it's been a long time since I shared something, since I basically didn't record anything after releasing Rainmaker months ago. While I could blame moving to a different house as the main reason, I think it was also a bit of laziness on my side (I finished moving 2 months ago
), and focus on other things during the summer holidays (like the open source adventure game engine I started working on just for fun). Nevertheless, I never stopped writing and thinking of music. And having recently bought some more instruments, I definitely had to give them a try, working on a simple idea that I had in my mind for a while already.The end result is the song you can listen to here:
https://soundcloud.com/lminiero/the-cas ... exter-ward
The title comes from Lovecraft novel by the same name, the first work I ever read of him as a teenager (so back when the world was in black and white!). While it's not considered his best work, I remember it really hitting me at the time, and in fact I ended up reading many more works of his after that. And being Lovecraft the source, the music was inspired by some of the old lovecraftian Metallica's songs, like "Call of Ktulu", "The thing that should not be", and "The house that Jack built" (the last one is not a Lovecraft song, but it always gave me the same creepy vibe). That's how I came up with the very creepy first part, the more traditionally mid-tempo metal song in the second part, and the creepy (again) finale.
For solos, I originally wanted to have something that sounded like a talkbox (like some of Metallica's songs do, as a matter of fact): I couldn't find anything that worked well, though, especially with vocoders. Eventually I simply added a formant filter to the solo (which apparently is often involved in talkbox-y sounds), and a fake automated wahwah via a Rakarrack plugin: it's not exactly what I wanted, but I think it sounds the part, and is close enough to the vibe I wanted to convey. The other solo is more melodic, instead, calling back the intro theme.
The production process was pretty much the same as always, but if there's anything you're curious about, feel free to ask!
Hope you'll enjoy this, and I also hope it won't take me 4 months again to share something next time
