https://youtu.be/HSs8HXX45ag
Hello everyone who reads this.
Here is a recreational and personal rendition of the whole Catch Thirty Three by Meshuggah, done in about a week.
After having worked a week and a half on the mixing of an exciting documentary in the context of my professional life, I needed something to stimulate myself and avoid the trap of post-exciting-project boredom. Why not recreating a whole album I truly love, as an exercize, then ?
So, here is the instrumental version.
Gear and stuff used and some things about the process:
- A good lil’ Fender Telecaster that followed me on tour through Europe last year. I didn’t even changed the strings since I can’t afford to buy new ones at this moment, but the twangy attack was more pleasant to me compared to the other Tele model I own (a Joe Duplantier Signature Pro-Mod San Dimas Style 2 HH E Mahogany by Charvel). I don’t even know what pickups are on the Fender, except they are single coils and it sounded cool so whatever. Standard tuning.
- Recorded and produced with Cubase 14.
- SLO 100-X by Neural DSP with its cool pitch function. From standard tuning I was using, it was 11 semitones lower. As a result, recording guitar takes was kind of a brainfuck, as I was hearing the acoustic of the guitar and the distorted low-pitched sound at the same time, which was a fun serie of constant cluster moments (I managed to get used to it, though)
- Guitar DI takes were duplicated and pitched 11 semitones lower through Cubase’s « Standard - Plucked » pitching algorithm and run through Steinberg’s VST Amp Rack (with a Meshuggah Preset, because well, if there’s Meshuggah written, you know you don’t go for a Bach’s Fugue)
- Clean guitars were also routed into SLO 100-X instances, some were pitched down, some were not.
- Bass was programmed, using the Session Bassist Prime Bass bank on NI Kontakt. It was routed into the preamp section of a SLO 100-X instance, then a Genome 2.04 by Two-Notes for the cab section.
- I also doubled the bass parts with a Scarbee Rickenbacker Bass in Kontakt, going through the same kind of routing chain. Both were then sent through a distorted bus (a fellow Decapitator by Soundtoys) to get some additional KRRR KRRRR
- SSD5 was used for drums
- Most of reverbs used were Valhalla Vintage Verb and Valhalla Shimmer
- I used two Arturia’s Vocoder instances for the vocoder part that happens during « Mind’s Mirrors ». I’ll have to bring some corrections later since I retranscripted some parts pretty pretty wrongly. My bad. Enjoy ze french accent vat makes zis moment glorious, by the way.
- There are two sonically fascinating, in term of sound textures, through the original album, the first one happens at the end of « In Death - Is Death », right before « Shed » starts. I love this sound. Since I didn’t want to sample anything from the original, I did a bit of sound design then. That was pretty fun, although it’s far from identical to the original one, but that was not the point. The other one happens during the short break that leads to the chaotic and wonderful part in « Sum ». In the original version by Meshuggah, it is of course enriched by one of the most wonderful screams to me in the music history (at least the music history I know and enjoy listening to, I won’t brag about knowing everything since that’s not the case). This one was also fun to do.
- I won’t lie pretending the guitar parts were nailed like a boss. They weren’t. A huge amount of them were recorded part by part, sometimes micro-part by micro part. And they were edited. Sometimes not that well, but it’s been a week since I finished recording the last note and well, that dedication on precision will be done later. Using a standard tuning on a regular six strings guitar also made me do some choice of fret positions that I suppose not being the same on an 8 strings guitar.
- I hid a few personal dull leads (definitely not a shredder, though) at some points, mostly when it was either fun to do so or for example, what I remembered from wrongly deciphering through almost 20 years now from the climax of « Sum ». There is something going on there in the original that still makes me fascinated and I still have some kind of sonic hallucinations when listening to it depending on the device I use (not even talking about the physical state I’m in which may vary when listening to music).
- I draw the cover on Procreate on my iPad. I added googly eyes on the snakes. They are cute.
- I also used Procreate Dreams to animate the background.
I plan to make a vocal version in the future, depending on my schedule, shyness and neighbours.
At some point, I may also do a few breakthroughs of the Cubase session if that would be of any interest.
So there it is, thank you if you read through this point.
Hope you’ll enjoy listening to this, although the original album already exists, so that’d be vain from me to have that much expectations.
I just needed something to focus a whole week and in the end I had a lot of fun doing so.
Cheers and take care.
Baptiste from the band öOoOoOoOoOo.
PS: « Meggashuh » phonetically means in french « mega cute ».
PPS : « Coiffeur Tiff Free » is a stupid pun I commit that means in french « Hairdresser Hair Free »