Line Up

NOTES

"Wow where to start.  Although I'm happier with this recording than anything else I have played on in my musical career it nearly drove me to the brink of insanity.  Not only had I assumed the role of designing the entire sleeve I also recorded and engineered the entire E.P. 

We had recently blown a lot of the band's hard earned cash on a totally disastrous recording session with a local studio which failed to deliver the goods...in fact they never even came close.  To be honest it was shaping up to sound worse than our first E.P.  I decided that there was no way the band was spending any more money on any local studios.  At the time I was in the middle of studying a degree in Music Production and decided that I could easily record a better E.P. myself than we could using any affordable local studio. 

We went to First Avenue again but this time only to record bare drum tracks as I had no way of recording a full drum kit in the house.  I had already recorded guide guitars to a drum machine and click track, so all Dave had to do was listen to the click for timing and play along to my guitars....by the way did I mention that Dave was now playing drums and that I was playing guitar? 

Anyway what followed was a long an arduous process due to the constant failing of my PC, takes getting lost, crashes every two minutes but we got there in the end.  I remember my guitars where all done in my bedroom, Ken's guitars recorded in his living room, Rich's bass in his spare room and all the vocals recorded in Ken's mam's bedroom, god knows what the hell the neighbours thought was going on when Ken and I started screaming our heads off for hours straight!!

Although it took us nearly a year to get the thing released it was worth it in the end, it cost us only £75 to record the drums for 5 hours and the rest...just a lot of our free time.  I was great to be able to work at our own pace and take as long as we needed to get things right.  There are definitely things that could be improved production wise, but I must remember that it was recorded in our bedrooms.  All I can say is the next one will sound much better so watch out!!!

"This time we produced a recording that sounded better than any other local demo floating about, although production wise it doesn't stand up to an Arch Enemy album it was a hell of a lot better than we'd ever imagined possible.

The main thing for me about Funeral of Faith is the musical progression we made from our last recording.  A lot more melody and harmony was present but we also upped a few notched on the old speed and brutality metre.  The main reason was obviously Dave and Liam swapping over which gave us a technical edge.  Liam was always naturally a guitarist as anyone who's saw us live can attest, he just always got roped into playing drums as he was the only person around here who could play the required speeds at the time.  Dave though had been practising away on his drums frantically and made outstanding progress to the point where he was able to come on drums and play the material correctly in a short space of time".   

Although I listen Funeral now and still I'm very proud of what we achieved I know we can do better, we grown technically, as better musicians and as song writers.  I just can't wait to get back in the studio and show what we can really do.  Who knows maybe next time we'll record a full album of our very best material".

Rich Maher