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Hello all, and welcome to another round of fresh music from yours truly. This time I thought we'd do a little more head banging, so here is a piece I started putting together quite some time ago. I present to you...ISERINE APPARITION! Give it a listen below, or head on over to the WORKS page to hear this work and more.

I began writing Iserine Apparition a long time ago, maybe even ten years past. I had come up with around 90% of the guitar parts, but no drums and only very minimal bass, most of which was redone. Now that my bass and drum writing have improved, I decided to revisit the work and see what I could do.

Musically, Iserine Apparition is very straight forward. It's one of the few pieces I've written recently that is strictly in 4/4 time. (Quite the far cry from Adrift and Reflections with their 88 and 144 time signature changes, respectively.) It's not overly complicated, although the bass does jump around a good bit, and that last guitar run near the end is a bear to play. The bass part was probably more difficult to play than the guitar part for once. (You're slipping, Nate...) It has a typical rock song structure of intro, [verse, pre-chorus, chorus] x2, bridge, solo, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, ending. Still 7 minutes long though.

Naming this piece was super difficult. I wanted to use some sort of industrial / mechanical term as the title, but all of them I found are song names already. I got tired of thinking of the name and worked on the art instead. Wasn't really sure where it was going either, but I eventually wound up with this nice spectral skull thing with a molten metal tear rolling down its right cheek. That's were apparition came from. As for iserine, that came from a glossary of foundry terminology I found online. Iserine is a black sand made mostly of iron, but also containing some titanium. The skull looked kind of sandy too, so the name stuck.

The guitars are tuned to drop C and the 5 string bass up a half step. Drums were a mixture of Ministry of Rock 2 and Ghost Writer patches from East West Composer Cloud. The guitar sound in this tune is composed of my Engl Ironball amp lead channel to one side, then my MXR EVH 5150 overdrive pedal through the clean channel to the other side. The guitar used was my Ibanez RG3EXFM1 loaded with Seymour Duncan Mick Thomson Blackouts.

The recording of Iserine Apparition took about two days, mostly because of moving mics around and fiddling with knobs to get the tones right. Mixing, on the other hand, took ages. As usual, I spent way too much time trying to get the bass and kick balanced. I ended up using three different kick patches at once just to get it audible. Creating synth sounds using Composer Cloud took a long time as well. There were lots of good ones to use as a base, but I had to fiddle around with effects to get the sounds perfect. The mastering process took a while as well, but I am happy how this track turned out compared to my older mixes.

Speaking of apparitions, there were several ghosts I needed to track down during the production of this tune. One being that Reaper kept messing around with my automation points. I'd be chugging along, making good progress, and then notice that there were copies of automation from other tracks all over the place. Then I'd have to go around and fix everything. Most tracks were unaffected. Some were totally nuked. Good thing I save incrementally.

The other ghost was this strange, robotic duck sound (for lack of a better term) that would appear near the end of the song. It was totally invisible until I started rendering tracks one by one. Then it appeared in the left lead guitar channel. Not sure why it was there since it was at the end of the track where there was only some fizz and room noise, but it's gone now!

Thanks for listening to Iserine Apparition! Soon it will be available for download and streaming through your favorite platforms. Stay tuned!

Nathan C. Curtis