Greetings, everyone. I recorded a metal album in my room and I’m here to tell you how I did it.
Wait, what?
That’s right. Metal! Inside my room in my apartment. The whole thing.
Without professional equipment? Does metal really need to sound all that good? Isn’t it just noise and screaming?
For as much “noise” as metal sounds, it actually requires quite high production value. As that one mixer on Metal Evolution says, “trying to make something distorted sound clean is not easy.” Especially when you’re playing very precise notes, or very QUICK notes, and adding a bunch of orchestral sounds and horns. It can all sound like a big mess if not done properly.
(Punk music, on the other hand, has been able to sound like shit for the better part of its history. “A punk album recorded in a garage forty years ago?” Sounds great. “A metal album recorded in a garage?” Get the fuck out of here! Despite this double-standard, I went on ahead anyway. (As we should all do when faced with opposition!))
All right, all right, fine. So, how did you actually do the recording?
The process of making a Fadenfreude song is actually a semi-long process, but it all starts with a program called Guitar Pro 5. This is a program that allows you to write your own tabs, that is to say, your own melodies, which, if your imagination is big enough, means “your own songs.” (See a basic composition here). You set the tempo, the instruments, type in the drums (think of it as a drum machine). There’s up to 70 “instruments” you can choose from, from pianos to pads to sawtooth and square synth, synth strings to brass, and so on. Of course, it all sounds computer-y, since everything is rendered in MIDI, but since I was making an industrial album, which usually mixes computer-y dance music with metal, the more things sounded like computer, the more I was like “It’s fine, I’ll get away with it!”
So anyway, from either 5 instrument tracks or 11, I made each song. Drums, guitar 1, guitar 2, bass, synth sounds, what have you. Once the song is totally done (and the drums have been tediously fitted with cymbals) then it’s time for the recording process!
II. Recording
The first stage of the recording process is the recording of the inorganic computer material. Since I can mute or single out tracks on Guitar Pro 5, I can isolate the drum track and let it play. But how do I actually do the recording?
A while back, my soundcard (which was awesome) used to be able to record any sound that the computer was playing with a grammatically-incorrect feature called “What U Hear”. So I could simply set recording program Audacity to record, play the Guitar Pro tracks, and it would record the computer and that was that. (This is how I recorded the first Fadenfreude album, but that’s a whole other thing, trust me). But then my computer died and I had it fixed by my co-worker’s friend who I think just installed Windows 7 for 90 bucks. I re-installed the sound card drivers to find that, uh oh, What U Hear did not work with Windows 7. I think it was to prevent people from playing songs on YouTube and just casually recording them. Yet I wasn’t trying to record those songs. I was trying to record my own! How could Microsoft seriously not think about of us apartment metal musicians?
Deeply annoyed and pissed, I thought of ways to record the sounds from my computer directly, instead of, like, recording them off the speakers. (Which I had done a few times with my first folk metal album, but that’s a whole other thing, trust me). Eventually, I figured out (and it’s gonna get technical up in here) that my speakers’ headphone jack was also an Audio Out. So I fitted a 1/4″ cable with a 1/8″ adapter on each end. Then I put one end in the headphone jack and put the other in the Line In of my computer. Theoretically, when I played sound on the computer, it would send the signal out through the speakers, along the cable, and into the Line In, which would be recording. Yes, the computer would be recording itself. I tried it. And it totally worked.
(In fact, the audio traveled out from the speakers, into a distortion pedal, out of the distortion pedal, and then into the back of the computer. The distortion would be turned off (or sometimes annoyingly left on by mistake) when I didn’t need things to be distorted.)
Now that I could record sound off the computer in an indirectly-direct way, now came the time to do some recording. First off, the drums were recorded separately from everything else. Then I recorded every other instrument together except the guitar. (I should have recorded EACH INSTRUMENT separately, but since I’d already mixed them in Guitar Pro, I thought it’d be fine. Plus, it’d save me a bunch of mixing work, which I sort of can’t stand.).
So yes, in Audacity, the free recording program I was using, I would have two tracks. I had the drum track and the EverythingButGuitar track. Now would come time for the second part of the recording process:
Recording: Part II: Guitars
Since a distorted guitar is one of the hardest things to fake with a computer (well, everything is hard to fake, really), I decided that I would have to play all the guitars myself. And since most of my favorite metal bands have two guitarists, I’d have to play them twice. That’s all fine and good.
So, how did I record the guitars? I simply plugged a 1/4″ cable into the guitar which was fed through the distortion pedal. Since I have no amp and the audio was going right into the computer, I had no way of listening to what the distortion sounded like, so I just turned down the playback tracks hella low so I could hear the actual strings while I was playing. That’s right. Acoustic metal riffs! And since the computer is so old, I have to have maximum memory saved for recording. I’d often only have the drum track playing and none of the other stuff. Y’know, like, THE SONG.
This was fine, except when the CABLES WERE SHITTY, causing the signal to cut in and out throughout the whole entire take, which meant I had to do it again. Other times, I’d play the guitar recording back and it would just be staticy for no reason. Another useless take. You hear bands talking about takes, and keeper takes. For me I was like “No static? No cutting in and out? KEEP IT!”.
But the guitars weren’t done, oh no. My distortion pedal wasn’t distorted or deep enough (it was like 40 bucks. And might be broken), so I had to go into the Audactiy plug-ins and make it bassier, less trebel-y, and thus, more beefy. Before, the takes sort of sounded like a screaming duck through a distortion pedal, but afterwards, it was like, well, a little more like a heavy distorted guitar. So, every guitar you hear on Musen has been bassed-up, trebeled-down. I tried to give it more bass, but then it just sounded awful.
Phase III: Keyboard and vocals
So by now, we should have the drums and the background stuff and two tracks of guitar. All right. Since the majority of the computer-made sounds sound sub-par, it’s time to jump on the keyboard (adjacent to the computer) and add some additional “oomph!” As much as I would want to simply leave the song how it was, I couldn’t deny that adding the lead again with some quirky synth from the keyboard made the song a lot better. I’d add those Choir Ahs to make things sound way more epic (like the second verse of “Vollmond“), and prettier Tremolo Strings to make things sound prettier (like the intro of “Melodien“). The two last songs I made feature strings heavily, and wouldn’t have been as good without them.
Just as I couldn’t hear the guitar when plugged in, I couldn’t hear the keyboard either. So I just pressed the keys in the right sequence at the right time. Muscle memory, yo! Sometimes I would flub it, but with enough practice, we can play something without having to hear if we are right! (At least that’s what I tell myself). Sometimes the cables would be janky, or the take would full of static, or I forgot to turn off the distortion on the pedal and it’d be all distorted. Even though this faced the same problems as the guitar, it didn’t have as many problems, and keepers were easier to come across.
After all that, it’d be time to do the vocals. To do this, I would plug in my thirty-dollar RadioShack microphone into the distortion pedal (with the distortion on full), so my voice would sound all weird and electronic-y. This didn’t only help my voice sound all weird and totally cool (this is another thing I tell myself), but helped me separate the fact that I was singing, for despite sharing all this, singing, and even doing it alone in my room when no one else is home, still makes me nervous.
After the initial take, I’d do some backing vocals that accentuated certain words or phrases in the song, sort of like the words at the end of lines (like how the Beastie BOYS yell things at the end of their LINES!), or singing the chorus with more than one voice. This often sounded pretty cool. But I couldn’t just have my voice all over the track, so I needed someone else:
Part IV: No money = Friends Become Singers
Since I’m pretty sure the guy who made a movie about a cursed apple pie with me would do just about anything, I had no doubts that Ralph would wanna shout out vocals in songs he hardly knew in a language he could not speak. When the song was just about done, I’d ask Ralph to come in and do his part. Since he doesn’t know German, I’d have to write it out for him phonetically. (For example: “Die Musen singen, hört ihr ihre ruf?” would be “Dee muse’n zing-en, hurt ear ear’a roof?”) As normal, I’d usually ask for as much as possible, and by that I mean whole sentences in German. I was unaware of this at the time until he expressed “Dude, do you even know how fast you are saying this?” So I was like “Fine, just say the one weird long German word you’ve never seen before instead of all 15, geez.”
Part V: Mixin’ and masterin’
All right, so once you have all the ingredients (drums, instruments, guitars, vocals, forced-friend-backing vocals), you can mix the thing. Cut out all the goofing off your backing vocalist did during the bridge and intro, listen to the song again, and then again, tweak it, whatever. Go through the unbelievably never-ending process of mixing when you’re pretty sure you are tone-deaf anyway (I just might be).
Once that was done, I sent them all to a good friend of mine, Mr. James Meder (listen to his music NOW. It’s professionally recorded, really), a musician I met while getting my super-useful film degree in college. He mastered them, i.e., made them sound coherent and the same volume, and made sure they were coming out of both sides of the speakers (???) (Some of the songs, when recorded, only came out of the left speaker. I have no idea why, but whatever, they’re fixed now!)
Receive the song from your friend who actually knows what he is doing and hit play!
Now you just have to do all that 11 times and you have album!
So, you just recorded an album? Like, how people have been doing it for years?
Yes, I guess so.
Why did you do it in your room? Why not in a studio? You know, like everyone else?
Mula, folks. Wages be low, rent be HIGH AS FUCK AND KEEPS GOING UP WHY???
Conclusion
So there you have it folks. Two years of off-and-on composing, recording, what I would call as mixing, some alcohol, German dictionaries, some prodding of friends, broken strings and perhaps a little bit of hope, but it is here, and it exists. An album that didn’t exist before. 11 new songs. Around 40 minutes of new music, and that’s pretty cool.
If you’ve stuck it out this long, reward yourself by enjoying the music (Worry not, I have English translations of the German lyrics). The free EP is able to download here!.
And now that this album is finally out, I can finally get back to revising that novel for a third time (but that’s a whole other thing, trust me).
~Rammfan
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