Title: And Then the Night Forgot Us

Year: 2012

Personnel: I did most of the writing and arranging, but the lovely Bekka Wrynn assisted me with the production and supplied some excellent vocals on “I Cannot Follow.”

Analysis: When I first started writing these tracks, I had intended them as a sort of neo-noir mini-”Faust.” Having later decided that was way too many hyphens used in one description, I eventually scaled the project back.

Seriously, these songs were initially intended to flow together as one 10 minute piece, but it sounded a little forced, so I broke them up. I still consider them all to be parts of the same whole, especially since they share some things here and there (the piano riff of “I Cannot Follow” shows up as a background guitar on the chorus of “And Then the Night Forgot Us”; the Ebow line from the beginning of “And Then the Night…” shows up in the chorus of “Noir”).

One of the goals I had when creating this was to make music that didn’t necessarily sound like Metal, but had an undeniable Metal pedigree. For example, the title track certainly isn’t the heaviest thing I’ve written, but I don’t think any of the leads on it would exist if I didn’t pass most of my teenage years listening to Iron Maiden (full disclosure: I still lose entire days looking up Iron Maiden bootlegs on YouTube). Being that this EP sounds to me like a combination of latter day Katatonia and Ulver, I feel like it worked out.

The nerdier of my goals was to try and capture the feeling of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal comic in musical form. If it sounds a little odd that I’m writing music to match the mood of a comic book, I seriously recommend picking up the Coward arc.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this EP marks the first time that female vocals have appeared on an All Hallow’s Evil release. Bekka Wrynn was gracious enough to provide some background vocals and some invaluable insights during the entire process (it was her idea to break up the songs and add the “Hopeless” interlude. It’s my fault that it’s a complete rip off of “Ad Astra” by Arcturus). She really helped this EP be much better than it would have been if it were just me sitting in a room for two months. Thanks, Bekka!

Right click on song titles to download them or scroll to the bottom for a handy zip file.

1. And Then the Night Forgot Us

2. I Cannot Follow

3. Hopeless

4. Noir

zip file: night.zip

If there were an emergency, this is where you would break your ass.

A while back I was showing my fiancee (Hi Bekka!) a bunch of unfinished things I had laying around and I cued this jam up. I had intended it to be the “b-side” of “Make it Go (Beep Beep)”, but I never really got around to finishing it, so it never got posted.

Anyway, the point of this story is that Bekka either really liked it or is really good at pretending she liked it and she asked me to post it, so here it is. Merry Christmas everyone! Here’s a rap song about asses.

JRG Music Factory – “In Case of Emergency (Break Dat Ass)”

This song will either remind you of this image or the ringtone you've designated for your spouse.

Even though scores of sequels and imitations have tried to sour me on it, Halloween is still my favorite movie. A lot of that has to do with the score: it’s simple, repetitive and completely effective.  Hear it once and it will start playing in your head anytime a situation presents an unknown quantity of darkness and danger. Hell, it still works even though there was a period of about 5 years where everyone had the theme as a ringtone.

The song I’ve posted here is the result of stitching every one of the movies themes together into one piece and then covering it with a fresh coat of dissonance. I’ve wanted to do a piece like this for years, but I’ve always approached it wrong (Seriously, I first tried this back in ’98. Everything about it was terrible). The rock band atmosphere doesn’t really lend itself to the creepiness of a analog warble, 70s synths and a plinking piano notes, so it requires a slightly different approach. Here’s the approach I’ve taken: Blut Aus Nord covering a John Murphy arrangement of John Carpenter’s score.

The mp3 is at the bottom of the page, click to listen, right click to “Save as…”. I’ve also made this handy YouTube video to make it easy for you to share with your friends (please, please share it with your friends).

“‘Michael?’ (Halloween Suite)”

Things have been quiet around here. It’s partly because I moved and all my stuff was in disarray and partly because I hate the fucking summer and get absolutely nothing done when it’s hot outside. It’s still a little too warm outside for me, but I finished moving/unpacking, so there should be a little more activity in the future.

In fact, I just posted a track called “I’ll Tell You When You’re Older” so that I can prepare myself to tackle a couple of October projects that I’ve been planning for a while. I can’t guarantee they’ll be good and, hell, I can’t even guarantee that I’ll decide to release them, but you can rest assured that I’m not just sitting on my ass eating popcorn balls.

That’s mostly because I can’t find any popcorn balls,

Jay

"Not everything goes up in flames...", but some things find a way.

Like a lot of songs I write, the demo for this one consists of two acoustic guitars and nothing more (well, actually, I think a third guitar shows up somewhere, but that’s not the point). I had planned on using that demo to start another “Faust”-like album, but it felt too much like repeating myself, so I stopped. But since reusing older materials is all the rage now, I figured I’d go green and use this track to try out some different production/arrangement things I’ve been looking to take a shot at.

The original intent of this song was to make it sound like sort of a sequel to This Faustian Flesh, so to stay away from that, I laid down some ground rules:

1.) No double bass.

2.) No screaming.

3.) More theremin.

I broke rule 2 a couple of times, but these things happen.

Lyrically, the song is about giving up on your dreams and kind of being okay with it. Well, its a little different than that, but that’s how it started. I’d say that up until about the age of 25, I thought everything I did had this huge impact, be it “Man, this shirt will really freak out them squares!” or “My thoughts on [insert subject here] will blow everyone’s mind!”. The truth of the matter is, no one really gives a fuck about what you’re doing, because they all have things that they’re doing to. And I never thought I’d be okay with that, but I actually kind of enjoy getting older. It’s surprisingly fulfilling to not spend all my time being impossibly angry at everything and expect everyone to give a flying fuck about it. Essentially, this is the 28 year old me talking to the 18 year old me. And I’m sure 38 year old me will eventually look back at this song and think about what a tool I was 10 years ago.

Aside from that, this song mostly exists as an excuse to try out some different pre-amps and guitar configurations. It probably sounds a little schizophrenic because of that, but I still thought it was interesting enough to post here.

As always, click to listen or left click to “Save as…”

“I’ll Tell You When You’re Older”

P.S. I can’t remember if I’ve ever mentioned that I generally include the lyrics with the mp3, but I do. If you go to iTunes and “Get Info” on the song, they should be under the “lyrics” tab. I’m eventually going to work on posting all the lyrics directly to the site, just not right now.

Here's a small portion of the Edit window for the vocals on "Cheap Apologies."

Back on the old All Hallow’s Evil website, I used to do a write up for each album that described how it was recorded and so forth. Since my recording process has pretty much stabilized since the days of making songs using Pro Tools Free and the Sound Blaster Live! card in the family computer, I thought I’d do a run down of how it works today.

Being that it’s the last thing I recorded, I’m going to focus on the process behind “Cheap Apologies.” The post ends up running pretty long, but it’s broken into sections, so if there’s only one part that you’re really curious about, feel free to scroll through and find it. If I didn’t cover something , you have any questions about any other songs/albums or you’d just like to let me know I’m doing it wrong, feel free to leave a comment below or e-mail me at allhallowsevil AT allhallowsevil DOT org.

Equipment

Just so where on the same page, here’s a quick list of the recording equipment I’m using right now:

A 7 year old Dell Dimension with a 3.2 gHz Pentium 4 and 2 gigs of RAM running Pro Tools 7.1, a Digi 002, KRK Rokit 5 monitors and Audio Technica ATH-30 headphones.

It’s certainly not the most technically advanced set up, but I’ve been using it for years and I’m really comfortable with it, so I can’t see any reason to change it (even if I’ve heard great things about Pro Tools 9).

Pre-Production

For a while, I was writing/demoing every All Hallow’s Evil track on an acoustic guitar, mostly to avoid “lazy” riffs (i.e. just chugging on the low E). Since I now have a better grasp of melody and composition, I don’t strictly enforce this practice anymore, but I do occasionally go back to it.

Technology has invaded my writing process, as I tend to write directly into Pro Tools. I love the fact that I can cut things up and move riffs around in a way that my brain might not be able to yet. Sometimes my dumbass brain gets stuck on a certain arrangement that may not work, but has existed for long enough that I’ve developed a habit of going from one riff directly into another riff that’s in the wrong place.

So, what I did here was play the main riff on an acoustic guitar for a few measures to figure out what speed I’d need to put the click at. To do this, I use the old trick of selecting 10 seconds of the track, counting the beats and multiplying by 6. For the super curious out there, “Cheap Apologies” is 108 bpm.

Having sorted out the bpm, I played the intro and the main riff up until I felt like the first verse should come in. From here, the process pretty much consists of stumbling along until a song comes together. I’ll play some different ideas, take a break, realize something would make a great bridge, move it, take a dump, come up with a harmony lead for the first verse, etc. There’s a lot of cutting and a decent amount of swearing before I’m done.

Eventually though, I have a fully functional song skeleton that’s more or less in time.

Drums

I say the acoustic track is “more or less” in time because often I’ll wander away from the click either because I wrote something that I couldn’t quite play yet or I’m trying to add some sort of groove to the situation. Sometimes both. In this case, it was mostly because I was trying to keep a little swing in the riff to help inform the drums.

The drums are accomplished using an M-Audio Trigger Finger (though I’ve also used a Korg NanoKey and a Rock Band 2 drum kit on occasion) and Fxpansion’s BFD. I never upgraded to BFD 2 because my computer is kinda old and BFD still does everything I need it to, so I’m a little wary to change something that works.

In any case, I turn the click up high and the acoustic track low, so the click will keep me in time and the acoustic will remind me where I am without enforcing it’s sloppy timing on my finger triggering. Since I lay down the drums with the system in “Low Latency Monitoring”, I don’t hear anything but my fingers tapping on the pads. I used to monitor myself by running MIDI out to my Alesis Q6.2, but I found the drum sounds on that to be more distracting than anything, so I end up tapping my desk like I’m still in high school. Since I kinda suck at this, I usually have to do two passes: one for drums and one for cymbals. Then I get to go back and clean everything up.

Much like with the acoustic track, I’m sort of making things up as I go along here, so I’ll often have two different versions of a chorus or something and I’ll do some editing to bring them in line with each other. I don’t like to use a whole lot of quantizing, but given the nature of the process, sometimes it’s necessary. I’ll often set the strength somewhere around 80% and, in order to keep it at least semi-human, I’ll try not to quantize entire parts. Since nailing the groove on this song was extremely important, I worked really hard to just get it right the first time and not spend hours trying to clean up poorly quantized triplets. There was a lot of swearing involved.

After I have a decent midi performance, I send the audio output of BFD to a bus on another audio track so I can make an actual .wav copy of the drums and free up some of the processing power being used by BFD.

Guitars

This is probably my favorite part of the process but, since I consider myself a guitarist first, it’s also the one where I’m hardest on myself. I always strive for complete takes on the guitar tracks and though sometimes some punching in is necessary, I will never use Pro Tools to fix the timing on something. I suppose the “human” nature of the guitars is there to make up for the “robot” nature of the drums (more on this in the bass section).

There are four basic rhythm tracks on “Cheap Apologies” using two different guitars: an Ibanez IC-400 and a Masterpiece Edition B.C. Rich Mockingbird. Neither one of these are high end guitars, but that’s okay, because I beat the living shit out of them. The Mockingbird in particular has seen some abuse because I bought it used from Guitar Center for $200 and it has some wonky wiring issues that I often fix by just hitting it. I also tried to adjust the bridge pickup and found it wasn’t mounted right, so now it’s being stabilized with electrical tape. I think it makes it look cooler.

Anyway, “Cheap Apologies” is in drop-C, which is slightly different for me. I string up all my guitars with Ernie Ball Beefy Slinky strings gauges .54-.11. I started using those because tuning to D (which I normally do) was causing some intonation issues with the G string, so I went looking for a set with a thicker G string (this is the only time this has happened in my life). The Ernie Ball’s have an unwound .22, which works well for my purposes.

Both guitars were run through the same amplifier set-up, which was provided by my POD X3. I had a POD XT for a while, but the only recording I ever recall making with it was the demo for “Myopic.” I picked up the X3 the day it came out simply because it let you use two tones at the same time. For someone who uses a metric fuckton of guitar tracks and doesn’t feel like committing to Guitar Rig, this is amazing.

Anyway, the rhythm tracks are panned hard right and hard left, with two to each side: one Iceman and one Mockingbird. During recording, I always pan the previously recorded guitar to the left side of the headphones and keep my signal panned to the right, which helps me keep them in decent time with each other. On a song like this, a little variation in the different tracks isn’t unwelcome, but it’s a careful balancing act to keep everything from sounding like 4 guitars instead of two really big guitars. There’s a lot of swearing right around the time I’m laying down the fourth rhythm track.

After laying down the rhythm tracks, I had to take a run at the clean guitars in the verse. I had originally planned for a tone not unlike the verses for Bruce Dickinson’s “The Chemical Wedding”, but that was a little over powering, so I broke it down into two parts: one clean arpeggiated guitar and another guitar playing chords through a phaser. Neither one of these is mixed to be horribly explicit. They exist to serve as the background for the verse harmony line.

That harmony line was laid down using the Iceman with the volume setting on the bridge pick up really low. I had to do an embarrassing number of takes to not only match up with the melody of the first guitar, but to keep everything from sounding too clean. With that out of the way, I moved onto the bass.

Bass

The Bass on this track is a cheap Squier  P-Bass running through the POD X3. As I mentioned before, I kind of suck at the drums, so I sometimes I have to go back and fix a few things, which is hard to do without making it sound too clinical. In these instances, I really count on the bass to “move” the drum track and add to the groove (“Ephemera” off of With Regrets… is a great example of this). Therefore, when I’m recording the bass, my headphone mix usually consists mostly of drums, click and bass. Unlike when I recorded Faust…, I’m somewhat decent at the bass now, so there’s only a moderate amount of swearing involved in this process.

Vocals

I normally cut the guitar leads before adding vocals, but I suppose I was inspired in this case and felt the need to lay down vocals immediately (actually, it really comes down to whether or not I’m awake at an appropriate time where I can scream like an asshole for a couple of hours and not end up with some form of citation).

To do vocals, I generally mix all the tracks into a rough stereo instrumental and create a new session. This way, if I get some big ideas about effects or multiple vocal tracks, I’m not going to bring my processor to it’s knees by adding a bunch of plug ins and I’m not going to be hindered by the 32 track limit on a Pro Tools 7 session.

I did three takes of the main vocal line (I use a cheap Behringer B-2 Pro condenser mic and I use the living hell out of it) which I later comp’d into the final vocal. Listening to this gave me some ideas as to where I could drop some backing vocals. The prechorus (the staccato part) consists of 6 vocal tracks: 1 normal, 2 aggressive, 2 death grunts and a black metal screech. The chorus pares this down to just the main vocal and the 2 aggressive backing vocals while the 2^nd prechorus adds three tracks of choir “ahhs” that I felt like throwing in there.

To get the pitch right on those “ahhs”, I had to use SampleTank 2, load up some actual choir samples and lay down a midi version of the melody.  I sang along with that and had originally planned to use it as a back up for my vocals, but I ended up deleting it in the mix when it turned out I already had enough happening.

Normally, I end up with a lot of extra vocal tracks as the only thing I really plan out beforehand is the main vocal line and the rest I kind of sketch in as I go along. This song might actually be the first time that I used a piece of every vocal I recorded. I’m either getting better or I’m getting lazy.

Leads

I recorded the leads using the Iceman again, running through the POD X3 and using one of my favorite software plugins, the Mooger Fooger Analog Delay. I keep the pickups on the Iceman pretty much touching the strings, so I really had to back off on the gain to avoid making things sound too sloppy, but I’m a big fan of tones that are right on the edge of breaking.

I cut leads very similar to how I cut the lead vocals: I do a few different takes and then comp something together. The difference here being that these different takes sometimes consist of wildly different ideas and then, once I’ve comp’d something together, I’ll generally go back and record it again so it sounds like a consistent lead and not just a bunch of different leads pasted together.

For some reason, I had it in my head that I wanted all of the leads to sound like someone falling or, as I put it to myself, constant unwanted motion. I tried to keep the leads random without being atonal or just random staccato bursts. I also wanted to keep it from being too shred-y, as this isn’t that kind of song, so instead of a ripping end solo, I threw in a slide part. It’s simple, but I think it works (and it was somewhat difficult, because the action on the Iceman is just a little too low to slide comfortably on).

Mixing

So, with all that done, it was time to mix it all together. I now had two different sessions: one for vocals and one for instruments. I started the process by mixing the vocals. For compression, I mostly relied on the Compressor 3 plug in that came with Pro Tools, but the more aggressive tracks (i.e. the death grunts) got hit with the CM Fuzz plug in I picked up with an issue of Computer Music some years back (I used Fxpansion’s incredible VST to RTAS Adapter to get CM Fuzz into Pro Tools). To provide reverb for the vocals, I used two aux inputs and bussed multiple tracks to each input. The one for the lead vocal parts was loaded with the old Pro Tools D-Verb plugin, while the back up vocals got their reverb from Dasample’s GlaceVerb (which I again used the VST to RTAS Adapter on).

The only really fun thing I did when mixing the vocals was in the creation of the choir part in the 2^nd prechorus. I had three parts recorded for this, so I panned them left, right and left, then sent them to an aux input to make an oppositely panned counterpoint for each part. To differentiate this counterpoint from the original vocal, I ran it through the GSnap pitch corrector (VST to RTAS again) and let it do what it does. So now I had six vocal parts: my three original, questionably pitched vocals and three new, oppositely panned, perfectly pitched vocals. I added some delay on top of this and bounced out a stereo file consisting of just the final vocal mix.

The next step was to get a final, stereo drum track. To do this, I exported the midi track from the instrumental session and brought it into a drum template session I set up for the What Prayers Cannot Heal EP. The template consists of the BFD Ultra plugin, which I’ve set up to send all the kick signals to one stereo track, all the snare signals to another, the toms to another and the cymbals to a final track. The kick and snare signals both get bussed out to separate aux inputs, where I compress the living fuck out of them. Since the compressed signal is only intended to add some meat to the original signal, I tend to be pretty aggressive with the compressor, to the point where it really brings out the room reverb inherent in the original signal. Sometimes, to further enforce the sound, I’ll load up Battery and back up the midi track with some other random samples, but that wasn’t necessary here. This whole mess gets bounced to a stereo track and imported back into the original instrumental session.

So now, I pop the instrumental session open, add the vocals and drums and start getting everything straight. The four guitars are sent to an aux input where I add a little reverb, but flip the signal so the reverb for the left guitar comes out of the right speaker and so forth. I also take the opportunity to make mono version of the guitar signals by bussing them all to a single aux input and panning it dead center. I tend to add just enough of this keep the song from completely falling apart in mono.

The bass gets it’s own aux input, where I create a super compressed bass signal and mix it back in with the original (I’ve always referred to this as creating a “banger” track, but there’s a solid chance that term isn’t anywhere near accurate and just the result of me reading too much Computer Music back in the day). I also throw a high pass filter on it to kill anything below 60Hz and keep the bottom end fairly clean.

Past that, it’s really just a matter of setting the drums to 0.0dB and bringing everything else up until it sounds right. However, here’s some heresy for you: once everything sounds pretty good, I don’t print a stereo track and bring it in for mastering. I just pop iZotope Ozone 3 right on the master fader and master the fucker right there. I keep a few wave files on my hard drive in order to have some form of reference when I’m mixing. In this case, I was using Sentenced’s “Bleed in my Arms.” It doesn’t really have a lot in common with “Cheap Apologies”, but it’s what I used for What Prayers Cannot Heal, so it was relatively accessible. I try to match the two tracks as best as I can using the harmonic exciters in Ozone and then I rely on the matching EQ to get me the rest of the way. I also add some mastering reverb and stereo width at this point and, of course, count on the excellent limiter to make it so people don’t constantly ask me why everything is so quiet. I probably use slightly more limiting that I really care to, but even the hobbyist can get caught up in the loudness wars. I tend to bring the limiter right down to the point where I can hear the vocals ducking it and then I back off from there. Then it’s just a matter of bouncing to disk, converting to mp3 and posting it here.

Again, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment, send a Facebook message or e-mail me at allhallowsevil AT allhallowsevil DOT org.

This has almost nothing to do with the song, I just really wanted an excuse to post this picture.

Leading up to Under Dead Stars, I cut demos for about 19 songs, most of which deserve to stay in the demo stage. Amongst that wreckage was the main riff for this track, which I decided to resurrect in the hopes that I will now stop playing it when I’m trying to come up with new riffs.

The only reason that the original version of this song didn’t make Under Dead Stars is that I couldn’t nail down the groove to it. It doesn’t have a super loose feel, but there’s definitely a little swing that makes this whole thing work. So, if anything, this is an experiment in making music that sounds recognizably human. Also, it’s been a long time since I used 10 vocal tracks on a song, so I thought I might try that out again.

Fun fact: This is the first appearance of a slide on any All Hallow’s Evil tracks.

Click to listen or left click to “Save as…”

“Cheap Apologies”

What kid didn't have nightmares about this elbow dropping on them?

This is a quick and dirty arrangement/recording, but I suppose that’s what makes it a fitting tribute.

Click to listen, right click to save.

“Pomp and Circumstance (Funeral March)”

I promise that the next thing I post will be a fully produced, original All Hallow’s Evil song.

Never Forget.

This entry is a little wordy, so I’m going to break format and put the mp3 first. Click to listen, right click to save:

Time Machine

Truth be told, I find the idea of mourning celebrity deaths to be a little silly. I suppose it’s great that some people are empathetic enough to mourn the loss of someone they probably never met and most assuredly didn’t really know, but I’m not one of those people. That’s probably why everyone thinks I’m a dick.

I mention this because it’s been about a year since Ronnie James Dio died. That was probably the first time that my cold, black heart had any spark of what it must be like to be sad when someone you don’t know dies. Let’s just say I was really looking forward to Magica II. However, since his discography was now complete, I felt like it would be a safe time to get the cover of Holy Diver tattooed on my left arm.

In any case, I often cover songs to try some different things without having to write anything myself. Being that my playlist has been heavy on Sabbath lately, I thought I’d take a shot at a Dio-era Sabbath tune. I wanted to stay somewhat obscure, so I was originally going to take a shot at “Country Girl”, but the other day the shuffle feature on my iPod presented me with “Time Machine” and here we are. “Time Machine” also happens to be the first Dio song I ever heard, thanks to it’s placement on the Wayne’s World soundtrack (which also included Alice Cooper and would probably be really easy to blame for ruining my life, but I still have yet to own any BulletBoys albums, so something else must be to blame).

Of course, this isn’t the Wayne’s World version, because I prefer the lyrics to the version on Dehumanizer. I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to decide that one.

Anyway, this was done quick and I’d kind of like to spend some more time with it and change it up a little, but I figured if I didn’t finish it now, other projects would push it out of the way and it would just rot on my hard drive. I also contemplated just posting an instrumental version and saying I left it that way in memorial, because my voice isn’t anywhere near Dio quality, but I left the vocals on as a testament to how much better Dio was than me. Seriously, even having dropped the tuning a half step, this one is still out of my range.

I suppose (hope?) there’s something to be said for challenging yourself.

My spot on sense of fashion led me this sleeveless Batman shirt and matching shorts ensemble. I was probably about 8 at the time this was taken. I'm glad to report not much has changed.

Year recorded: 2010

Tim Burton’s Batman was a pretty big moment in my life. It feels a little strange for me to refer to a massively marketed summer blockbuster as a big moment in my life, but anything else would be a lie. But I was 6 at the time, so what more would you expect?

I’m not sure anyone expected the summer of ’89 to stick with me like it has. My Digi 002 is surrounded by Joker memorabilia (fun fact: the Joker and Satan are my two favorite fictional characters) and I still randomly ask people to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight (in fact, it’s one of the lyrics on the original version of “Sweet Sanctuary…”), so it was only a matter of time before I made an attempt at Danny Elfman’s “Batman Theme.” I eventually arranged and recorded it somewhere in 2006, but that version hasn’t held up so well, so what’s presented here is the 2010 re-recording.

Around the time of re-recording the Elfman theme, I also decided to attempt an arrangement of “Like a Dog Chasing Cars” from The Dark Knight. Since “Dog…” focuses more on texture than melody, converting it into a metal song was a little more difficult than the Elfman track. I went with a slightly sludgy, deathdoom approach to it that I thought worked fairly well, but garnered some dislike on YouTube, so what the hell do I know? In any case, it’s short, so it shouldn’t take you long to decide how you feel about it.

Click to listen, right click to save.

“Batman Theme” (Danny Elfman cover)

“Like a Dog Chasing Cars” (James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer cover)