Posts

Why Vocalists Shouldn’t Write Drum Parts

In today’s entry, I explain why letting a vocalist write drum parts is a terrible idea — even if everyone involved initially thinks it’s fine – which no one ever has. Once the guitar and bass tracks were finished, I messaged Mike to let him know everything was ready. We’d loosely discussed a price earlier, but once things were confirmed, he named a figure and I agreed. Thanks to using Fiverr far more than any human should, I’d somehow unlocked a loyalty discount, which knocked 20% off the cost. Even then, what I paid wouldn’t have covered a single day in a studio back home. The demos I sent over included all the EZdrummer parts I’d programmed. I told him he was free to change anything he wanted, apart from a few sections where the drum feel was tied closely to the vocal patterns. Everything else was completely up to him. As he started sending demo videos from his electronic kit, the difference was immediate. I’d thought the EZdrummer parts sounded decent — until an actual drummer rewro...
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Traumatised - Behind The Lyrics

Traumatised is a direct song about living with PTSD and the cycle that comes with it. The lyrics focus on repetition — nights that never change, sleep that never comes, and the way intrusive thoughts surface the moment everything goes quiet. Days are marked by exhaustion and volatility, nights by memories that refuse to stay buried. The song captures the tension between escape and survival, where neither option feels like relief — only different ways of enduring. There’s no resolution offered. The track doesn’t move toward healing or closure, because trauma doesn’t work on a neat timeline. Traumatised sits in that reality, documenting the fear, fatigue, and weight of carrying something that never fully leaves.
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Cutting Out the Middleman (Even When That’s You)

Today I explain how things suddenly became much easier once I stopped getting in the way. With all the guitar lines finished, the next job was sorting the bass. Having both Adrien and Ant involved turned out to be a massive advantage for several reasons. They’re both excellent players, they’ve worked together for years in Lost Brethren, and they’re completely comfortable sharing files and recording remotely. More importantly, they actually understand music theory. While Adrien was learning the guitar parts, he transcribed everything properly and sent over sheet music for every song. I had no idea what I was looking at, but I trusted that Ant would. By the time I spoke to him, all the guitar parts and notation were already done. From that point on, bass lines started arriving daily. Within four days, every track was finished. All I had to do was throw the two guitar lines and bass into GarageBand, apply my usual terrible guitar tone, do a very rough mix, and send the files to the drumme...
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Recording Guide Guitars When You Can’t Play Guitar

In todays self-absorbed ramblings, I explain the thoroughly miserable process of recording guide guitars and guide videos for a session guitarist — despite not being able to play properly, not owning a tripod, and not knowing how to use punch-ins in GarageBand. The first problem was tone. The distorted guitar sound I’d been using in GarageBand was so bad it was hard to hear the riffs myself, never mind send them to someone else to learn. After complaining to a friend — the same one who’d effectively given me the Jackson — he lent me a TC Electronic 550 pedal. Whatever the settings were, it instantly sounded like an actual amp instead of digital nonsense, and for the first time I could hear what I was playing. Next came rebuilding the drum tracks. Because I hadn’t saved the original EZdrummer tracks, I spent an entire day trying to identify and recreate every loop I’d used in the demos. Once that was done, I pulled everything into GarageBand and started recording guide guitars. That’s w...
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How to Get Disowned by Your Family (By Offering “Exposure”)

In this entry, I explain how the recording phase finally ended and how I very nearly disowned myself in the process. With everything tracked, the next step was finding a producer. I contacted a local producer (my brother) and confidently explained that if he mixed, mastered, and engineered the album, it would be great exposure. He did mention that he wasn’t actually a producer, but by that point the hard drive was already through his letterbox. The goal was never a perfect mix. I just needed to know that all the files lined up properly, started and stopped where they should, and were usable. Everyone else had recorded themselves before — the real concern was my vocals. Thankfully, within a couple of hours we had a rough mix that proved everything worked. Watching the process up close made me realise just how much work mixing actually is, and I didn’t want to burn out local goodwill. So naturally, I went back to Fiverr and found Haunting Studios — experienced, metal-focused, and afforda...
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The Body and the Blade - Behind The Lyrics

The Body and the Blade reflects my approach to making this album. It’s about doing something without mastery, but committing to it fully anyway. The song frames killing as a craft — not refined or elegant, but deliberate. There’s an obsession with process, tools, and method, even though the person carrying it out is still learning. The fixation on the blade as an extension of the body mirrors the way the album was written and assembled. There’s no claim of expertise here, only repetition, trial, error, and persistence. The idea of “doing it properly” exists, but it’s filtered through instinct rather than formal skill. Violence in the song is intimate rather than chaotic. It’s careful, flawed, and methodical — much like the creative process behind the record itself. Mistakes aren’t hidden; they’re part of the outcome.
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How to Come Across as the Weirdo Next Door

It was finally my turn to step in front of the microphone — and potentially alarm the entire neighbourhood. I’ve recorded plenty of demos over the years, but I’ve never paid much attention to things like levels, peaking, or gain setting. My usual approach is to shout into the microphone, turn the vocals down in the mix later, and hope for the best. If it distorts slightly, so be it. Historically, there’s always been someone else handling the technical side. This time, that person was me. My setup was simple: one microphone plugged into channel one of a sixteen-channel interface (fifteen backups felt sensible), a Rode PodMic, the cheapest cable I could find, a pop shield of questionable origin, and a budget sound deflector stuck behind the mic. I then screamed into it while turning the volume down until the warning light disappeared. Producers massively overcomplicate this stuff. The bigger issue was having no one there to tell me to redo takes — which is usually producer-speak for “tha...
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