(Text by Tuomo, 2005)
A long period of work is now behind and the debut album is finally finished. One cannot do anything but to sigh out of relief. I would have never believed to see the day when the job is done. At some point it felt like it’ll never end. Furthermore, the fact that I was living through the hardest times of my life during the making of this debut album, did not make things any easier. Without a doubt, it doubled the amount of work and maximized all the problems. At a some time it felt as if anything that can go wrong will go wrong. There were, for example, problems in synchronizing between audio and midi - thanks a lot to the guy who sold me the MOTU Midi Express XT parallel – afterwards he cheated me. It is impossible to count the amount of swearwords that came out of my mouth during the making of the album :). When the computer crashes about 5 times every night one starts to get a little tense. All in all, I survived the making of
From Dawn to Rise and I am fairly pleased with the outcome soundwise. At the same time I got to learn the hard way that mixing is partly making of compromises. Although I used quality monitors (Duntech Statemans), they didn’t as such help in the actual mixing or in the adjusting of the sounds. I can say nothing else but that mixing is damn difficult and it felt almost all the time that I can’t get the sounds and balance exactly right. But during mixing I tried to make the synthesizer sound as natural as possible. So the result was somehow electronic music. All the aforementioned instruments are Korg Trinity’s originals, although substantially adjusted and adapted sounds. I didn’t use the sampler option that Trinity has at all. Finally, and luckily, Svante Forsbäck premastered the album.
The worst part in the making of the album was that the creative part was about 1% (that is, composing the songs and making the arrangements). Everything else was work that I knew how it needed to be done, but the rest would be just fighting against time. The album took the most of my free time during a time period of over a year, which means that my friendships were put to a test from time to time.
I was so @#% tired, bored, deep and hardly burned-out during the making of the record.
Making of the album widened my views, and got me to realize that all the records that have been published in this world have required work and time. I think that it also requires appreciation for the know-how and accomplishments of others for someone to be able to call himself an artist. Well, it’s another story whether the listeners like the music.
Last changes just before release.
The making of the record was coming to a close and the pace of work was only getting faster. A few days before mastering I went to Kuhasalo (a nature resort close to the centre of Joensuu) to air my thoughts a bit. As I was listening to the sounds of the waves on the beach, the thought that came to my mind was ‘why the heck was I using synthesiser sounds in Intro (just before You Came With a Wind begins) and in Outro, when I could use the sounds of real waves’. Immediately on the next day I contacted Cadimef studios to ask if I could borrow mobile recording equipment from them. They asked me to turn to the media programme at the polytechnic. Already on the following evening I was in Kuhasalo with the recording equipment and a friend of mine, but the speed of the wind was 0m/s. No waves. Great! ‘Holy cow, these systems’ stated my friend Markku. On the next day a hope arose again as I was watching out the window at work.
As I was riding my bike to Kuhasalo the same evening, I thought ‘what the hell am I doing?’ There wasn’t much time left, and yet I had managed to come up with more work for myself. The weather was really great, it was the first hot day of the summer, and there were people sunbathing on the cliffs. I received a few (???) strange looks as I walked around the beach and the woods with a microphone. People on the beach must have thought that I was spying. :) For those who haven’t heard the debut album yet, it begins and ends with the sound of waves. Furthermore, there is the sound of trees soughing at the very end of the album.
At the last moment I turned to Chartmakers Oy, Svante Forsback after being tipped off, and managed to organise time for mastering with a two-day warning. The last night before mastering I slept for four hours, that is to say, that I finished the album at night. It wasn’t the only night, though, that I stayed up really late. The only part of the album that was unfinished was the sample-part in Outro (in which I sampled pieces from many of the albums songs). I didn’t have time to use special effects on that sample. Luckily I could sleep on the train to Helsinki. So Svante and I mastered the album on Thursday the 26 th of May 2005 from 18 o’clock onwards. On some tracks we also did some fine-tuning on the sounds. There were problems especially with the lower sounds (i.e. bass), but Svante was able to fix them unbelievably well. We only took one longer break – the mastering was finished at 2.30 a.m.
Well, the work didn’t end there. It’s probably no surprise that there were some changes on the last-moment. I noticed it the next day as I was listening to the first version of premaster at a friend’s house, and I noticed the same thing when I was listening to it at home. And that was the Vocals. It is rather the wholeness that matters. One cannot, thus, say that it would carry the whole thing forward. It’s true that vocals are not the strength of this album. I thought and thought the whole weekend about what the heck to do. And I came to a conclusion: ‘Let’s redo the premastering!’ Fortunately Svante had time to go into the subject on the 17 th of June. I had the new version in my hands early on in the following weekend. I do not know was it right choise to make mastering again but It is done now.
At the same time Heta and I were giving the finalising touch to the album covers. I think Heta blew a fuse at least five times with the whole thing. Well, as a side comment, I had blown my fuses with the whole album for 1000 times. But all kinds of incredible things happened with the designing of the covers, we changed the fonts various times as nothing seemed to work, and Heta gave a finalising touch to the minutest details. The whole thing was just incomprehensible fiddling. But it didn’t go to waste. Actually, I wouldn’t have started with the whole thing in the first place if I had believed that nothing would come out of this.
Unbelievable, but true, the album went to press on the 30 the June. Whoa...
I must say that I took everything I could out of myself in these last moments. Also in my dayjob, that I have in the local big company, I had been put through the wringer during the spring. So the time after mastering was used to ’recharge my batteries’. I didn’t have much strength left, I was completely exhausted. The first edition was in my hands on the 10th of July. In summary, this is the last album in which I take care of all the instruments, and especially if they are created on a synthesizer.
Thanks.
Big thanks on the making of the album belong to Ville: you did a lot of work while you were elaborating on the guitar arrangements on your free time. Thanks to Heta for designing the cd-covers, for the great pictures and the wonderful ideas on the layout. Heta, we made quite great work, what do you think?! And, thanks to Mikko J.P. for good layout ideas. Thoughts were much more clear after chatting with you. Thanks to Anne for the translations. Thanks to Svante, at Chartmakers, for mixing and premastering. It was great experience to work with you. And thanks once again to those whose names are mentioned on the cd-cover.
And for audience: I hope you’ll find yourself or things from your life through our music. I hope you like the outcome! :)
As it is written on the texts on the cd-booklet, the album includes quite versatile style of music. So, please notice that in the forthcoming releases the musical style will be clear: Pop -music . Well, you will not find e.g. jazz (She is gone), trumpet solo pieces (God Knows), or songs in the style of Hiekkaranta or This Time on the forthcoming albums.
Most of the tunes on the debut album are approx. 5 years old. This is reflected somehow in the lyrics of some songs.
Listen to the comments during record work.
Here you can download and listen
MP3 file, that includes comments during record work and takes.
