Carcass HEartwork: the recording process by Keith andrews

[Djabthrash]

Amazing read, thanks for sharing !

 

[fitzrangerhoodngarb]

Magnifico! Thanks.

 

[Rhorschack]

Wow. Thanx for sharing.

Heartwork has aged pretty well soundwise and remains my favourite Carcass record.

There wasn't many albums sounding as huge yet natural in the genre in the early 90'

The lyrics were quite inspired too. Departing from the gory medical clichés.

A true metal classic imo.

 

[Skaldir]

thanks for sharing
I found it funny that the guitar sound of the demos was unreached for so long. thats life, sometimes the scratch stuff is the best

 

[Shinozoku]

"The kick drums had second kicks in front of them, and the whole kick setup was ‘tented’ slightly to manage the room ambience volume, but we did like the tone of the drum in the room quite a lot. "

So they had 4 kick drums set up, one each in front of the ones being played? Dude, the things we engineers and musicians do for perfect tone.

 

[Eduardo Apolonia]

Very interesting reading.

Thanks!!

 

[Lasse Lammert]

here's Colin's version of the process of finding the guitar sound:

Maelstrom: You worked on Carcass’ most successful and well-regarded albums overall, Necroticism and Heartwork.

Colin Richardson: Yes. I’m very proud of Heartwork. I spent a long time trying to find the guitar tone — I think it took five days. Looking back, the reason why it took so long was we were using the wrong heads and cabs. Then we managed to get a hold of one of the first Peavey 5150s. The rest of it was merely capturing a band at its peak. They were kind of moving away from the grind and into Megadeth influences and a few Iron Maiden things. I remember thinking at the time, “wow, this is a bit too mainstream,” but not at all, it was good, catchy riffs. By Swansong, they were signed to Columbia, and I think the label would have liked them to do clean singing vocals, but the band put their foot down on that.

Maelstrom: Could you tell us about how you recorded the guitars on Heartwork?

Colin Richardson: I believe the board was a Neve VR. I used the board’s mic pres. For the guitar sound, we tried a Marshall Anniversary and various other heads — various combinations. (We didn’t try changing the guitar, which would have been a logical thing!) We were kind of making it up as we went along... we tried moving the cab around the room...

I had heard about something they did on the Metallica Black Album, which was they had joined two kick drums together. I had heard Kiss did that as well. Up till then, we couldn’t get enough bottom out of the guitar. So in a moment of lull, I thought why not try it with the guitar cab. So we took the back off one Marshall cab, and the front off another one, and duck-taped them together to make a huge cab. Everybody laughed. But it sounded better... It tended to rattle quite a bit and there were still some issues with the sound from the Marshall Anniversary. When we got the 5150, then that was it. I didn’t bother taking the cabs apart, and plugged it into the Frankenstein cab, and it sounded amazing.

I was determined not to record anything unless it was better than the previous album. I’d ask the band, “are you blown away by this?” and if they said, “yeah, it’s pretty good,” then it wasn’t good enough.

I think there was a pedal in there... a Marshall Governor pedal? If I had discovered Tube Screamers back then, I would have been tracking with one.