Focalor

[Focalor]

Some shit I recorded at home 2 or 3 years ago using an old Win98 PC with ACID Music 2.0. All guitars and vocals are me. Drums are beat-by-beat arranged one-shot samples, pretty tedious shit but sounds better than loops. Not really looking for a band or anything since I probably suck too much for that (not opposed to the idea though), but if anyone is maybe interested in doing some kinda collaboration by emailing songs/tracks back and forth, that might be fun.

Focalor - 1 - Prologue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuZlQNLhB_E

Focalor - 2 - War of Words
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnzc3tJzYxg

Focalor - 3 - The Master's Call
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY2YSp-2IUw

Focalor - 4 - Purification
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L7TTJ_SsxE

Focalor - 5 - Darkness Shines
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIbZov0aYuA

Focalor - 6 - Paranoid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVTSJukqq8w

Focalor - 7 - Nocturnal Emissions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGr3ZEaqDX0

Focalor - 8 - Inner Voice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqyFJEu7os

[MetalPaul]

shits sounds good man, great atmosphere you have going on with that, really dig the growls as well. what kinda gear are you playing through??

[Focalor]

I think the only guitar I used was my Ibanez JS100, stock pickup at bridge position, Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates at neck position. Only floor unit used was Vox wah. Rackmount amp consisting of Marshall JMP1 preamp, and Digitech GSP2101 studio tube preamp/processor for all effects. Most of the effects I used was things like reverb, 4 voice chorus, a little delay, some active 7 band EQs maybe (I can't really remember). I have mainly 2 different settings I ever use, one with a short reverb for all rhythm parts, one with a longer decaying more spacious sounding reverb for leads, but both have identical settings for EQ and any other effects included in the chain. For all the rhythm guitar parts, I used the OD1 setting on the Marshall JMP1 to record the track once, then record another identical track using the OD2 to get two somewhat different textured tracks (OD1 and OD2 being different intensities of gain, OD2 is more distortion). Then I'd pan the OD1 track to the left maybe 15% and the OD2 track to the right 15%, just enough to where they'd bleed into both channels slightly but still retain their individual sound and have a stereo doubled effect.

For a lot of the solos, I'd record the main part of the solo, then go back to the beginning and work out how I wanted to harmonize it with a second lead guitar track, then actually record it again and pan both tracks left and right to whatever sounded okay. I figured out that panning them a little allowed me to still get a decent harmonized sound while still allowing the individual notes of each track to be heard better. Just sounded a little fuller to me. Leaving both lead tracks centered seemed to make it sound more like one guitar playing both notes instead of having two guitars making two different sounds like I intended it to sound like.

Software I used was ACID Music 2.0, and pretty old loop based program that I got maybe back in 1998, REEEEALLY outdated and obsolete by todays standards, but fuck it, it works. The company that made it isn't even in business anymore, Sony bought them out probably 8 or more years ago. The computer itself is an old piece of shit Win98 machine, p3 500mhz, crammed full of salvaged RAM from other old computers I had laying around, I think 512mb of RAM. Computer came with 32mb RAM, that shit was NOT enough. Most of the tracks get loaded up via the RAM for quicker access. Most of the guitar and vocal tracks I individually set to be disk based rather than RAM loaded, which is damn near mandatory since the tracks can be as much as 50-70mb in size depending on how long I leave it recording.

For vocals, I used a shitty old tiny PC microphone. I had to afro-engineer things to make it sound halfway worth a shit. The mic is maybe 2 inches long attached to about a 10 foot cord. I took an old folding metal sheet music stand with the music tray removed to use a mic stand. Then I took a small piece (maybe 1/2inch-3/8inch diameter) of copper tubing that I cut to about 3 inches long, pinched the living shit out of one side to where it would fit inside the end of the music stand, then bent the pipe to about a 45degree angle to where it would hold the mic towards my face. THEN... took a wire coat hanger, straightened out the hook part and bent it back over to where it would hold the triangle part of the hanger out in front of the mic. Then I draped a tshirt over the top of everything to act as a pop screen and keep out some of the ambient noise from the PC running. And... BADA BING, REDNECK MIC STAND! Hey, it works... kinda.

All drums were single strike WAV files. ALL OF THEM, even the cymbals. I normally have to do 2 tracks for all regular drums (snare, kick drum, toms), and then 4 to 6 tracks for all rhythm tempo cymbals. I stagger tracks to strike the cymbals to where every track has enough time to decay fully. If I only used one track per drum sound, it would clip off the ends and sound completely unrealistic. It's a huge pain in the ass to "play" drums that way, but it sounds a lot more realistic than using some faggot assed pre-made loops.

No bass guitar tracks. Unfortunately I dont own a bass. But I don't guess I really don't need one, it sounds like it's supposed to I guess. Would be nice to create some more interesting nuances with a bass, but whatever. I tried using a pitch shifter effect to tune down about 2 octaves, but it sounded really gravelly even with the sampling jacked up as high as it would go, so I just said fuck it and left bass out of the whole thing.

[MetalPaul]

very cool, i feel like some of the effects arent even necessary, you have a very good doomy/ folk feeel goin on, tha added affects make it a lil more prog that it should be, but still sounds great though

vocally, it sounds great. sounds like your doin it a band practice. im a minimalist, so that comes across very well. a little more reverb on them would be key!!

as far as your recording situation goes you have definatly done the best with your situation! sounds great with the tracks that you have, even though you did that hand by hand. a full drummer would do you so much justice!

id like to colaborate on a project like this, i enjoy the folky/doom that you have going for you, though unforunatly i have little means of sending and receiving files via the computer. where are you located??? great tracks man

[MetalPaul]

here are some of the tracks i do for my project "fear not death"

http://www.reverbnation.com/#!/fearnotdeath

[Focalor]

very cool, i feel like some of the effects arent even necessary, you have a very good doomy/ folk feeel goin on, tha added affects make it a lil more prog that it should be, but still sounds great though

vocally, it sounds great. sounds like your doin it a band practice. im a minimalist, so that comes across very well. a little more reverb on them would be key!!

as far as your recording situation goes you have definatly done the best with your situation! sounds great with the tracks that you have, even though you did that hand by hand. a full drummer would do you so much justice!

id like to colaborate on a project like this, i enjoy the folky/doom that you have going for you, though unforunatly i have little means of sending and receiving files via the computer. where are you located??? great tracks man

I wanted to add some subtle reverb to the vocals. I ended up having to export the recorded vocal track WAV's to another cheap shitty program I bought years ago called Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 10 in order to tweak the EQ a bit. Using the shitty PC microphone I had, they all sounded really flat, so I used that program to add more midrange to make them more audible. I think it also had a reverb effect with it, but it was kinda difficult to use. I think the only song I used reverb on the vocals was "Purification", and I didn't like it. I didn't want to go overboard with too much reverb on too many of the tracks because it ended up sounding all muddled and obscured.

The weird delay and reverb I use for my rhythm guitar gives it a sound like it's being played in a room with hardwood floors. Since I go direct-out, I wanted something to make it sound like a miked amp being recorded. With direct-out and very little processing, sometimes you pick up far too many mistakes in your playing and it ruins the sound of the tracks, makes it sound cheap and cheesy without any roomy ambient sound like that.

Anyway, got shit going on over here, monday night football, fixing to drink myself into a stupor with any luck. I'll yap more maybe tomorrow about this.

[slut rag]

listened to a couple of songs the other day and it was pretty good. almost reminded me of vehemence in a way, not sure why though..

[Focalor]

listened to a couple of songs the other day and it was pretty good. almost reminded me of vehemence in a way, not sure why though..

Never listened to any Vehemence before. I'm still largely stuck back in the 90's and early 00's as far as death metal goes.

id like to colaborate on a project like this, i enjoy the folky/doom that you have going for you, though unforunatly i have little means of sending and receiving files via the computer. where are you located??? great tracks man

I listened to your stuff, and while it's not entirely the style of music I stick exclusively to (I don't really carry one theme throughout everything I do, I like to mix it up and do different things here and there), I get the feeling that maybe we could create some interesting stuff. Your style seems pretty goth to me. I guess goth is how I'd describe it. I'm not hip at all, I'm a little confused about what genre is what in metal these days. But from what I hear of your stuff, it sounds kinda slower and has more space in it for dramatic harmony and melody. I think I could probably do some pretty good lead guitar work with it. Hopefully you're pretty proficient with leads and solos too, it would be really cool to try some trade-off solo passages for a nice contrast.

You mentioned that my effects usage made things sound a little "prog". Hopefully that isn't a problem. That's kind of the sound I'd like to go for. Ideally, I want a few of the sounds in a song to sound really lush and otherworldly. I'd also like to try to experiment with things like odd timings maybe, maybe even some radical mid-song tempo changes. Whatever sounds interesting and fresh, but above all, GOOD... as in the progressive style of tempo changes and weird sounds doesn't sound out of place and non-cohesive in the context of the entire song.

I have a few songs in mind already that I've worked on in the past but never fleshed out completely and/or finished them. The overall sound of them I had in my head seems like they could blend well with your own particular style.

Sometimes I'll just be sitting there playing and come up with something that I think sounds really cool, and I'll get all excited about it and start recording. I'll get maybe a nice intro and verse together and then I'll just go completely blank and get stuck. I'll try to come up with something that sounds like it fits well with what I've already gotten recorded, and when I play it back I'll think that it sounds fucking horrible and I'll trash that track and try again a few times to no avail, then get frustrated and just STOP. And often, I won't come back to finish it. It'll just be a half written song sitting there on my computer.

But anyway, I've got maybe 2 or 3 songs like that which I think started out very promising but I never got around to finishing. Maybe I could dig them out, let you hear them, find out what you think about it, and then maybe we can go from there.

Hopefully you have some way of recording at least guitar tracks on top of whatever I can send you. I'd need to know what format you'd want to work with, like MP3 or WAV or whatever else. My music software deals with WAV files for tracks only, but I'm sure whatever format you sent me I could find some way of converting it to WAV so I can use it.

I have two such half-written song that I think might interest you already posted on the web on my older music projects page, the second song ("Untitled5") in particular.

http://causticism.angelfire.com/newmusic.html

Lemme know what you think, etc.

[slut rag]

i haven't listened to vehemence in a while.... you might like them, maybe not. again your stuff KINDA reminded me of them. you definitely have your own sound though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULFjFKiTJXM