Immolation Issues Studio Recording Update

Immolation has posted a new studio recording blog through Decibel Magazine. Excerpts from the blog follow:

"Since the last update, Bob and I spent the remainder of the week laying down the guitar and bass rhythm tracks. As soon as Bob was finished up with the rhythms, he then had to go song by song and record all the additional guitar rhythms and overlay sections. This became a long and involved process because there were so many layers in the songs that it became hard to keep track without referring to the pre-production. As soon as he thought he was all finished with one song, he would check the pre-production demos and realize he had more to go. So this is how it went for most of Friday and all day Saturday. I managed to finish up the bass tracks on Friday night hoping to get in there Saturday to start vocals, but this didn’t happen. After spending almost two full days with the additional guitar parts, Bob was ready to start leads, but now we were running out of time. We essentially had one day to get all the leads and vocals done, which we knew wasn’t realistic.

"Fortunately, we had technology on our side, and Bob was able to start recording his leads at night into his Ableton Live program. He was able to play right to the scratch guitar tracks and click track Steve played to. Basically, it saved both he and Paul many hours in studio A, and he was able to get most of the leads he already had written recorded into his computer on Saturday night. He was up to about 4:30 in the morning after laying down his additional guitar parts since 11 a.m. earlier that morning, so needless to say it was a long and exhausting day.

"Sunday morning came and it was my turn to finally get in there and lay down some vocal tracks, which is probably the most painless and the most fun part of the whole process for us. It is cool to finally hear the vocals over songs you have been working on for weeks as instrumental pieces up until that point. The songs really take on a new life when the vocals, leads and guitar overlays are added, and this is the part of the process we all look forward to. I had been practicing for almost an hour a day on my own to make sure the vocals would be what they needed to be for the recording. I usually know what I need to do, and usually singing along with some of the old material during this practice time is sufficient. This time, however, since we did have all the songs in demo form, I was able to rehearse all the new songs for the last three days prior to recording them. This really helped me get familiar with the phrasing and patterns of the new material, which is half the battle when singing to new material. It usually looks good on paper, but the trick is to get it to work with the music. We started around noon on Sunday and spent all day on the vocals. It went really smooth and by about 7 that night we were done. After importing some of Bob’s leads from the night before, we were all set. We had to get our stuff together and leave our studio home of two weeks to enter the real world of the working man the following day.

"Unfortunately, because things ran slightly behind schedule, we didn’t have a chance to have our traditional end of session dinner with Paul, so a trip to the local diner at 10:30 Sunday night on the way home was as good as it got for Bob and me. All in all, we were very happy with the way everything came out, and now the masters get sent out to Zack Ohren for the mix, and we wait to see what kind of studio magic he is going to use on these new Immolation offerings. We are very excited to hear the new material finished and mixed. This is the first time in over 20 years that we didn’t leave the studio with a copy of the new material, so we are more anxious than ever to hear the finished product."