker since it wasn’t initially thought out for anything other than making music for computer games. For example, since stereo files weren’t supported by its internal sampler, the file could be split into two mono files using an external Windows-based sound editor, and then simultaneously triggered on two different hard panned tracks. But there was of course a trade when resorting to these kinds of tricks: Added complexity, RAM usage and doubling the number of required tracks. Also I found that in this type of software, the headroom ceiling seemed to be low, and it was easy to make a mix sound crowded when pursuing more “professional” results. To tackle this, some module players and streamers offered playback effects that altered the perception of the listener making it seem more spacey. I used “Cubic player” for MS-DOS. Things such as sub-bass frequency boosts, filtering and phasing applied to the mix could help achieve a sense of separation and loudness, although to my ears these weren’t satisfactory enough and I would often resort to my own methods for finalising a mix. One of my favourite cheap tricks involved driving the signal from my soundcard through a tape recording deck and then re-recording it back with a few extra dB and a degree of tape saturation. Another trick to get guitar solos and vocals to sound in sync with sequenced tracks meant bouncing the song onto tape, rebooting into Windows and monitoring the song through headphones off the tape while recording straight to the “Sound Recorder” bundled with Windows. This would guarantee that the recorded file containing the performance of the player matched the pitch and tempo of the original track (provided that the tape deck didn’t introduce fluctuations in the playback speed of the recorded material). Then it was a matter of importing the recorded audio into the tracker and triggering the sample un-looped and in its original key at the right spot. While this worked, I would often bump into the aforementioned limitations inherent to the fact that I was using a tracker beyond the scope of its original design.

Like with many other software packages, programming the tracker involved a learning curve, a technical mind and a degree of patience. Without time and experience, it was easy to get frustrated working with hexadecimal values representing ranges assignable to certain basic controls. And something as simple as fading in and out, pitch bending or panning could become daunting when editing with a computer keyboard. At the time I had no MIDI master keyboard to send this information through the movement of a knob or fader, and I’m not even sure whether it was possible to send MIDI controller data to the tracker and have it convert it to hexadecimal on the fly. But learning the ins and outs of these tracker applications paid off, and once you got used to its method it actually made a lot of sense and became an addictive and fluent process. Songs were pattern-based so starting a song by the end was possible. The resolution of each pattern was measured in lines scrolling down your screen in a grid of cells and columns where columns were the track. At the centre of the screen a cursor would “read” the information contained in each of these cells as it scrolled over them in playback mode. Each cell could be left blank or filled with any combination of three possible control values: Note, Pan and Effect. Lines were numbered from 0 to 63, typically, and it was possible to add or remove lines from a pattern if needed, for example to create a logical ¾ or 6/8. The speed of the song could also be controlled using the BPM setting and a special parameter that would multiply or halve whatever BPM by the selected measure.

Sound sources varied. I would either hunt for sounds contained in other .mod files, browse my collection of free samples, or record audio using a Shure SM58 microphone connected to a Marshall JCM900 valve guitar preamp, while using the send and return to route the signal through an Alesis Quadraverb GT effects unit and into the sound card’s input. Other times I would simply process audio directly in the box using a shareware application for Windows, Goldwave. I probably shouldn’t say this, but on a particular occasion I sampled the bass drum off the beginning of the track “My girlfriend’s girlfriend” from “Type O Negative”. On a different occasion, it was the guitars of “Obituary”, “Slowly we rot”. But we can keep this just between you and me, can’t we?

My tracker of choice, and possibly many others was “Fast Tracker II” by Triton. This free MS-DOS application featured an intuitive user interface one could interact with using a mouse in addition to the keyboard, which greatly facilitated the definition of loop regions in the sample editor window. The look and feel of the sequencer area of “Fast Tracker II”, similarly to the rest of the trackers available very much resembled a spreadsheet, and people I know would approach me and say something along the lines: “So. I heard you’re now making music on Excel…”

“Fast Tracker II” was a very robust piece of software. If there was an occasional hang requiring a reboot, it would be most likely down to the MS-DOS sound card driver or the fact that there was no protected memory built into the OS. The user interface was not only intuitive, uncluttered and amazingly fast, but also very well organised into logical sections, easy to understand even by a novice. You could record your sound card’s input straight into the sampler or load the sample data and store it in a deck as a program for later recall. Actually, one could even attempt to load non-audio data to see what the program would do with it. I tried this with a text file once and ended up with a strange noise sound file, which I used in a song. Dialog-boxes would appear for confirmation of destructive operations, but never would one feel interrupted by irrelevant questions like it happens so often these days. There was even a real-time graphical oscilloscope for each track where one could visually monitor which tracks were playing and mute them with a click.

I hope not to be infringing any copyright legislation by posting a screenshot of the main window. If that’s the case, contact me and I’ll remove it.

Sacred Sin Memorial

2007-05-17T19:16:00.000+01:00

During the first months of playing in “Sacred Sin” most of my time was spent covering the “Dark Side” album. Rehearsals tended to get repetitive because of line-up changes involving the drummer. But they personally helped me develop stamina for playing technically challenging and particularly fast guitar riffs for extended periods of time, which was useful in live performances, especially considering the amount of head banging and alcohol involved. Although I was splitting my time between school and the band, I would still try to find time for playing my own things at home, some of which would later become part of existing tracks or turn into a whole track on it’s own, which was the case with “Link to Nothingness”. Ideas would pretty much get accepted or rejected in the rehearsals during cigarette breaks or while the drummer finished setting up the drum kit. The other guitarist and I had no trouble playing the same riff exactly the same way at the same time, instantly working out harmonies or changing our usual tuning to get a heavier sound for the band, so we glued together pretty well as musicians.

There were many opportunities to play everywhere around Portugal and to pick up varied live performance experience. Despite playing with other Portuguese metal bands in small to medium sized venues being more often the case, bigger support acts with internationally acclaimed bands included “Napalm Death” at “Pavilhão dos Belenenses” on the 3rd of December of '93, “Manowar” at “Dramático de Cascais” in '94, on the 18th of March. We also supported “Tiamat”, "Samael" and "Sentenced" - who were touring at the time - at the “Pavilhão Carlos Lopes” on the 5th of May of '95, and then had a 3 date mini-tour with just "Sentenced" around Portugal.

In ’95 we had a number of tracks lined up and ready for inclusion in a new album. The recent sign up with the BMG label division “Dinamite” brought forward other opportunities: A new-to-the-country Englishman from Sheffield, U.K., would become the engineer behind the sound of “Eye ‘M God”, recorded at Angel II studios: Marsten Bailey. The amount of rehearsals and Marsten’s competence paid off during our time in the studio: The album was finalised in just a week.

For the recording of “Eye ‘M God” I used mainly my Washburn KC70 guitar which I had heavily modified by then. It sounded a lot more fat and higher in gain with those Seymour Duncan pickups than my other sponsored Ibanez SG-series guitar. I don’t recall the precise details on how Marsten miked up the amps to get a consistent wall of sound for the guitars, but I think that my Marshall JCM 900 was screaming full blast in the largest room of the studio perhaps with some condensers picking up room acoustics, and the preamp signal was being fed through to the Tube Works power amps and four speaker cabinets shut in the smallest room. If you ask me, I think that Tube Works sucked badly, but that’s what we had to work with. I believe that the drums got tuned and recorded during the first day, and four guitar tracks per song laid down on the second and third days. We were recording onto 24-track tape recorders, not digital media, so very little punching was ever resorted to and we had to be able to play the whole track and solos in one go.

A music video of the old single “Dark Side” existed, and at the new record launch venue hosted by the Head Banger’s Ball TV show presenter, Vanessa Warwick, relationships were established that would lead to it becoming the first Portuguese clip ever on MTV. To promote the new “Eye ‘M God” record another video clip was shot in the beautiful area of “Sintra”, in Portugal, and a tour with the U.S. Florida band “Malevolent Creation”, was scheduled for the whole of December ’96.

The most vivid memories I keep from this tour come from the London U.K. opening gig. After spending three days on the road where I was finding it hard to get any sleep, we finally arrived in London where we met our host who lived around Camden. We were then directed to the place where we were to pick up the amp cabinets. Since we were travelling in a camping van with limited space for five people, we had carried only our amp heads, guitars and effects. The venue was set in an old pub that seemed to be sited in an abandoned building, feeling quite surreal. After the gig we drove back to where we had initially picked up the cabinets: What seemed to be a London underground gallery that served both as a recording and rehearsal studio during the day, had now in a matter of hours turned into a private party. The corridors leading to the main hall had been covered with blankets and light seemed to come indistinctly through them and all around us. A lady with a baby pushchair chatted merrily to a friend in the main lounge, and as me and José Costa, bassist and vocalist, dragged ourselves in a hazy state of mind through the endless corridors entering every room along the way to see what happened there, we would be confronted with things such as an empty room, black walls, fruit basket in the middle under a spot light. It was only after leaving the room and shutting the door firmly behind us that José turned to me and said:

- “Didn’t you see?”
- “Yes. The fruit basket…”

Brief pause. Then smiling:

- “ I meant the couple shagging at the dark corner…”

The next tour date was to be in Bergum, a village located in the Dutch province of Friesland, Netherlands. I was immediately attracted to the bucolic surroundings and the affability of the people, although Frisian - the local language - sounded a bit harsh as we asked for directions to the venue. When we finally got there, it was as big wooden house. As we went in to introduce ourselves, a small committee of people welcomed us and presented a long table covered with hot food, snacks and drinks. This was to be our first and only hot meal for the whole duration of the tour since we left Portugal on the week before. We delivered a solid, brutal performance that night on a full belly to a responsive, deserving audience. I was particularly flattered for receiving a lady’s attention during the short stay, to the point it made me forget about the freezing -5Cº temperature when I stepped outside in a t-shirt to say goodbye.

We had been so far travelling in our rented camping van, but it was now time to switch to the tour bus we would be sharing with “Malevolent Creation”. Another support band was to join the tour: “Detestor” from Italy who was travelling in its own camping van driven by an interesting character who was a history teacher.

The top level of the bus resembled a crypt. The seats had been replaced by organised horizontal cells where I could just fit in. But despite its claustrophobic feel, my tomb turned out to be very cosy. Apart from the two bands and the driver, the tour manager also travelled with us. I don’t remember his name, as I would normally refer to him as “Load in, Load out”.

Somewhere in Czech republic I had the strangest feeling that the houses, the streets, the people could very well have come from Portugal only if it weren’t for certain deadness to them. No one would speak a word unless absolutely necessary. We had time to wander around during the afternoon to try and find somewhere we could eat. It seemed like the clock had stopped ticking many years ago; the currency had low value and at the backstage of the theatre where we played one could still find traces of civil war: military communication radio equipment and other indistinct things lying around.

The tour went on day after day. Waking up in a different country, playing, drinking, sleeping. We didn’t play the last date in Paris, since we wouldn’t have time to catch the train afterwards. The money that was given to us was barely enough to buy those thirteen McDonald’s burgers each, which we managed like ration for the following thirty-six or so hours the journey would take. Upon my arrival home, I went to bed and slept for something like fifteen hours in a row. I woke up exactly in the same position as when I laid down.

Despite my relative indifference to success, “Sacred Sin” had become one of the most highly regarded and respected Death Metal bands in Portugal since they appeared in ’91. Everywhere we went the audience knew the tracks and was very welcoming and warm - in a typically Portuguese hospitable way.

In ’96, disappointed with the lack of camaraderie and acknowledgement of my role as a contributing musician, along with the frustration of the time consuming rehearsals and unclear direction of the band, the decision to abandon the project was made. I offered to play our remaining scheduled gig at the “Voz do Operário” venue where my resignation was announced.

For a period of a time I received offers from bands who had heard about my resignation, asking whether I would be interested in joining them, but I thought it was time to move forward.

The Age of Miracles has Past

2007-05-16T23:55:00.001+01:00

Lisbon, Portugal

It was in early ’92 when I got my first guitar and effects processor: a Washburn and a little Zoom unit you could clip onto your guitar strap. At the time I listened mainly to Thrash and Death metal which greatly influenced my guitar playing style and technique. Through word of mouth, these metal roots and rapid progression learning the instrument earned me reputation amongst several local bands lacking a competent metal guitarist. After two brief unfulfilling experiences as a guitarist in “Exiled” and “Extreme Unction”, I got invited to join “Sacred Sin” – an emerging but already popular Death Metal project who’s music I already knew from their debut album “Dark Side”. It was flattering for someone as young as I to receive such an offer, since my first impressions of the record struck me as innovative, structured, mature and well ahead of their time. The guitars sounded tight, technical and fast paced without losing focus on the track itself, and this I thought, was exactly what I needed to push my own playing style a step further, unaware that this offer would turn out to become a three-year odyssey playing a preponderant role in the Portuguese Metal scene of that time.

After abandoning the project in ‘96, for the first time in three years I experienced what it meant to have time again to dedicate to my own music and personal development in what was until now the most creative period of my life, during which I produced a number of tracks in my own personal style. The potential of computer based music production unleashed a breadth of possibilities I had never even thought possible in a home studio. Unconsciously I was dissociating myself from the guitar without fully realising that my choice of instrument had suffered a decisive change. The tools made available by computer software allowed me to turn any sound into a playable instrument, and the compositions I would have instinctively played on the guitar were being naturally translated into a matrix of harmonies, scales and effects. The sounds of a solitary bottle echoing down a dark alley becoming the main musical phrase of a decadent cello piece. Once again, my isolated activities drew the attention of several individuals, from which a single long lasting friendship is worthy of note: the remarkable João Paulo Simões who I can only regard as a monstrously gifted literary and artistic intellect with the inherent ability to put into words the very essence of the human dimension. This emerging friendship was the ultimate turning point and the missing link responsible for giving a new direction and sense of purpose to my music.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to spend many hours together during which we would listen to music, watch independent films and debate over our own thoughts, existence and artistic production. I felt creatively inspired by this exchange process to an even greater extent as my mind vigorously bubbled with musical abstractions rooted deep within our fellowship. It was becoming clear that we were essentially the same individual, same soul, with similar physical appearance pursuing the very same truth through parallel art forms. Even to this day people see us together and ask:

- “Are you brothers?”
- “Yes”.

Eventually the concept of “The Ultimate Architects” blossomed, aiming to consolidate artistic expression into a unified settlement: An egoless statement of creative purity. But as with any idealist aspirations, the inevitable failure of this project was set upon João Paulo’s departure to the U.K. in ’97. The synergies that once irradiated out of our contact were now broken facilitating the decline to follow. The “The Ultimate Architects” ideal was taken over by the remaining member who turned it into a dancey, electro-pop revival of bands who rightfully belong to their own times. And in their own époque they should have remained peacefully, undisturbed.

I continued to work on my own, developing production and engineering skills I used for remixing and expanding the substance of my own prior creations. The new “The Ultimate Architects” benefited from this knowledge when as a personal favour I was asked to become officially their live sound engineer - which I did for three consecutive years, until I had enough.