STREAM OF PASSION guitarist Stephan Schultz has checked in with the following studio update:

"Hi there! Thanks for taking an interest in my guitar recording experiences! It we’re short and cold days outside yet long sweaty days in the studio...

We started recording the guitars for the new album back in the beginning of December 2008. After almost one and a half years of writing and about a month of pre-production and rehearsals we were ready to take the songs into the studio!

Since I made the guide tracks for Davy’s drum recording sessions I was very confidant yet very excited when I had to lay down the first guitar tracks. Like Eric wrote in his blog we started with searching for the biggest and fattest sound to build our wall of metal with. We had about 10 amps and 15 guitars to experiment with.

We found that phat sound we needed pretty fast and could start recording the first day in the studio. I mostly used my trusty Diezel VH4 amp and a Peavey 5150 Mark 1 through a Bogner guitar cabinet. The guitars I used were 2 Gibson Les Paul Studio’s (one of Jochem’s and one of mine), my Bo-El MC-6, Eric’s custom Mayones and my 7-string Mayones.

Jochem and I hit it of! We understand each other perfectly, have about the same humor and we are both very driven!

Recording the songs went pretty smooth most of the time. We used a lot of different tunings on the album (7-strings in A, 6-strings in A, B, E, Drop D or Drop E) and recorded each riff with 2 or 3 different guitars. Playing the riffs right and tight wasn’t a problem, tuning those different guitars perfectly to match each other was… Especially the songs with the 7- strings were hell to tune. Gibson guitars sound great but they are F*%^ing hard to tune… (Seriously, they have to fix that!!!)

During our breaks between recording sessions we ate tons of crackers with cheese and loads of fried chili paste (Koningsvogel Sambal Badjak rules!!!!). Sometimes we left out the cheese. It works even better than Red Bull! It really became an addiction and a must! (Try it!)

Anyway, after days of hard work and driving through snowy white Holland we finally laid down the last guitar walls of the new album! I wish you could all hear the results! It really sounds kick ass!!!!!

I then had a few weeks to write new guitar solos (replacing the ones I wasn’t happy with) or optimize the ones I already had. After I had written the solos I had 2 weeks to practice them. Too bad those weeks were filled with Christmas dinners and New Years Eve and New Years Day parties…

We recorded the solos on January 2nd(still a little bit hung over from a kind of food poisoning I had because of the six Oyster-cocktails I had two days earlier… don’t ask…) within 5 hours. They sound really cool and extreme (if I do say so myself) and I’m really happy with the results…

I can’t wait to take our finished album and play it really, really loud! That’s gonna be awesome! I hope you feel the same!"

Cheers,

Steve