You guys seem to be centering on the "feeling" or mood...Viva Emptiness is heavier because they produced it that way. the guitar tone has gotten a facelift, courtesy of Mr. Dan Swano. Here's a part of an interview with Dan where he talks about the recording of Viva Emptiness- an interview which most of you have NOT seen...from a smaller 'zine called Lamentations of The Flame Princess-good 'zine:
Dan Swano :"I've been doing a lot of unexpected work with KATATONIA. They've come off this really fancy recording in one of Sweden's biggest studios called Soundtrade, where EUROPE has recorded, big bands. They called me one night and they were having problems because the sound they were getting there was far worse than we were getting when we were working together, and they were paying big bucks! So they asked me if I could help them to beef up the drums and the guitars because they were sounding really bad. I got the master disk they use these days, and I started restoring these fifteen tracks worth of drums and guitars and that was quite a painful process. I have this perverse thing where I kind of like doing stuff like that. It's like have five hundred megabytes of a word document where you change the letter K to the letter C manually. It's that kind of business. You have your sampled drum kit and you replace all of the acoustic drums with sampled drums and make sure it sounds exactly like the guy played it. Normally this process is something that causes albums to sound very sterile and very computerized, but I have started using new software called Reason which makes this sound very natural yet very perfect. The guys were overwhelmed by the new sounds that I made for the drummer. Also, the guitar sound was beefed up a bit using modern morphing technology which actually steals the sound from one recording and adapts it to another. Quite weird software, but it can do that! I was kind of a computer geezer there for two weeks, and we had Christmas coming up at work so I couldn't really do anything, so I was doing BLOODBATH interviews on my lunch break, and being Santa Claus the rest of the time, selling keyboards to stupid people. That's one of my classic catch-lines from Terrorizer magazine. When I quit EDGE OF SANITY, I was so pissed, I remember telling him, "I can not do anything, I'm just really bad. All I can do is sell keyboards to stupid people." And that was the big headline. I'm known for doing that these days!
Should I ask what recording you stole from for the new KATATONIA guitar sounds?
Dan Swano: "The band wanted to have an EQ that sounded like the new MUDVAYNE, The End of All Things to Come. So after trying out all my traditional stealing-guitar passages, I found on that one in a manner of seconds, a riff that sounded similar so I could start the morph process. It turned out really nice. It still sounded not very good, but it sounds a zillion times better than the original, which was the purpose of the whole thing. Once something sounds that bad, you can never make it sound totally nice. It's saving a horrible meal with a lot of spice. It's hot so you can't really taste the crap. I've heard the final mix, it was done at the same studio where I did the vocals for Alive Again, I went in there and helped them to get a guy that could handle this kind of situation, because it's not every studio that would accept it. It was pretty messy. I came there and I had to upload this and they had to re-record that, some mixing guys just want things to be served on a silver plate or else they won't do it. I had to find them someone who had the technological skills working with stuff like Pro Tools, and also that liked KATATONIA, and I found someone in this Studio Kuling place that likes PARADISE LOST and also likes KATATONIA. He was very pleased to work with some of his favorite guys. I would say that it's sounding the most professional ever from these guys. It's definitely above their own league sonically.
How can you go to a big studio and end up with a crap sound?
Dan Swano: "When you're on the outside looking in, and when you're a bit younger, you believe that automatically, because it's expensive, you get a good sound. Sometimes, ironically, it's the other way around. There is a certain love and dedication in a smaller studio, where the engineer kind of knows everything in his studio, and there are weird gizmos everywhere to make sound better, that you don't have in a big studio because they are more of a facility that you can rent. Any technician in the world should be able to go in there and follow a standard thing, there is the mixing desk, here is the rack, there are the speakers, you know? They went there because it was a fancy place in Stockholm, but they did the one thing they will never do again. They did not hire anyone to record them. They were there all by themselves. So it was these guys trying to run a space shuttle with nobody telling them how to do it. It might be an expensive and very dangerous way to find out how it is to be a recording engineer, you know? It's not very unusual that bands go to big studios and have a complete failure. It's been throughout the history, I remember DESTRUCTION being the first band to record on forty-eight tracks, and it sounded absolutely horrible from what I remember. You thought, "They recorded on forty-eight tracks, this must be the best sound in the world!" And you listen to it and go, "Well
" I still remember doing the first EDGE OF SANITY album in Stockholm, and thinking, "This place is much bigger than Sunlight, so it must sound a lot better!" I remember coming off the mixing of the first EDGE OF SANITY album and going to visit ENTOMBED while they were recording in Stockholm, and Skogsberg just put on the tape of Nothing But Death Remains mixes in the monitors and I thought, "That sounds cool
" and he just cranked Crawl that they were recording and I was blown away. This fucking sauna, it was the smallest place I could ever imagine being a studio, they got a sound that was ten times cooler than we got in this fancy place in the middle of Stockholm with this big desk and the big things. From then on I went home and decided I would do more recording, I would learn how to do this so I can make our albums in the future. We tried one more time with Unorthodox and didn't get anywhere near the result that was worth the money, which is why I started recording EDGE OF SANITY. From that moment, it turned out to be something I had to do for a living because it was too late to go back to other studios. I still have a great problem paying for studio time. I don't know what it is. I can do it all by myself, I just want to go somewhere where the gear is right, and just do all the work myself. It's so hard imagining that people are actually paying hundreds of thousands of Swedish crowns just to do what I can do for free. It's a weird thought. I will never ever do that, I'm afraid. It's like asking someone else to bring up your baby, you know?
How did it get to the point where they're going into an expensive studio with nobody backing them up?
Dan Swano: "They thought just the way that I thought. This is Soundtrade! They have a mixing desk for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It must be great. It must sound awesome! There is just a button you press for 'Good Sound.' That's not the way it works. It's a very different environment. Sonically, this studio is a very flat and very precise environment. When you listen to the sounds it gets, it doesn't sound anywhere near your hi-fi system. It's a very special, clean sound. They didn't really know what they were hearing. They ended up using a lot of these direct recording devices that they were using in their home studios. The drums were not properly tuned, or the microphones were not properly placed. Maybe if they recorded some sort of pop songs, it would have worked. The drummer happens to be one of the hardest hitting guys in the industry, with cymbals that made more noise than you could ever imagine, and it's bleeding all over the drum tracks, and the guitars sounding even more rough than some of the guitar sounds I did for some black metal bands. Pretty much leaving me with a good recording of bass and vocals. That was pretty tough. But I made it happen, and these guys realized way too late about Sunlight, even though the equipment was a lot worse, the guy knew how to do it. The difference between recording to a four track tape recorder is not that big from recording onto the coolest system in the world. I've found all these old tapes, and I've been transferring them to the computer to put MP3s out on my webpage. I've been listening to some of the recordings I did on four track cassette machines. Some of them sound better than the shit I did on sixteen tracks in Unisound. It's amazing, but there was just something about the dedication, you could spend one entire day just finding a snare sound, because you felt you were working against the machines. You had to prove to everyone, and to yourself, that you could get a good snare sound on this fucking piece of junk. You don't have to prove anything to anyone if you use fancy equipment, you know? It's natural that you get a good sound, that's what everyone thinks. But it's just as hard work, you know? Once you start messing around with quality equipment, you don't get the nice things like a lot of noise and hum and distortion, you just change the sonics. It's not that big a difference, to be honest. It's not as in the movie industry where you can make bigger changes if you have more money. Here it's pretty much sounding the same. I've had master tapes where they've been recorded with a high budget, and it still sounds like a tin can snare drum. That's the way the snare drum sounded in those microphones. They are just another bunch of guys that had their visions shattered that you can actually buy a good sound. You have to find a guy who can get it. I think they will record the next album with Jens [Bogren], who did the mixing. I originally booked them for this Studio Kuling thing, but they couldn't get the deadline working and he had a problem because I told them they should record the entire album there so he moved some bands. Then they canceled their recording and I'm like, "Fuck, it's all my fault!" Eventually, he ended up doing the good of it and mixed it. The recording process can be tedious. Sitting around for three weeks isn't always my idea of fun, you know?
Hope this long-assed post helps with this goofy debate about mood...lol
