Hey guys, first release in nearly a year!
I'd like to share some information about the EP but for those of you who want to avoid a wall of text, here's the Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/album…si=8CBJwEjjTV68KXlk8bSJOA
So the EP started about two years ago as a couple of ideas sketeched out on a MIDI keyboard. This was when I was in the middle of the long process of working on my previous album “Janus”, so I guess I wanted to divert some creativity into what would eventually become “Witzelsucht” to keep “Janus” as focussed as possible.
The name “Witzelsucht” comes from a rare mental disorder which causes those afflicted to make puns or tell inappropriate jokes or stories in inappropriate social situations. I chose this as the name for the EP as it reflected my creative mindset, and is also a nod to two German artists who influenced the project to some degree, Kraftwerk and Rammstein. To put it bluntly, if your response at any point of listening to my EP is “what the hell am I listening to?” then I will feel I have done my job. I am not entirely comfortable applying a conventional genre to this, I prefer to think of it as a metal interpretation of EDM.
This then developed into five songs that didn't really sound like anything else I listened to, which was part of the objective. I deliberately wanted to step outside of the metal and rock mindset to create something unique, at least for me. This then turned into eight songs, and the mixing process then started.
As you can probably guess, the instrumentation in this project was a little unconventional. The final Pro Tools session comprised of 5 master bus tracks, 5 pre-master bus tracks, 5 instrument buses, a kick reverb send, 5 synth drum tracks, 3 shaker/tick tracks, 5 synth bass tracks, 25 synth tracks, 23 effects tracks, 4 vocal tracks, a dog vocal track and 13 guitar tracks.
The guitars are entirely Kemper, and are a combination of a Peavey 5150, a PRS Archon, an ENGL Powerball, a Hughes & Kettner Grandmeister, a Mesa Boogie Mark III, an ENGL Fireball and a Marshall JCM800. All of these profiles were from either ToneCrate, ReampZone or Double Impact.
The synths were split into 7 primary lead sounds, and each of those 7 contains two synths. One mono, sent through the Kemper, and the second is stereo with stereo FX, either an octave up or down from the main. They were bussed together and compressed to be treated as one instrument.
There are 11 other synth tracks including pads, polysynths, organs etc.
There are five bass tracks in total, but the primary bass tone comes from JST Sub Destroyer. The drums were written using Avid's Boom plugin, and I later added a blend of free EDM-style samples to the kick and snare.
So I think that is about all the insight I can give off the top of my head, so I'll just say that I hope some of you guys like what you hear, and if this EP is well received I may at some point make a Witzelsucht Part 2!
If any of you guys want to check it out but don't use Spotify, here's a link to the various other places you can find it: https://song.link/album/gb/i/1392411696
