Songwriting - the wakening
posted on 01 Nov 2021 under category Songs
There are no lyrics, of course, but no discussion of the first Death Beast album would be complete without discussing the creation of the introduction track “The Wakening”. Would you call an intro a ‘title track’? I don’t think of it as such, and to be honest I just think of it as ‘the intro’ because I didn’t really realize it when titling it that I had already used “The Wakening” as a song title before - for the acoustic+lead guitar intro to the song “Soulsword” from Rampage’s “Bellum Infinitum” album.
The title “The Wakening” came from some AIM discussions between me and Stan when we were coming up with ideas for songs and the album. Between the two of us we came up with the idea of doing at least three albums, and then naming them in sequence - “The Wakening”, “The Onslaught”, and “The Aftermath” - with the sequence of themes being obvious. And, in looking at the lyrics Stan wrote for the first album, he certainly held up his end of the bargain - every song has some kind of an ‘impending doom’ or ‘your destruction is on the way’ kind of feel to it, and it’s what I tried to keep up with on “The Onslaught” by making the destruction not impending but active.
Anyway, instead of just blasting out of the gate on the first album, I knew I wanted to do some kind of intro, but clean guitars/acoustics weren’t the right feel and keyboards would not work, so I thought I’d go with some kind of lead guitar/guitar effects track - not actual music plus solos, but just noisemaking that had some kind of rhyme and reason to it. Aimless noodling wasn’t going to cut it, but a riff with solos would be too structured.
Fortunately, the same tool that helped me with layering backing vocals and the sound effects at the end of “Here Comes the War” ended up working perfectly - Sonic Foundry’s “Acid” looper. I had plenty of practice by doing the layering vocals for songs, whether just putting multiple vocal tracks together and in-sync or doing the more elaborate ‘growing army of the dead’ bit at the end of “Enslaved Cadavers”. I saw how I could add multiple tracks and mix them, and even mix single song-length tracks with looped repeating soundbytes, so I sat down and banged it all out in one evening.
The start was the feedback - I just hit ‘record’ and held my guitar up to the computer speakers which were monitoring the amp and started that nice, clean feedback. I did a bit of gradually moving it back and forth for a touch of volume swelling, but basically just let it feed back for close to two minutes, at which point I pulled back all the way to stop and I left that as the first ‘base’ track. Next I laid down a second track of me recording in stereo a Slayer-esque cacophony of random chromatic picking, trills, pinch harmonics, whammy bar dives… I put Kerry King’s entire guitar oeuvre from the first three Slayer albums into two minutes. Then, for a more fucked-up sound, I edited that stereo track in Sound Forge by taking one of the two channels and just reversing it completely - that way, instead of one stereo noise track, I had two completely different noise tracks panned hard-left/hard-right with one of them sounding ‘off’ by being backwards. Then, for even more of a cacophonous sound, I recorded another guitar track of me doing high unison bends, bending both to perfect pitch and just a bit flat, kinda like Quorthon’s leads on the song “Blood Fire Death”. I just stayed on the one note through the whole track, then I edited it by fading up at the start and down at the end, and I auto-set the pan to slowly take it from center to hard-left, then slowly to hard-right, and just slowly back and forth until the end.
Mixing that together left me with something cacophonous and nearly amorphous, but with JUST enough structure to not be pointless. I still felt it needed something, though, and that’s when thinking back again to the “Enslaved Cadavers” outro gave me the idea to add more horror to it by adding some vocals. I started going back to the other vocal tracks on the album and cutting out particularly good screams and shouts. Then, I would make copies of them and start playing with them - pitch-shift up, or pitch-shift down, or reversing them, or leaving them in stereo and swapping phase so they sound bizarre, and just pasting those in. Then I started cutting out a couple of vocal lines and adding those, also manipulated in the same ways.
Then another idea hit me and I started recording some spoken lines - I’d say things like ‘death beast’ or ‘hell’ or other random words or short phrases from the lyrics. Some of these I would just slow down and paste in. Others I would reverse and put in backwards. On a couple, I reversed the line just to hear what it sounded like backwards, then I recorded myself speaking them by phonetically trying to copy the backwards speech, then reversing that fake-reverse to get something that sounded forward, but ‘off’. I also recorded one little ‘secret’ in there, pitch shifted WAY down and reversed - the cat’s out of the bag on that one so it’s not really ‘secret’ anymore, but I wonder if anyone picked it out back at the time, or will bother doing so now. Do people still try to play their metal albums backwards for the hidden messages?