The recording of "Horns For Adornment"

From StS Duper dag 0

So, we recorded, mixed, mastered, printed, uploaded and had a releaseparty for "Horns for adornment" last saturday. How did it go, and what did we learn? 

First of all, we suck at getting publicity. The whole "record an album in one day" ought to generate some buzz, but all we got was one print article and 5 web pages posting our press release. Our name does not work to our advantage, we found some of our emails didn't make it through the spamfilter, probably due to Satan in the subject line. Kids: selling your soul to satan is overrated, it just doesn't work!

From StS Duper dag 0

We printed the album cover before the recording, so we had to stick to the songs on the cover and the playlist on the cover. We delivered the cover 2 days before the recording, and that turned out to be just fine. 

Also, we had planned a big social media campaign during the recording-session, but that was kinda crippled by the lack of wifi in the new studio, but hey, that's why we have 3G, right? The setup was: Qik postings to blogger, Facebook publishes the Blogger RSS-feed and also publishes to Twitter, and then Myspace posts the Twitter-feed. Facebook proved to be the weak link here, so we did most of our posting to Twitter.

The studio work actually started on Friday when we did the setup and checked the levels. This is NOT cheating, everything on the album was recorded on Saturday!

We started in the studio Saturday at 10. Might seem a little late, considering, but Thomas had a gig on the other side of the country Friday, took the first flight Saturday morning and was ready at 10. After some initial setup, the tape (yeah, we recorded on tape, old school) started rolling at 11. 

From St Satan Recording HFA

The recording process is documented at our twitter-account: 

11:26 - First song

11:34 - Second song

12:06 - Third song

12:39 - Fourth song

1:14 - Fifth song

3:45 - Songs 6-8 done
4:43 - Done recording all songs!

5:34 - Listened, some editing ang backupvocals done, leaving for soundcheck

6:00 - 7:00 soundcheck

7:00 - Dinner

8:30 - at Happy Sound Factory, waiting for the mix

9:18 - First CD copied

10:15 - Low bitrate version available at Soundcloud

10:38 - CD-quality version available for streaming and paid download at Bandcamp

23:40 - St Satan hit the stage at Garage

23:59 - 100 CD's arrive at the venue

We opted for Soundcloud and Bandcamp for digital distribution, due to ease of use and fast uploading, so we could keep it within the time-frame of the project, and because our good friend Gisle recommended the sites. Karisma Record have been interested in the project all along, and ended up distributing the physical copies, and Artspages will handle the rest of the digital distribution, getting us on Spotify, iTunes etc.

From St Satan Live release

As you can see, a pretty busy day! We had loads of fun, and having a finished, printed CD in your hands less than 11 hours after the tape started rolling was indescribable. We've listened to the album a lot this last week, and we all agree - it has everything a good album should have. Good, timeless rock tracks, high energy and some damn fine playing. To us, this was a great success!

From st satan

But wait, there's more! The recording-session was also documented by Kim Holm, a cartoonist every bit as kick-ass as the band, took our challenge: make a cartoon-rockamentary, and release it at the concert in the evening. And so he did, captured the humorous energy from the studio, and produced 21 pages of rock'n'roll mayhem! He handmade the front-cover the day before, and the back is all of our signatures, and he made and sold 17 exclusive copies the same night.  

From St Satan Live release

There it is, we can totally recommend it, but get your shit together before you try something like this, and be sure to have really competent people in the studio who are on the same page as you. And financially? After every member bought 10 CD's to sell to friends and family, the whole project is break even! We now have a kick-ass album that can take us anywhere, everywhere and nowhere, we own all the rights, and we are debt-free! Pretty awesome if you ask us.