Hey everyone,
on October 13 2018 I had the honor to visit Disillusion during their drum recordings at the Proton Studio. The photos I took were time exclusive for their Patreon campaign, which is why I’m now just able to show them all to you. But as it was such a special occasion I was also asked to write down some thoughts about my visit to share with the other patrons and I thought I just share this post with you too:
Hello fellow Patrons,
my name is Michael and on the 13th of October 2018 I had the honor to visit Disillusion during their drum recording session at the Proton Studio. As I’m listening to Disillusion since 2002 (which, if I think about it, actually makes half my life now) and am part of this patreon campaign since day 1, you all can probably imagine my huge excitement about this trip. Because not only was I able to see Andy again, but I also had the chance to meet Josh for the fist time, have a look behind the curtain of this recording session AND get a sneak peek of some new tracks!
And I’m here to share those impressions with you, from fan to fan.
Before I go on with that, just a quick background about myself, during my time at the university I was really into concert photography and later on also made lots of promo photos of bands and portraits here and there. This also includes Disillusion. I’ve seen them at dozens of live shows and even had the chance to do some promo photos with them back in the Gloria days. This is why Andy asked me to bring my camera(s) along for the trip and the results of that can be seen below. But why am I telling you this? Well, in all those years where I’ve been involved in the music scene I visited a couple of studios to hang out with bands, but I actually never was there during a real recording session. So this trip to the Proton Studio was really my first time I’ve been part of this and oh boy, was it an experience. The sheer amount of detail that goes into this work was mindblowing. The guys did dozens of takes to get the perfect sound, “missing high hat here”, “maybe add a snare there”, “needs more power”. This must be so taxing on all sides, especially if you think about that I was just there for like 5 hours and those guys have been doing it for hours over hours several days already. Kudos to them.
But next to seeing this hard work put in to perfect the sound, I simply can’t get over the fact, that it all looked hilarious to me as an outsider, because they actually were talking in their own language. Well Ok, maybe it’s “drummish” and I simply don’t speak it, who knows :-) . The communcation during the recordings was basically cut down to “Dum Chak, Bak Dum, ts ts tsssss, chak”, so fascinating to observe.
Next to taking in this scenery of Andy conducting the drums and them speaking in this weird language, I of course was listening closely to the parts of the songs they were recording, because I wanted to take in, what I could while I had the chance as it probably will take a while, until we all get the next piece of it.
When I arrived they started to add some percussion to a song snippet I already knew, as they had it in an update video and live Q&A, but once this was done, they switched to record the drums for their next song on the list. They started of with the verse and later on got to the chorus. And guys, believe me when I say, it’s all worth it! I’ve heard familiar Disillusion parts but also a sound, that was not in any of their songs before, I think they already mentioned it in previous updates, but they really are bringing in some awesome ambient parts and I can’t wait to hear the final product and dive deep into this record once it’s out.
All the best
Michael
