Brief about the album
A sum of sound waves randomly brewed in his head. He often told himself that he oscillated towards anything that seemed to be spinning on his record player or his winamp, and his writing reflected the same. Which is why, he told himself he’d always be stuck with little pieces of music, jumbled moods and genres that shall never fit. But he guessed the dearth of music drove some people to do strange things. He had just parted ways with the ever-so-popular Live Banned after having seen it from inception along with Dheeru and Amrit; and then, Sridhar Varadarajan, (who also incidentally took his place in Live Banned) decided to let him try to stitch his little pieces of music together in his ridiculously good home studio, which had since evolved to Studio 304.
What stands before us today, asking for our uninterrupted audience and imagination over the short expanse of a couple of minutes under a half hour, is his labour of love over the last two years. It is his humble request that we treat this multi-lingual concoction of six songs with the love and patience we would give anything in its infancy, as he feels it has turned out to be quite beautiful and a very worthy listen, sculpted straight from his heart. He can already never thank each one of us who will listen to this enough.
Mixing and Mastering of the album
‘Skin’ was the first song that got mixed down and mastered. It was done by Anirban Chakrabarthy, the guitarist of ‘Liquid Groove’, who was always a guitarist he used to look up to and who also opened a studio called ‘Red Planet’.
‘Moneyshot’, ‘Creatures of Habit’, ‘Bahar’, and ‘You’ were all mixed and mastered by Abijith Rao. He’s the most dedicated sound guy he’s ever seen. He thinks Abhijit used to do sound for live gigs every day and across states and he’d never miss a schedule. People may also know him as the superstar biker who is currently roaming the globe on his Royal Enfield Himalayan!!
‘Amma’ was mixed and mastered by Abhilash Lakra, who’s one of the most established guys in the scene for this and also a guy he’s known for awhile. He’s a regular in the film scene, extremely thorough, very professional. All the strings and orchestration on the song demanded someone of his style and expertise.
Equipment and Tech used
He had many people asking him about how this is really slick production and he must have used tons of fancy equipment but it was all made on pretty humble stuff, in fact when they started recording first, Sridhar had a home studio and not even built ‘Studio 304’ yet, where all of it eventually got done.
They concentrated a lot on how the tones of anything sounded. Other instruments such as guitars, bass, drums, percussion were all played live. They form the majority of the sound anyway, there’s hardly any FX and stuff we used. Sridhar was the plug in magician for whatever little we did use.
The whole thing was produced in Logic X Pro. The guitars they’ve used – Vintage Thomas Blug Strat.
- Line 6 Variax.
- Ibanez Artcore.
- Ibanez Bass.
Amp used was an Ibanez Tube Amp. We also used a Laney Iron heart IRT Studio. They used a Roland TD-4 drum kit and Native Instruments Guitar Rig and Amplitube for any additional cabinet modelling and modulation. Other softwares that were used were Native Instruments Kontact, Battery, Massive, Toontrack Superior Drummer, Waves plug-ins, XLN addictive drums, Brainworx plugins, Izotope alloy, Logics inbuilt instruments, synths etc.
