OPUS DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/file/n9qsgtrbgwen89m/DAR+-+Get+Gored.opus/file

I literally couldn't think about or work on anything else as soon as I started on this track. Man, there is so much going on in the guts of this song, I don't know where to begin!

For starters, I think this is probably the HEAVIEST thing I've ever done with my Stratocaster (it was like falling in love all over again!). I usually don't go for my strat for hi-gain stuff anymore. However, in an ironic twist of events, the reason I don't usually use it for hi-gain became the reason I DID use it for this track! My Strat's just too bright and twangy at times for me to want to use it more often for the sound that I usually work with. That brightness however came in handy for this track, because I decided to pitch-shift the guitar tracks. The chugga-chuggas you hear are actually two parts layered together. After recording my two tracks to pan hard left and right, I pitch-shifted them down -800 cents, and made copies that were shifted +400 cents. I pitched things down as an experiment to see how things sounded compared to if I had just gone all loose-noodles and down-tuned to Drop-A. The idea being that I had my Strat in a drop tuning but with decent string-tension. That in combination with the strat's brightness would help it retain its clarity when being pitched down. I also chopped the hell out of the guitar tracks (as you'll probably notice by the aggressive stutters).

I spent quite a bit of time looking around for various synth VSTi's. The one that really stood out though was Bazz::Murda (developed by DistoCore). This song/style just wouldn't be the same without that epic distorted synth kick! I also played around with running Helm through some distortion and then into an amp-sim and cab-sim (with some reverb tacked on to the end of the chain!). That's how I got that noisy ambient sound that you hear in the beginning.

Speaking of the beginning, oh man, you don't know how happy I was when I was messing around with the bass line from "I Live Again". I chopped it up a bit and had parts pitch-shift down -200 cents every once in a while. After tweaking the bass amp-sim and some other things, I had the biggest and dumbest grin on my face when I finally heard those little -200 cent down-tunes!

Originally this track wasn't going to have an intro, but I felt like it was just too short and in the end, I really wanted to build up to the big chugga-chuggas. So while the main chunk of the song took a bit of inspiration from "Matador of Cydonia" (and maybe a liiiittle bit of nuDOOM's "Rip&Tear"), the intro became a mashup of "The Phobos Anomaly" and "I Live Again".

I also had quite a bit of fun just throwing in various percussion samples (from within FL Studio), and tweaking the samples around. Its novel for me because I've never really bothered with messing around with electronic drum/percussion samples like this (always just preferred going after acoustic drum sounds instead).

Something neat that I came across while working on this was "Couture", a transient shaper/enhancer. Really neat little plug-in that I think I'm going to wind up always throwing on to my drum busses from now on! It really made stuff like the snare sound a lot more punchy!

Lastly, from 3:16-3:42 I wound up sampling and throwing in the one bend from "Matador of Cydonia".

Anyhow, as for album art, the Skriken finally get to make their debut on a RED PLANET album/EP! These not-so-cuddly fellas were from some concept art I drew on paper around this time last year. At that time I was creating a series-bible for RED PLANET, and one of the things I also came up with were a couple of monsters. One didn't really get fleshed out much, but the Skriken was different. Tall, lanky, and veiny, the skriken operate as a hive-mind and act as the eyes of hellish invasion. They don't usually fight, they just quietly observe and watch their victims. However, should they feel threatened, they let out piercing shriek and will swarm their target. Their shriek is where their namesake is from (Skriken is Middle English for "scream"). In any case, our two space marines in the cover art are probably about to have a VERY bad time.

Anyways, hope you all enjoy my first attempt at trying to sound like a discount-Mick-Gordon! ~DAR