Then and now - recording the onslaught
posted on 03 Nov 2018 under category History
As I noted a few days ago, The Onslaught will be released 20 years after my first full-length self-done release This End Up. Times change, as we all know, and things change with time, and this is really nowhere more apparent than in the long, laborious writing and recording cycle for The Onslaught - it really took over half of that time, at 11 years from the first writing to the final mix.
I’d rather talk about the details, but some broad strokes first - the first song for the album, “Devastator”, was first written in 2007. “You’re Fucking Doomed” was written in 2008, and “Drink ‘til You Die” in 2009. As bad as that sounds, even at one song per year this should have come out in 2014, so things only got worse. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 2015 when I made more progress on the writing front my finally sketching out “Hell On Earth”. Next, “Plague Beast” wasn’t written until 2016, and then in 2017 I wrote the rest of the songs for the album - at least the ones that weren’t rewrites of songs that I did back in 2006 for a Rampage album that never came out.
“Eleven years? Rewritten Rampage songs? What the fuck, Vic?”
Well, keep in mind that while it only took one long summer to record This End Up I had written some of that stuff a few years before (back to 1989/1990 for one song, even). The main thing, though, is just life. When I was recording This End Up, I had no kids and a built-in life structure where I had two or three nights a week alone at home, so I had hours and hours to pour into it. Combine that with recording and running a label being new and it becomes pretty easy to see how a cycle builds itself - come home from work, plug in the guitar, slap on the drum programs I did at lunch that day, rip out a few takes, mix it, listen next day. I literally didn’t have anything else to do, and while I also gamed incessantly back then (DOOM WADs for the win!), I still dedicated the bulk of my time to working on music.
Years later, farther along professionally, with kids in school, there was a lot less time to do anything, much less something fun that was only a benefit to just me. I would idly toy with ideas in the meantime if I was doing something else and a quite moment came up, but without a notebook for scribbling or a guitar for noodling many of the ideas just floated away. The good ones stuck around, and probably likely mutated between when I first thought of them and when I actually got home to program or record them. I’d like to think that meant that what stuck around was much more memorable for it - but that’s not really for me to say.
With the writing and recording spread out over such long timeframes it’s hard to remember exact specifics of what it was like doing the recordings. Most of them were done late at night, staying up after everyone else went to bed and doing direct-in recording. Later on, through 2016 and 2017, schedules changed again, and many of those instrumental tracks were done during days at home with the kids - easily half the album was done with my older son on the Xbox about five feet away from me, him commenting on line to his friends how his dad plays guitar and if they heard the strings in the background that’s what it was. (Just the acoustic sound of playing a direct-in guitar, of course - I guess I played pretty hard…)
Vocals I saved for the odd days when nobody else was home, which were rare. I’d plan them a few days ahead of time and I’d rehearse to instrumental tracks in my car while driving to and from work (more rare alone time where nobody can hear - except the asshole giving me the side-eye in the car next to me in traffic, of course…). Then, the second everyone else in the house left on recording day I’d run upstairs, plug up the mic set and effects, and get going. I’d never be able to get more than five or six takes done before my voice would give out, and I think some of the takes on the album show that even that was pushing my limits.
The newer computer and equipment sets made the physical process a lot more smooth and easy, of course. No more linking up to a tape deck and doing the “pause-run-play” dance. Direct mixdown audio exports were quick and easy. I mixed down nearly every stage of the process - rhythms and drums only, added bass, added scratch vox, added leads. Some songs ended up with a long writing cycle because I had my skeleton set up, but I’d still toy with different ideas in my head for what the leading parts would do.
Recording became a bit less harrowing as well, because I had the disk space and processor power to run multiple takes at once. One of the things I remember most in those early recordings was the “Bet” - “that take was pretty good, but could I do better? I’d have to delete this almost-perfect take to see if I can fix this one little thing. Do I take that bet?” With much more robust cutting/editing/mixing tools, my normal operation was to run at least two takes of EVERY track - leads, rhythms, bass, everything. I’d listen to each take in isolation to note the problem spots and then see if I could switch tracks - if a mistake was at 1:05 on one track but the other was perfect, I’d splice the track cut just before that so I had seamless takes. I used to think that was ‘cheating’, but an audio-recording podcast I was listening to at the time had interviews with several different producers and they all do that for even the biggest names in the industry - sometimes each line of a song is taken from a different take for that perfect, polished end product.
Towards the end, of course, everyone knows now what happened with Opyros and the Barbarian Wrath situation. I had just talked to Opyros a few weeks before, about July or August 2017, and I was on-target to finish by that November. It ended up being January 2018, for various reasons, but at least one silver lining was made out of my process. I regularly fed Opyros test mixes to let him know how the album was doing, and while he didn’t manage to hear the full, final mix, it was mostly done except for a couple of leads and vocals when he last heard it, and he seemed really happy with it.
Now, of course, it’s been almost a year since it was totally finished off, and since release is imminent I guess I need to start thinking about what comes next, musically speaking. I’ve rebuilt my PC again, and my first tests show that I’ll need all new software as well, so I don’t really know where I’ll go from here. Despite the halting progress, I’m extremely happy with how it came out, and the few who have heard it so far rate it pretty well among my whole catalog, so I know I’ve still got some good songs in me. I can afford to wait a while, but I promise it won’t be until 2031 until the next album.