Studio time: Helion - Fool's Paradise - OUT NOW!

[Pernax]

Howdy bass playin' partners!

 

I decided to spend a few moments to tell what I've been up to lately (and to clear my head up a bit). As some of you good people know, I play in a metal band called Helion. Having seen many similar bands from up close, I have to say that we do what we do quite well, and we try not to take the easy way out in our songs, which keeps things interesting. Even if you're not that keen on heavier music, I'm sure that our stuff isn't too hard on anyone's ears...

 

We recorded a 4 song CD in a pro studio about 1½ years ago, and it received quite a nice welcome, and was sold out quite fast. All the reviews we got were positive, and we even won a "Demo of the month" award in one of the biggest Finnish music magazines. The prize was 100 CD-R-copies of what ever we would like to put on the disc, with black and white print job on the jewel case and on the disc. Pretty nice.

 

Also each of the winners of "Demo of the month" will take part in a competition which decides the "Demo of the year" or something like that, and the winner of that will be announced in the beginning of the new year. The prize will be the opportunity to record a single in one of the best studios in the country. Again, quite nice.

 

Why only "quite nice" you might ask, and why haven't we done anything with the 100 CD-Rs yet? Quite simple, we've got something bigger cooking in the oven! As no record company was willing to take us under their wings, we decided to take matters into our own hands and a few weeks ago we began recording a full length CD. All expenses will be paid by us (and a few rich fans who graciously offered to give us a zero-interest loan to cover most of the tab), and we are doing most of the recordings by ourselves. Yey us! We'll use the free 100 CD-Rs as promotional items, and order a larger amount of full color, all the bells and whistles, CDs for retail purposes. The operators are standing by to take your pre-release orders now!

 

We're using a laptop Mac with ProTools and a DigiDesign M-Box to record everything but the drums (we don't have enough pro-quality mics to do that) in our own practice studio (which has served as a real recording studio up until a few years ago, so the acoustics are ok). Also the final mixing and mastering will be done in the pro studio (the same one where we recorded the last CD, the guy who runs it knows his stuff and is no stranger to our kind of music).

 

We began by recording demo drum tracks which will be replaced by the studio versions in the final mixup part, and currently 95% of the lead guitar parts are done, 10% of rhythm guitars and 15% of keyboards have also been recorded. Bass parts will be recorded a bit later on, I've been acting as the studio engineer/guitar tech/producer for now.

 

We've been pulling about 12 hour shifts per day, and the pace isn't going to be any slower in the future. I have to say that it's damn hard work, even when I haven't even touched my bass yet. But we're young (and stupid) so it's ok, and it's nothing a good meal and a beer can't fix at the end of the day. We've had our fair share of "stupid user errors" which have sometimes resulted in the need to re-record some parts, but that's just a part of the learning curve. And believe me, we have learnt a lot! I have nothing but high respect for you out there who work with the recording stuff daily, and also it's always a very humbling experience to have to listen to one's playing from tape (or hard drive, in this case), there's no room for sloppiness. As we have a lot of (free!) time to work on the music, any errors left in to the final product will be due to our own negligence, and we can't have any of that!

 

As for you gear-a-holics, I'll be using the DI-out from my SWR 750x into the M-Box, and possibly also a miced signal to add some diversity. The bass of choice is unclear for now, but the options are a 5- or a 6-stringed Ibanez BTB (with different guage strings), or if the Gods Of Instrument Construction permit, my new 5-stringed custom which should be in my hands in a few days. Yey me...

 

I guess I'll call it a post for now, gotta go catch some dreams, I still have about 6 hours before the all the fun starts again... Yey me...

 

-Pernax

[Mr. Phil]

sounds like fun. I'll buy a copy! Good Luck!!

[Tom Capasso]

It's all on a computer? Sounds like a pro environment, but my years in a related business makes me ask - how is it backed up?

 

My studio experience is so limited, but there is one thing that happened to me (in my two studio sessions). I think it happens to many bands nowadays. You get in a groove, and it sounds great. The playback sounds great. You keep going, and when you're done it all sounds the same. If you have someone guiding you, you won't need this advice but consider a day off and a change-up on some songs just to be sure there is some variety.

 

I enjoyed the Helion material I downloaded, and look forward to the new CD. Best of luck on winning the "year" thing as well - why not?

 

Tom

[Pernax]

Just got home an hour ago, another 12 hour day in the bag, it's all good! Today we finished the lead guitar parts while we waited for our keyboard player to finish writing a game report of the Junior Ice-hockey World Cup game (he's a contributor to an online hockey site thingy). The games are held here in Finland, and they take place in Helsinki as well as here in Hämeenlinna, which is the city where I live. Once the missing sheep was back in the herd, we made good progress on the keyboard parts, another song is almost done.

 

As for Tom's questions, the recording system sounds much cooler than it really is in person. You can find information about the M-Box here .

 

And as for the back up thing, the idea is to burn the session data to CDs every now and then, but it's something that should be looked more into. The ideal situation would be to use an external firewire hard drive for backing up the data, but unfortunately we don't have access to such a thing. Just have to hope that nothing bad is going to happen to our precious data between the backing up to CDs (*knocks on wood*).

 

The point of keeping things fresh is also a valid one, thanks for bringing it up Tom. Luckily most of the time when we work there is at least one pair of fresh ears to bring an objective view to things. The main responsibility of the recording project has fallen on myself and the lead guitarist, and the other band members come and go as their schedules allow. And even when it's just he two of us, we take enough breaks to make sure that our opinions of the work doesn't become too jaded - nothing good comes from bashing one's head against the wall for too long. There are some nice and comfy couches on the social quarters just next door to our practice space, and going out to enjoy some fresh winter air helps too (even if it's enjoyed through a filter...).

 

Tomorrow we'll try to get more work done on keyboards before heading out to celebrate the new year. Somehow I have a feeling that the 1st day of the new year will be a day off from recording - loud music and a mystically appeared headache don't mix well methinks....

 

I'll update this thread again later on, and I'll try to get a few pictures of the "operations center" too.

 

-Pernax -->

 

PS. There was a re-run of Late Night w/ Conan O'Brien on TV (I believe it was aired in the US just before X-mas), featuring Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band... All I can say is wow! What a great show the guys put up! Best performance ever on that particular programme that I've seen.

[g.]

Should also have backup for EVERYTHING on the computer. OS, applications, configs/prefs/options, etc.

 

It's a real beaotch to get an entire environment set up just the way it was, should a main system drive crash.

[Mr. Phil]

NEATO!!!!

 

looks very expensive...

[Pernax]

It's been really busy lately, 80% of keyboards are done, and we also did a round of demo vocals on all but one song. Things are sounding quite good, even if I say so myself. Tomorrow I'll lay down some bass tracks, even though there's still some tweaking ahead in order to get a good enough tone - luckily we can use almost as much time as we want on said tweaking, one big benefit of going DIY-style...

 

I took some pictures, as promised, for those (two people ) interested in this project:

 

Lead guitar as engineer, rhythm playing his heart out, and drums on the sofa.

Keys & drums at it... err.. hockey anyone?

Your\'s truly - quality control department hard at work.

No room for error - layin\' down the keys.

 

-P

[Pernax]

What a busy few days it has been... Laid down the bass tracks on Sunday evening and finished them on Monday. I think they turned out quite ok, even though I had to make quite a lot of adjustments to the basslines of some songs due to changes in guitar parts.

 

Playing wise I had to focus on my right-hand technique a bit more than usual to find the right strength to sound good without too much strings-banging-to-the-frets sound which is quite prominent in my live playing, it just doesn't sound that good on tape. Like I said in an earlier post, it's always a humbling experience to record stuff, and I got a few pointers on what to work on in the future from listening back to my playing.

 

Also I found it a bit difficult to get a good feeling going due to the lower-quality demo drum tracks - it's been a long time since I've last played without a live drummer (the last time I did studio work was with an acoustic duo - no drums and a different story) and it took a while to get used to not hearing the drums as clearly as I would have liked. Speaking of feeling, it was quite hard to get into one particular blues-rock-clearly-a-summer-hit type of song when there's snow and ice all over the place, but I guess it came out OK in the end. You can find an old live take of the song from our website - it's titled "The Sun Is Burning Down".

 

I ended up using both my basses quite equally, a few songs really benefited from the extended range of the 6-string. I used the same settings on both basses, balance adjusted slightly in the favor of the bridge pickup, and just slightly boosted the bass frequency. Additional (and more comprehensive) tonal shaping will be done once we have all the instruments recorded so we can get a good overall sound, that's why I kept my sound quite flat at this stage.

 

There's still some guitar work needed as well as just a tiny bit of keyboards, let's see if we can get those done today. The "real" drum tracks will be recorded in the coming weekend, and after that we'll focus on the vocals. Final mixing and mastering will take place a few weeks later, if all goes to plan.

 

-Pernax

[Pernax]

It's been a while since I last updated this thread, but as you might have guessed, I've been quite busy with the project. Things have moved forwards quite nicely, we spent the whole last weekend in the "pro" studio recording the drums.

 

We ran into slight problems with the tempo/click of the demo drums (which we used to record everything else with), it appears that the metronome our drummer used isn't really precise - for example a tempo set to 160 on the metronome would in reality be something like 159,05. Doesn't sound like much of a big deal, but when a song lasts for about 6 minutes the slight differences become really disturbing in the end. We got past the problem, but in the future we wont be doing any demo drumming, live and learn I guess...

 

Today we had some fun with acoustic guitars (well an acoustic guitar and a dobro to be precise). As we have nearly unlimited (read free) time to record stuff at our own studio, we've been doing some experiments with adding small things here and there - it's better to have too much stuff and then cut most of it out in mixing rather than having too little stuff and kicking one's self over the possibility of what something might have sounded.

 

We also have quite a task with cleaning out the midi-trigger tracks for the drums. We need to go over every snare, bass drum, and 4 different tom hits of every song to make sure that the triggers are where they should be. Sometimes the D-Drum thingy picks up hits from other adjacent drums or leaves a hit unnoticed. It's a time consuming task, but it's better that we do it in our own time instead of paying a pro to do it. Maybe one day when we have a (major) label to finance our sessions we don't need to worry about such things anymore...

 

Oh yeah, there was a reporter from a local newspaper doing a story about us yesterday. I don't really know what the story will look like in the end, but any publicity is good publicity, right? The main point was that he was interested in seeing how a semi-pro record can be done without too much of professional interference. And we made sure that he'd get our website's address in the story as well, so it should be quite cool.

 

Here are some pictures from our visit at Studio Sound Supreme:

 

An overview of the mixing console - a thing of beauty!

 

From left to right - Leo (drummer), Janne (studio engineer/god), the back of Jaakko (gtr)

 

This looks like something from a sci-fi movie...

 

-Pernax

 

PS. If someone is interested in hearing some rough clips from our project, it can be arranged...

[Mr. Phil]

Originally posted by Pernax:

This looks like something from a sci-fi movie...

Now THAT is what a progressive rock drum kit should look like.

[doc taz]

Originally posted by Phil-diggity-dog:

Originally posted by Pernax:

This looks like something from a sci-fi movie...

Now THAT is what a progressive rock drum kit should look like.

That's a kit I wouldn't mind usng for myself. Sweet.

 

Do put up some clips on your site if you can be bothered to.

[Pernax]

You can get really rough around the edges type of mix of a song from clicking this link . The drums and vocals are demo-stage versions on that take, no EQ'ing has been done on any instruments etc. etc. but at least it will give you a little taste of what is to be expected...

 

-P

[doc taz]

Originally posted by Pernax:

You can get really rough around the edges type of mix of a song from clicking this link . The drums and vocals are demo-stage versions on that take, no EQ'ing has been done on any instruments etc. etc. but at least it will give you a little taste of what is to be expected...

 

-P

 

*dances around the house*

[Mr. Phil]

Listening to it right now

 

F*CKING AWESOME!!!

 

Put me on the Preorder list for the Album. And send me a copy of the other album too while your at it.

 

edit: I am STILL listening to the song, and its wierd cuz my MP3 player shows that it is 5:35 long and it went on for almost 7 minutes!!! wierd. stupid computer.

[_Sweet Willie_]

Keep at it, Pernax. Looking forward to hearing the final product!

 

Peace.

--SW

[clatteramy]

It's sounding great already! Can't wait to hear the final stuff -- best of luck!

[Pernax]

Thanks for the nice words guys, if you even remotely liked that songs, you'll definitely like the 7 others even better.

 

Yesterday we did the last recordings of the instruments, just a few bits here and there (some changes to the song I posted as well). Now all that is missing are the vocals. We're going back to the studio on the next weekend to mix the instrument tracks and the demo vocals. Once we're done with the actual vocal tracks, it's just a simple case of inserting them over the otherwise ready mix and with some minor tweaking we'll be all done and the master CD will be ready to be shipped to a CD-printing company. So if everything goes as planned, we should have the finished product in our hands in about a month's time.

 

Before we can get there though, there's something I have to ask of the good people populating this forum:

 

We're looking for one or two people who fill the following terms:

 

-The person's native language is English.

 

-The person has the ability to record speech on a computer, and also has the bandwidth to transfer files over the Internet.

 

Basically we're looking for someone to read our lyrics out loud, so we can compile a cd out of it and give it to our lead singer so he can work on his English pronunciation (which unfortunately needs a bit of work at the moment). If no volunteers appear, we can do it ourselves too, but it's always different to get an actual "native" to give a good example.

 

What we're offering in return is free copy of the upcoming album, as well as a copy of the previous sold out (!) album. Also, you will get your name in to the credits of the new album as well.

 

If anyone is interested in helping us out, please contact me via PM or this thread. Thanks in advance.

 

-Pernax

[Mr. Phil]

OOOOOO I can get the sold out album AND credits??

 

Check your PMs Pernax

 

I would LOOOOOOOVE to do that!!

[Pernax]

So the vocal thing is being sorted, great .

 

Here are a few more clips, and a nice picture of the instruments used and abused while making said clips...

 

A short clip

 

A bit longer clip

 

http://www.helionprog.com/pics/temp/axes.jpg

 

-P

[_Sweet Willie_]

'nax,

 

Finally listened to the clips. Nice work. Sound quality is really pretty good considering there's more engineering to be done.

 

Peace.

--sweets

[Dan M]

Love the mp3 you posted. You guys are good.

[Pernax]

Originally posted by Sweet Willie:

'nax,

 

Finally listened to the clips. Nice work. Sound quality is really pretty good considering there's more engineering to be done.

 

Peace.

--sweets

Thanks, but I have to dissagree with you on the sound quality thing, those clips are way way worse than what the actual sound quality is. To make those clips the signal has been driven from the Mac & M-Box to a basic mixer to a minidisc deck to the computer via a basic soundcard and finally encoded into a mp3. And then there's the whole non-EQ'd/mixed/mastered thing as well. But at least it serves the purpose of getting the big picture across . Hopefully after the coming weekend we'll have a bit better sounding stuff to work with .

 

-Pernax

[_Sweet Willie_]

Originally posted by Pernax:

Thanks, but I have to disagree with you on the sound quality thing, those clips are way way worse than what the actual sound quality is.

The way you described them initially, I expected utter dog poo for sound quality, and they're certainly sounding better than that!

 

But, if you're going to force my hand, there certainly is room for improvement in the sound quality.

 

Peace.

[Pernax]

A quick update;

 

We got busy last weekend and recorded lead vocal tracks for 6 songs, the remaining 2 plus back up vocals will be recorded on the coming weekend.

 

I finally made a few clips which feature the "real" drum tracks instead of the demo drums like in the previous clips.

 

Here's a little comparison (the files are about 1 meg):

 

Clip 1 w/ demo drums and no mixing

 

Clip 2 w/ real drums and mixing

 

Here's a bonus clip from another song: Clip3

 

-P

[ClarkW]

Pernax: Clip2, Clip3 --> HELL YEAH!

 

Our bands have a lot in common! We'll be in the studio by the middle of April and I'm even more excited now that I've read your accounts and heard your work. Sounds great, and I can't wait for the Finnished (haha, I'm so funny!) album. Keep up the good work.

[_Sweet Willie_]

Cool, 'nax!

 

Glad to hear that someone's still kickin' @$$ and takin' names in Finland.

 

Can't wait to hear everything once completed.

 

Keep up the good work.

[Pernax]

Some time has passed since the last update, things have been moving forwards slowly but steadily. We've been working on the vocal parts as much as our busy schedules allow, and there are only a few backup parts missing to complete the recordings. So hopefully (depending on the schedule of the studio) we're looking at an early April release date for the CD.

 

Here's a preview of the cover art:

http://www.helionprog.com/pics/kansi-foolsparadise300.jpg

 

Also, our website has been redesigned, and content will be added in a steady stream as time allows. If you've a few minutes to spare, why not check the new layout out, the link is in my signature.

[g.]

Ah, no - you've hooked up with the Pony Trekking! Nice cover art; will of course be checkin' out the site, and later, the album. Do Finland proud! Or at least, the local saunas and pubs ; }

[BenLoy]

Nice stuff, man! You guys are tight!

[Mr. Phil]

Great Album art!!!

 

Finally the anonymous album title has been revealed!!