ANUBIS GATE composing blog 1 How an Anubis Gate album is made: There several distinct phases that material for an album goes through. Phase 1: Initial demos. These are the raw materials. Recorded at each members “bedroom” recording facilities they can be anything from a ten second solitary guitar, keyboard or vocal thing to longer passages. Sometimes with more developed instrumentation, sometimes with a vocal idea or two, but often instrumental. If it has some kind of vocals the lyrics are all nonsense lyrics at this point. No idea is too small to be pitched. All these ideas goes in to a big dropbox. Here is what’s in that dropbox right now. All working titles ofcourse. queen of egypt 7 eight a gruhvys gæjt balladen boss drum by the light down up from afar veryheavy hfag7 megagate new delhi symphony orchestra opethish intro over now panter a power riff psykotopia the beduinski the build up the chill the half and the whole yiri2 choirpiece Phase 2. This is the jigsaw puzzle phase. This is where things get developed, combined, thrown away, re-instated, changed, re-arranged, edited, argued about etc etc etc. There are no holy cows. Sometimes sections of a more developed phase 1 piece gets used in different songs. We have examples of songs where the final album version contained nothing of the original phase 1 version. This is often the phase where vocal melodies appear for the first time. A “no holy cow” example would be Yiri where the only thing that survived from the original chorus were the vocals. All the music underneath the vocals were changed, including a wholly different chord structure…..You get the drift. It’s not uncommon for a song to go through up to 50 different versions! Of the things recorded in this phase the thing that remains on the finished album will typically be the keyboards and some acoustic guitar stuff. Maybe some non hi-gain guitars too. Phase 2 is mainly Kims turf, but everybody adds stuff, ideas, comments and positive vibes etc. The following “songs are in Phase 2 right now: balladen (the only candidate for a complete track as of now) from afar a gruhvys gæjt new delhi symphony orchestra psykotopia (at the moment this includes “over now” too) All these have que/nonsense vocals. The only song being very developed is Balladen Psykotopia is up for a major overhaul, probably from scratch ditching a large part (if not all) of Kims contributions. The “over now” section will probably be gone too. Phase 3. Recording. This is where all the stiff drum programming gets replaced by real drums, recorded at Hansen Studios. Everything is bounced to stems (que guitars, bass keyboards, vocals) etc etc for Morten to play along to. Then after what is a little week of recordings, Jacob does rough mixes of the drum tracks. Now the work begins to track the finished vocals (Henrik does this at home) and the finished guitars and basses (which happens at Kims place). When this is done all the files are uploaded to Jacob Hansen. He re-amps the guitars so they’ll sound awesome. Obviously nothing is in phase 3 as of now. And won’t be until mid/late 2016 Phase 4. Mixing. Done by the awesome Jacob Hansen with Kim assisting. We always have guitars and keyboards at hand if something needs extra work. The rest of the band trusts the mixing team with doing what is right for a song. Still there are no holy cows. An example would be The End Of Millennium Road. Until the very last day of mixing what is now the chorus didn’t exist. Only because we felt it needed something extra did Jacob and Kim compose a chorus for it. (Before that the chorus was what is now the section before it). So when the rest of the band heard the final mix it had a chorus they’d never heard before. On a final note: Over all a very slow and involved process, but if you find it interesting click follow and read all the new album blogs as they happen. We hope you’ll enjoy them.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 23:20:36 +0000
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