Final Release: November 26, 2019
Production: 2009-2011, 2017-2019
Genre: Post-rock, Electronic Rock
Album Length: 41 Minutes
Availability: All streaming platforms
Summary: The Void is a hard rock instrumental album fused with electronic synths. This album is a big leap from my normal style of electronic “soundtrack” music, It’s primary focus is on heavy guitar riffs. Production on the album was a long and difficult learning experience that had numerous setbacks.
Production: When I first started working on The Void I knew almost nothing about audio engineering. Some of the original demo songs for this project were created back in 2009, that makes for a ten year time frame from conception to completion. However during a majority of that time the songs were never touched. All the original demo versions of the songs were first created from 2009 to 2011. This was also the same time I began working on songs for Social Phobia. Tracks that sounded too “heavy” and were mostly comprised of guitars were excluded from social phobia and would instead be included in The Void. My goal with this project was to be heavy on the guitars and let the synth support the guitars rather then take charge of the song. This was also the first project that included writing and recording lyrics but that component was eventually scrapped. The only remnants of this vocal endeavor are the names of the songs.
In 2017 after six years of the project being neglected I decided to get serious about getting The Void to completion. And by serious I mean I would work on it very slowly on and off for a couple more years. Unfortunately this project suffered the same problems as Social Phobia in that the original recordings were never preserved. Although it’s not like the original recordings were that great to begin with. The gear I was using when composing and tracking all the songs was very low end. For example, all the acoustic guitars were created using a $100 beginner guitar and recorded with a $40 off brand microphone. So at this point my task was to polish a turd due to bad processing and lousy gear from the early days. Please note that this critique is only in reference to the production quality not the music composition itself. After a few years of hellish mixing and mixing again and then doing it again, I was finally finished with The Void. The audio improvements from old mixes compared to the final version were well worth my endless hours of suffering.
Final Thoughts: Similar to previous albums, The Void was a learning experience. This is me putting my flavor on the hard rock music genre and branching out from my normal electronic style. A lot of time was waisted on vocals that did not see the light of day along with trying to improve bad quality recordings that really should have just been re-recorded from scratch. The end result came out pretty good considering the development hell that this project went through.
