Recording drums for ///pathetic.toneless.obsessions
The origins of the main riffs and parts on ///pathetic.toneless.obsessions go back to when we were still a trio. Since the beginning of Sons of the Lighthouse we recorded every rehearsal and jam session we did which lead to gigabytes and gigabytes of material safely stored on our hard drives and cloud storages. When we decided to move on as a duo, we didn’t just want to throw all these ideas out the window and start all over again, especially since some of those ideas had already turned into almost finished songs. So we took some of those songs and started experimenting with different synthesizers and samples. We loved the change in energy and the effect the synthesizers had on the songs right away so we kept going. It felt like this newly added element gave the songs we already knew and loved a common thread. We went back and forth between meeting in our rehearsal room to write new parts and jam and meeting at my apartment to write basslines and fiddle around with synthesizers and samples. After approximately 4 months of writing and arranging parts, acquiring all the gear we needed to properly record and play over the backing tracks in our rehearsal room and refining the songs, we were ready to record the EP. We knew we couldn’t afford to go to a big studio to record, neither could we afford an engineer to do the recording for us. But we always found a way to make things work by ourselves so we didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t make this happen on our own either. I decided to take the recording and mixing process into my own hands and spent weeks reading books and watching YouTube tutorials on how to set up microphones for drums and guitars, what to do and what not to do when recording, how to mix songs and dozens of other recording and mixing related topics. Having been part of a professional recording and mixing process before, I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve.
Nik and I both took four days off to lock ourselves in the rehearsal room and record the songs: Two for drums and two for guitar. Everything went smoothly and we both perfectly stuck to the schedule. The next stage however was completely uncharted territory for me. Having seen a mixing process and actually doing it are two very different animals. So I had to go with the trusty trial-and-error method. I started adjusting volumes, adding equalizers, gates and compressors, adding effects, removing effects and deleting the whole damn thing and start all over again. But after a couple of tries I felt like I got the hang of it and the songs started sounding the way heard them in my head from the very beginning. I slowly got a sense of what buttons to push and what knobs to turn to get the results I was looking for. With every new song I approached I acquired new skills which I then applied to the songs I already worked on. I think this approach actually helped giving this record a guiding thread. For the last step, mastering the record, we decided to give the mixes into professional hands for once. The results that were sent back to us shortly after blew us away. Our good friend Sebastian Eichmeier did an amazing job rounding off the songs giving them the finishing touch.
All in all we are incredibly proud of this record and we are eagerly looking forward to sharing our music with you as well as recording the next one (probably later this year). ///pathetic.toneless.obsessions marks the beginning of a long prosperous journey of kicking ass!