Machine Red from Electric Birth by Parataxis
This song was supposed to be an immediate contrast to the slow grind of Black Machine. "Faster, with blast beats and shredding." The blast beats at the beginning are not traditional (both, both, both), but a rudiment I came up with played off the ride cymbals on the left and right of the kit. It's a paradiddle-diddle, played hand-to-hand, with flams (played off the rides) on the last beat of each pattern. The snare was custom built: a 14" walnut stave shell topped with the crown hoop from a Yamaha sFz with a set of snares on the batter and resonant head. It sounded great initially, but recording a high-tension snare is not easy. They're very delicate and slight variations in the stroke can change the sound wildly from one hit to the next. Good for rudiments, bad for metal. It was a nightmare to mix, doubly for an amateur like me. The guitars are half direct recordings by Nate and half analogue recordings of him in a strange setup: parallel-distortion pedals fed by a Peavey Rockmaster preamp, feeding a Classic 50/50 power amp...It sounds more impressive in writing. Zack's bass guitar parts are highly syncopated in the arrangement in a few spots - a welcome departure from "the guitar part, but lower." All four of us collaborated on the tablature on-and-off for about a decade before finally bothering to record it. Even then most of the leads/melodies were a last-minute affair. The single art is an image I took of a channel routing module from an old audio mixing console. It loosely fits with the themes of the album.
Tracklist
| 3. | Machine Red | 4:03 |
