Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 1/09 -14

Baaaaaaah!

Things are taking way too much time so I'm re-recording Resurrection and releasing whenever I'm done (should be fairly soon depending on how busy I'll be with school starting and all).

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 19/06 -14

So far the vocals are sounding pretty good, we're recording now and then when's there's opportunity. I'm going to start polishing things up a bit more again fairly soon, fix bad guitar-takes and such. Overall things are going slow and steady but there isn't THAT much left to do, give it another month-ish it might all be done :)

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 12/06 -14

School is over for this year and I've started working as a sound designer on a game with some friends and other awesome people. Simply put this means I have more time to record vocals but there are still problems with planning the recording sessions timewise. We have recorded vocals for one song so far though and it sounds... alright (It could always be better but whatever). It seems it'll take some more time to  finish this thing but hopefully it'll be worth the trouble in the end.

Bye for now

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 31/05 -14

...
The mix sounds awesome.
The first master was better than expected.
But the damn thing ain't finshed yet.

To be honest since the last post I don't think I've recorded anything. I've been mixing a lot and focusing on school and friends over the last few weeks but if all goes well the final recordings will be done next week.

To clarify, what remains is this:
* Vocals
* Most of the foley-work (The storytelling during the main tracks)
* Some bass cleanup (Might skip this one but there are a few small parts that annoy me about the clean bass right now).

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 12/05 -14

Lyrics are done. Or rather the first decent versions of the lyrics are done but melodies for the vocals are yet to be written. For a few different reasons this stage took a little longer to reach (school taking priority, problems with new hardware, etc) but it's stabilizing now. There's still work to be done, some things about the mix are still to be solved (some strange volumes here and there) but the general sound is there and most the more annoying things are gone. Of course there's still vocals to deal with but after it's just finetuning the mix a little bit more and mastering remaining.

Close to the End

The mixing process has entered the phase where I remove half of the shit I've added and weaken the rest. A cleanup process which pretty much allways happens and which usually improves the general quality and clarity of the mix substantially...
Hopefully it will this time as well ;)

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 30/04 -14

As of yesterday all drums are complete. Previously I had only worked with programmed drums but now I've had the chance to record some on my electrical drumkit. Although they have been edited/quantized it still sounds a lot better than it did before with mor detail, variation, fills, and a few completely different beats which in my opinion sound a lot better than the old drums. Because of time constraint a few areas were not recorded this way but it mainly riffs where variation and improvisation was fairly limited so I wouldn't have gained that much from it anyway.

Now to the somewhat negative side. The mix is starting to feel pretty much complete and most changes made now are just nudging the controls of the EQ's and whatnot to get a better sound but there is still one thing that's bothering me: the clean sections. Yesterday I spent hours working on creating a improved preset for my noise reduction for all the clean electric guitars, and making new Guitar Rig -presets for them as well as improving the old one so it doesn't show of as much noise. Overall the result was pretty good but not quite where I want it. The lead clean is fine where it is but the other two guitars fade away a little in the mix and sound a little too weak so I'll be trying to improve on that. There's also some problem in the mix I feel with the relansionship between the guitars and the piano so I'll probably take a proper look at that as well.

Other than that recording is close to completion, what's missing is still most of the foley and all vocals. Lyrics have made some progress but I've been focusing on other things so they're still not complete either.

Yes, Bonus.

The bonustrack has been recording and added to the main mix. Lyrics have been written and vocals will be dealt with when the time comes for that overall. Drums will be recorded during the weekend, probably during Saturday and Sunday but mayhaps also on Monday, we'll see. I'm really tired.

Bonus

There's probably gonna be a bonus track.

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 22/04 -14

Slow progress, the mix is getting better with every day and the lyrics are starting to take shape. Soon I'll deal with recording drums and after that hopefully at least some of the lyrics will be ready for recording. Until then it's just wait and improve the mix slowly as I deal with school and prepare for the final recordings.

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 14/04 -14

I've made a first mix. It's a little rough but it's an important milestone. From here on out the work is more relaxed since I'l basically just sit around and adjust and tweak what's already there until it's perfect.
There are still a few things to record to be honest, I'm still using written drums and that won't be fixed until some time next week or maybe even later, there's still foley work and even some abient guitar stuff to do for the story-based tracks, and of course there's vocals to think of. I still haven't finished all the lyrics but that's high priority at this point and I'll have more time to actually do that now that most of the heavy work is done.

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 07/04 -14

As you can see some progress has been made, most instruments have been recorded now. What remains are drums, vocals, and ambient-guitar stuff. After that it's just polishing to do before going into the mixing stage.

This is an image of the Cubase project for recording everything. Orange tracks are input for instruments like guitars and such, the other tracks are mainly MIDI but also one or two ambient tracks (although I think a few of them ended up out of frame in this image). I'm glad I upgraded my computer a bit before starting to record this album, it would've been a nightmare otherwise.

Progress Report - Eyes Cut Open - 30/03 -14

Progress is being made on the recording. It all sounds quite nice so far but there's a lot left to do...
Feels good to make a little schedusle like this one though. :)

A Momentary Source Of Info

Hello there! I created a blog today!

Yup.

It's this one if you haven't figured that out yet, not saying that you haven't but you never know.

How are you today?

Anyway, I'll post some info here now and then about what's going on with Hums In The Dark. My guess is that it will mostly be a quick little text now and then saying that I'm writing on something or recording something else, nothing too heavy you know. Could be interesting though, might make a little clearer how active I actually am with this project to those who may take the time to listen.

On another note, I'm recording an album. It's and album I've writing on basically ever since Universal Queen came out. It's gonna be pretty big, one song actually turned out to be like eight minutes. I'm pretty proud of that to be honest. I've written longer but nothing with that high density in content and variation. Most of the electric guitars have been recorded as well as all the ambient stuff and overall the project's been layed properly so that I can start adding more detail and so on, with some temporary drums and piano. Similar to the writing process however it will take some time to finish this part of the process. I want to make it as good as possible, if nothing else then for the fact that I put way too much energy and time into writing the damn thing. To prolong the whole thing I've also got a new guitar that feels and works very differently than my old one which means I'm spending a lot of time just figuring out how to play on it basically, but that's mostly a good thing though as it sounds a hole lot better than the old one. A PRS Tremonti for those interesting in knowing.

Well that's about it, Imma go back to listening to Zappa and possibly take another look at how this blog looks and works, etc.

Happy journeys.
//Oskar