STREAM OF PASSION keyboardist Jeffrey Revet has issued the following studio blog:

"So, after having watched Davy (Mickers) sweat behind his drum kit for some days, it was my turn to enter the recording-arena. All together we scheduled about 1.5 weeks together with Joost (van den Broek/AFTER FOREVER) to go through all the strings arrangements, record the grand piano, other keyboards and the string quartet."

11-24-08

"Together with Joost I started off with working out all the string-arrangements we made during the pre-production. Everything had to fit together and needed to be worked out in proper sheet music, ‘cause we didn’t want the players to freak out during a stressfull recording session because of unreadable or unplayable sheet music. It turned out that we really wrote a lot of strings, all together we got over 400 pages of sheet music! To be recorded in one day."

11-27-08

"But before we would record the strings, on Thursday that week we traveled to E-Sound studio in Weesp to record the grand piano. What great experience that was! Quite a difference from the digital piano I play live. Besides a lot of fun it really was a day of hard labor, ‘cause I only had one day to record all the songs for the whole album. But in the end it worked out fine."

12-01-08

"After this acoustic recording session it took Joost and me two more days to record all the other keyboards. Basically, we just put everything in the songs we could think of. Very cool, but it might cause Jochem a little extra work going through all these gigabytes of extra audio-files during the final mix. Wish him luck."

12-04-08

"On the last day we needed rest, so... no way! On the last day we recorded the strings. We worked with violinist Ben Mathot, who also did the latest AYREON album. He gathered the other people to form a quartet so we didn’t exactly know what to expect. But from the moment we recorded the first take it was obviously clear that Ben choose the right musicians. For me, recording the strings was one of the best experiences of the whole recording process. They did a great job and it was really cool to hear the stuff we wrote being played for real!"

That’s it from my side, I pass the pencil on to the guitarist..."

Jeffrey