New album of Marker Beacon (heavy metal)

[zer0]

Hello,

I'm the guitarist of Marker Beacon, a french metal band. We just released our first album called "Dead Frequencies" (15 tracks).
Official website: http://www.markerbeacon.org
Download link: http://www.markerbeacon.org/?page_id=71

We used many free software to record this album:
- ardour for the pre-mix of all musics, some cut/paste to clean all the audio tracks
- rosegarden with fluidsynth and zynaddsubfx plugins for all the synths (except the intro which is a hardware synth)
- hydrogen for the drums of all musics
- many scripts using SoX to convert tracks from stéréo to mono and python to modify the xml hydrogen files
- and of course my debian distro!

Thank you to all the developpers of these software !

The output of ardour (wav tracks) and hydrogen (midi) was mixed and mastered by a professional sound engineer (probably with proprietary software).

Our music is released under a Creative Commons licence (BY-SA 3.0), which means you can freely listen to it and download it from our website. A physical CD is also available from the "shop" tab if you really enjoy it

Anyway, feel free to comment...

[Jesse]

I can't say I'm big into metal, but you guys did a great job with this.

What hydrogen drum set did you use? It works really well for what you are doing. Also, you did a wonderful job with the guitar recording. How were they recorded? Distorted guitar seems like one of the hardest things to get right.

[zer0]

Hi Jesse,

Thank you for your comments. The drums kit used comes from the sound engineer who mixed our
album. We provided the midi files to him and I guess he plugged it to an hardware electronic drums.
Initially, we did all the premix with a drums kit based on GSCW-2, and the result was not that bad.

For the guitars recording, we used an ENGL Powerball amplifier for most of the rythm guitars. We
sometimes used a Marsall JMP1 or an ADA MP2 for some lead guitars. The amplifier cab was in
small room -- a bit larger than a broom cupboard -- and we used a shure SM57. We did not play
very loud. The SM57 was directly connected to our console (Tascam DM24) without any specific
preamp. Of course, again, a big part of the job was done by our sound engineer who added some
EQs, effects, ...

[Jesse]

Sm57 used to be the only mic I owned. It's a great "desert island" mic.