Nebulous Peril - Divided By Zero
By george bowles on January 19, 2014 1:52 am
for black metal week I came up with this monstrosity. for this Nebulous Peril album I have been working on, the formula goes drums first then overdubs of bass and guitars. this one is a little different as there is only one guitar take, but it is split into three different channels.
first to describe NP: basically me trying to do black metal, which means it is going to have all kinds of free jazz, death metal, grindcore, and other influences as I'm not huge into black metal (although bands like Deathspell Omega, Krallice, Emperor, Portal, Antedeluvian, and Mitochondrion influence this, which are all either black metal or experimental death metal that is difficult to categorize). Further adding the the weirdness is that I am treating this first album as improvised chaos (if I do a second it will be written, or at least guitars first then drums).
process: recorded the drums on a portable tascam which had too small of mics to be recording a full drums kit being played too fast. hence the rawness of the recording on that. I thought it still sounded usable and cool in its own way, and the drums along with the cold were a huge influence on how this sounded. for the guitar, it was run through a line 6 delay modeler with stereo outs... one of these went direct into my Scarlett 18i6 and the other into a chain of pedals then into my ampeg guitar amp. then I took the headphone jack from the amp and ran it into the board, as well as a ribbon mic on the amp itself. so 3 different guitar sounds from the same performance. the clean channel or least effected one at least then got an amp modeler in reaper (I think the fender bassman distortion actually sounded best but can't remember for sure).
I then tried to mix this thing and it did confound me for a while. have been trying to go with the less is more attitude but for this the more fx I piled on it the more interesting it sounded. mixed in both reaper and in ableton live with a sub-mix of the unaffected material under the reaper mixdown. time will tell which I like more but I decided to go with the ableton final mix which may end up being a more confused mix, I'll have to compare and contrast the two. I ended up being somewhat happy with the mix but the bass drums are too fast and not mic'd close enough to get anything more than a blur for the most part. so I kinda went with that and came up with a borderline powerviolence noise piece rather than black metal, which I guess is pretty cool anyway.
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CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
