Occurrence 2012

Almost a year has passed and our upcoming album remains still unfinished. I know it's common that recording process takes many many years from composing the songs to the finest little details on the booklet and the website. It has always been the way Karelian Warcry works. As a drummer it can be very frustrating to wait other players to finish their parts.

Meanwhile I can plan what booklets could look like, pick photographs from my own archives that represent our goals in visual part, draw sketches, even design a flash game for website visitors or whatever comes to my mind. And of course concentrate other important things in my life, like cuddling with my beautiful wife-candidate. Still the ongoing recording process haunts me once in a while. It can drive you nuts. Patience, my friend.

Today I was thinking about recording situation itself. It was icy cold, pitch black dark and my life was quite a chaos at the moment. I can't even recall the proper miking setup we used. A good friend of ours came by and set the things up, while I was still unsure what cymbals or what snare I would use, and also still a bit too confused about the new appearance of my drum kit. I couldn't do that all just by myself. Miking setup consisted of 15 mics overall: snare top, snare bottom, hi-hat, 2 x ride, 3 x tom, 2 x bd, 2 x overhead, 2 x room mic and one extra mic for china. Maybe I'll add the specs of them later, now I'm just too tired to do that.

One thing that buggers me off, is the china cymbal I used on record. It didn't sound the way I wanted, but hey, what can you except from a basic china like 18" Meinl Classics. I added one self-hammered splash underneath it and one cut splash on top to get more complex sound from it (by the way that Paiste Alpha Splash on top is formerly owned by Tonmi Lillman. He sold me that while he was still living in Kouvola. This way I honour fellow drummer who passed away in February, 2012). I didn't use that Sabian Leopard China shown on kit pics somewhere below on this blog.

What I've learned from previous recording session? A lot and hell of a lot more. More practise, more tuning, more timing, yadda yadda! You know what I'm talking about. For the next recording I prefer to have all the cymbals miced separately and hopefully I can use totally different symbal set. At the moment I don't have place to hammer my cymbals and I'm not sure if I'll have any in the near future. I've also decided that next time when I'm sitting behind my drum throne recording patterns, it totally happens in the middle of summer. That's it for now. Over and out!

Hiisi flying drumstick broom