Originally Posted by halsinden
ok chaps, this was actually part of a PM thread i had with nick, given the extent of the conversation i figured it might be relevant to post here.
nick's just heard the advance samples MP3, gave me some really interesting commentary on it, so i've replied. a lengthy read, so it's only if you're intrigued...
i hear what you’re saying man, it’s definitely interesting to listen to whatever feedback we can get from these new tracks. do of course bear in mind that these are only the demo versions though, we’re recording the album versions as we speak.
everything this time round has been refined and reconsidered. by that i mean john’s a much better producer than he was back in 2005, so the sound’s going to be intrinsically different in the first place, it’ll be a lot more clear. what’s happened now with the guitars is that we’ve actually got much better materials available to us, for instance these demo tracks were recorded using john’s framus dragon and the modded cabs he has from the endorsement. we’re also paying more attention to the basis of implied gain through more tracks rather than an initially overloaded tone for distortion, as many bands do - hardly a revelation, but the recording of the crisis guitars wasn’t working to the low gain key as much as now.
the main brief that pretty much everyone has been working to this time round, in arranging the songs, is definitely to add more space in the sound. we found fairly early on after the release of crisis//reinvention that when playing live the overall sound was simply too busy, so we worked to cut down a lot of the backing. the other major issue with crisis was the absence of identifiable choruses and ‘sections’, which i found made listening to it quite tiring. as you said, it just wouldn’t let up and many times followed a very linear approach with arrangement, rather than returning to a theme occasionally in a song which makes a listener identify with it more. this has all been realised since gigging the songs and monitoring the reactions combined with how we felt doing it.
another factor is that we’re operating more as a band now when concerned with penning new tunes. in that literally everyone else is providing material now, as opposed to crisis being so much more of a polarized summation of performers. this isn’t to say what happened with the last album was bad at all, but more that at the time and with the members who were in the band then (do note that only 50% of the crisis lineup are still in the band now) it was mostly only john who was coming up with music because it’s what sounded most like what we were pursuing, then i’d be coming in with lyrics and the odd riff here or there. now, we’ve got a drummer who is putting a definite human slant to his parts and has made them entirely his own, we’ve got a bassist who is really starting to revolutionise her own playing style (ie. now much more technical) to accommodate the material and therefore is more sensitive to her own dynamics, we have a tech-death second guitarist who has already written pretty much an entire song himself plus all the solos, a female vocalist who can actually belt out ALL parts without any problem (unlike her predecessor) and who also writes these amazingly anthemic choruses and then there’s me who’s writing a lot more on guitar now, putting new approaches to this album’s lyrics in (ie much more literal and easier to understand) and i’m putting so much more attention on my clean vocals.
at the core of the music will always be john. he produces it, he writes a huge amount of it and the programming will always stem him from him. for the album, we’ve got so much more to hand with the guitar stuff. john’s a framus endorsee, mart’s an ENGL endorsee, we also still have our ties with peavey and syan is a warwick endorsee. we’ve got joe with his mapex & istanbul endorsements, the list goes on… for instruments, john’s using his schecter 7 (can’t remember the name of it. black lacquer, mother of pearl binding, 707s, 26.25 scale i think. either a damian or something similar) and mart’s using his ESP steph carpenter baritone 7 which he’s loaded with a kahler trem. syan’s using a warwick vampire extended scale 4 string. we’ve been tracking using my pod XT pro so we can then re-amp later. i’m using an AKG sound control condenser mic, and christina’s using a neumann condenser which suits her voice more.
H
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