Near-instrumental named after the town where I live.
Scrap Metal
I upload music to under the alias 'Extar'. The music is primarily heavy metal, but I like trying my hand at other things now and again. I record my music in my bedroom with an old PC and a bunch of sub-standard equipment.
Story behind the song
This song came about after I heard Iron Acton by 'Beak>' and thought it was really cool. I think I ought to get hold of their album to listen to very carefully. Before I added the 'vocals', there were a few similarities in the music, but that was about it. However, once it came to recording the vocals, it was coming up to one in the morning and I really can't record vocals at that time. Not proper ones anyway. Somewhat despondent after realising talky vocals sounded rubbish I bid farewell to the halfway decent (by my standards) lyrics that had been languishing on my desktop for months and revisited 'Iron Acton'. 'Hang on, he's just making noises with a big delay effect... I could do that.' So I did. I thought it would be funny to take the piss with such meaningful lyrics.
I was thinking of the piano solo in 'Just Like You Imagined' by Nine Inch Nails. Unfortunately, I'm rubbish at piano, so that's how it turned out. I stuck that piano bit at the end because it sounded cool. It's probably a tiresome gimmick sticking cool things at the end of songs like that.
I tried to make the guitars sound less like some gigantic metal fest and try and steer a more interesting course around the one Post Metal riff I seem capable of playing. I hoped it would end up sounding like NIN.
The lyrics are about
The song is called Heckmondwike because I couldn't think of a better name. Seeing as it's basically another instrumental, I didn't want to give it a poncy pretentious name like I did for 'The Minotaur'... Besides, 'Iron Acton' is just some place as far as I'm aware, so I might as well completely rip off Beak> in that department as well. It's called Heckmondwike because I live there. I had a hard time settling on a name, other names considered were Forgotten Beast (rejected for sounding like some 'gay' D&D thing), Voice Hatchet (the name of my current fortress on DF ('What was that about being 'gay?')), Stone Chair (for combining places near where I live and things from DF.)
I'll try and keep this to a minimum:
I used the Pod for the second time. I didn't mess around as much with it this time though, I think I used the 'Brit Classic' (some 60's Marshall, I think) with one of the 4x12 models. The distortion was courtesy of my long-suffering DOD (Fx-86) Death Metal Distortion pedal. It's a great sounding pedal, but it's f*** ing noisy. Also, I found out that the Pod's noise gate is feeble (it didn't stand a chance against the wall of white noise generated by the DOD (or should that be DUD?)) I recently restrung both guitars (for the first time in many months, possibly a year. I really don't do myself any favours leaving it that long, but restringing the Floyd Rose is a f*** ing pain, and both guitars need setting up by someone who knows what they're doing (i.e. not me.)) Enough with the brackets. So I used the Epiphone Les Paul. It's sporting a set of 11's now which sound pretty cool, though is unlikely to be doing the worn nut any favours and further worsens the need for a set-up. If I remember correctly, the grainy sounding guitar towards the end was achieved just by fiddling with the mid and treble dials on the DOD and turning the bass right down. The dials on that pedal are awesome.
The bass was straight through the Boss ME-50 with some reverb, and then the bass amp with some EQ. Nothing fancy. EQing the bass amp is another thing I know next to nothing about.
The 'vocals' were achieved via the SM57 with the gain pretty high (I couldn't really afford to do anything very loudly) and a heavy delay/repeater effect from my mixer. It was a pretty rough approximation of the far superior sound Beak> used in their song 'Iron Acton'--oh look it's that song again. I did some of that high-pitched humming again like I did on 'Touching A Nerve'. I like doing that.
The piano was plugged straight into the mixer. It could really do with a quarter inch jack input. A proper line out wouldn't go amiss either,
Lyrics
Hey.
Okay.
Go.
Yeah.
Go.
Okay.
