7/24 - Crystal clear drum tracks in Clearwater, FL

After a kickass show in Jacksonville, we were all eager to get to Dave's apartment down in St. Petersburg. We ended up driving through the night to get there — all 4 hours of it. We got to Dave's place at 6 AM and all melted out of the car into Dave's house. I was fortunate enough to be granted sleeping permission, as my generous band members wanted me to be on my A-game for the recording session the next day. I managed to scrape about 2.5 hours of half-sleep in the car, but kept on waking up because of the thunderous laughter resulting from Karl's jokes. All. Night. Long. (But seriously, he's the funniest man in black metal).

Finally Gotcha, Karl! 

My plan was to change my drum heads as soon as I got to Dave's place so that I could sleep for as long as possible right up until we had to leave for the studio. Instead, I ended up going right to bed and waking up with another 2 hours of sleep only to rely on coffee and sickly banana flavored energy shots (those shits are disgusting)  to carry me through. Everything at the house went relatively smoothly, but as you may imagine, things got pretty hectic running on such little sleep.

We arrived at Clear Track studios, from Clearwater, FL at about noon and began setting up drums promptly. Dave was engineering the session, and Sean helped out to dial in tones and place mics. We were all pleased with their facilities at the studio but experienced a total of about 1.5 hours of setbacks because the staff at that studio was quite disorganized.

Our session was scheduled to begin at 1 PM, but we didn't start rolling tapes until about 2:45 PM. Between missing cables and console difficulties it was a minor debacle. It was daunting to our engineer, Dave, because we had 5 hours to do 5 songs worth of drum tracks. 3.5 hours to do the same amount of work seemed rather steep. But in my typical fashion, I kept calm and knocked out most of the songs in just a couple takes. Fuck yeah!

Here is some tracking footage from one of the new songs on our forthcoming release. This song is probably my favorite on the record so far because I get to just fuck around the whole time. Enjoy!

We finished tracking all the songs right at 6 PM, (our deadline) and were out of there after a quick data transfer. We spent the duration of the night at Dave's place chomping down tons of chili and enjoying some victory brew. All in all, it was an outrageously successful day. I'm sure all of our fans will enjoy this new release immensely.

One more studio video!

Sorry that this post went up so late. The writeup of our amazing Orlando show will be live in a few hours as well.

- Matt