The following is EPICA bassist Yves Huts' no-holds-barred account from his recording sessions for the band's new album, due out later this year:

"This story is based on actual events…

The life of a musician isn’t always glitter and glamour. Sometimes we do actually have to work. Recording sessions are one of these rare occasions. Because during the recordings of the previous albums I was always too drunk and breaking stuff, I was banished from the Gate Studio. So I was left with no choice but to record the bass at my home studio.

When the album will be released and people will hear the songs for the first time they will probably be wondering why the album sounds like shit. One explanation is that we only had 3 rehearsals before entering the studio. On top of that Ariën (our studio drummer) was still on tour when we recruited him. So he only had 3 days to prepare himself. Fortunately he’s from some distant planet and his bio-implants allowed him to record the drums with inhuman precision at a record time. I guess the album will contain more than 60 minutes of songs, but he managed to record all the drums in just 53min25sec. I wish Einstein would have lived to explain this. I think it has something to do with one song being so fast that if you listen to it, you go back in time.

Anyway, because we’d done almost no rehearsals, I had to base the bass-arrangements on Ariën’s drums and Ad’s preproduction guitars. To check if everything was right I first wrote the bass in midi and sent it to Ad to check if it fitted with his guitars. Basically he threw all my stuff away and made an entirely new midi-file. One of his lame reasons for this was that “if the song is in A minor the bass should not be in F# major”, which is, as we all know, just a big pile of bullshit. Anyway he bribed the other members into agreeing with him, so I had no choice but to follow his arrangements.

Before I started with the real recordings I first sent a test-recording to the Gate studio in Germany to check if the quality was good enough. I called Sascha (our producer) and he said some things like “arshloch”, “fotzegesichte” and “deine recordings are scheisse”. As my German is a little bit rusty I interpreted this as an approval. So the real recordings could begin…

Just like Ad I didn’t need a recording engineer, not because I could engineer myself, but because my tiny studio was hardly big enough for my own ego. I found out that I’m a really shitty bass player too, so the only option I had was to record every single note separately and paste them all together to what you can more or less call a decent bass track. In the end it only took me 2 months to record all the notes. Although I studied audio-engineer for one year I turned out to be a pretty lame editor too, so I convinced Ad to smuggle the tracks into the Gate studio for the editing. Ad put the files in the Gate studio hard drive in a Kamelot folder. Unfortunately the Gate Studio people found out and reportedly said 'Even Sid Vicious didn’t play this badly!', so he had to edit my tracks himself. If you’re wondering what’s taking us so long to record the album, it’s not me, it’s Ad. To this day he’s still editing the bass tracks.

As I heard that there were going to be four guitar tracks instead of two, I was afraid that in the mix there wouldn’t be room anymore for the bass. So I recorded 10 bass tracks (and two more just to make sure) and thus secured a prominent position for my instrument in the mix. I’m sorry for the peeps who like guitar, drums, orchestration, choirs or vocals, but the next album will be mainly bass guitar."

Go to this location to view pictures of Huts at work (scroll down).

Huts' caption for the picture above: "23:00h: Realizing I’ve been playing the wrong instrument all day so just giving up to go party."