These tracks were written in collaboration with my friend Leo Williams who studies at Leeds Arts University. Leo contributed the vocals to the track as well as being the person that produced, mixed and mastered them all whilst I wrote all of the instrumentals.
The tracks currently serve as a proof of concept that we can write and record this style of music on our own as well as it being a passion project for the pair of us. Currently only two of the tracks could be seen as near release ready with those being “In The Endless Dark” and “Helpless”.
Once all the tracks are release ready, the two I previously named would be the first 2 singles to come out whilst the rest would follow on the rest of the EP. They would most likely be released under Leo’s solo artist name ‘Silent Echoes’ unless we later decided to make a new identity for the music we created together.
I created this as a concept of what a potential album cover could look like for this project. However with the actual release we would get in contact with a real graphic designer and commission them to make a real cover for us. Leo, being a student at Leeds Arts University will quite easily be able to find one for us.
All the tracks were recorded using the same setup of a Macbook connected to a Focusrite Solo interface recorded into Logic. Unfortunately due to conflicting schedules we were never able to arrange a time for me to record real drums for the tracks so they were all programmed using MIDI.
All of the songs were played on my Charvel Pro mod DK24. Our tones were achieved using a combination of the Neural DSP ARCHETYPE: Gojira and ARCHETYPE: Petrucci guitar plugins. We rotated between depending on what the song called for with ARCHETYPE: Gojira mainly being used for the riffs whilst ARCHETYPE: Petrucci was primarily used for any solos or lead parts.
All of the songs are pitch shifted down at least 3 semitones with the lowest being pitched down 7 semitones. This was to achieve the signature low tuned guitar sound of the genre without me having to change the string gauge and setup of my guitar to achieve those tunings naturally. The only issue this presented was when playing on the top 3 strings of the guitar the notes higher in pitch tended to not track very well so to get around this I ended up doing most of the leads on a non-transposed track.
