Hi everyone! Sorry about how late this post is – I really wanted to get it posted up earlier today, but I had to wait for a couple of things to be finished first – thanks in advance for your patience! We have a good combination of older Catholic metal bands as well as some new bands that submitted music this time out for PHL3.
Here are the bands:
– So Shall It Be
– Malign Expulsion
– Craig Moran
– Theandric
– Seven Sorrows
– Cradle Catholic
– Divine Blood
– One God One Faith
– Katholicus
– Bona Mors
And as an added surprise we are excited to add a song by Effa Tha!!! Effa Tha is from Croatia and their songs are in their native language; but the passion of Marin Katava’s singing doesn’t need a translation! As an added bonus, Marin has also sent us more songs for us to share in a blog in the near future – these songs are from their new album. It is amazing!! Thanks to Marin and his bandmates for joining us on PHL3 and for this early Christmas gift of their songs available for live streaming on our site. I hope everyone looks forward to this. Marin has also given us translations of the song lyrics as well.
I/We have been listening to the tracks all week and are currently preparing the songs for mastering. The mastering process does take some time – the most important tool in mastering isn’t software, hardware, analog racks or other equipment – the most important tool is your ears. Each song has to be listened several times to get to know the levels of the drums, bass, guitars, voice, etc. – this is critical when mastering a compilation album since we want the final mastered copy to sound like a continuous project despite the fact that the mixing is the work of many people that have different mixing techniques. Without sounding foolish, I always have a bit of a laugh when I see “fly-by-night” internet websites claiming to master a song for $10-$15 or a whole album for $120. There is no way that proper mastering could happen with these people; proper mastering suites can cost as much as $40-$65 per hour; what the cheaper internet sites are doing – is setting a plug-in setting or using something like a Waves L1 Ultramaximizer and just cranking it through. In one of my past posts I shared some investigative work in which I send a horribly mixed/distorted song to 6 of these companies to have them mastered. Five out of the six sent me back garbage – they couldn’t have cared enough to listen to the quality of the bad mixes. If they were ethical or had a clue what mastering really is about – they would have refused to master it and emailed me back explaining why. I only had one company listen to the bad mix and get back to me about it; but the plethora of expletives I received was incredible. Instead of being professional and wording the email in a respectful manner – they send an email that was so bad that it should have been reported.
Mastering does need to take time; it can’t be rushed. If it is rushed – the status of the album/cd/coompilation could be in jeopardy. The release date for PHL3 should be in early January 2014. More details about this be shared as the process is going on; I want to keep the community informed about what is happening. If you have any questions/comments for me – please feel free to email me at dave@catholicmetal.com and I’ll get back to you asap!
I hope that everyone is taking the time to prepare during this Advent season. I’m trying to do some different things in my personal life this season; one of them is reading the gospels that have the description of the Christmas story (Luke/Matthew). I have read them before, but whenever I’m reading them I always learn something new. As we get our hearts and our homes ready for Christmas, I hope everyone takes the time to follow our Pope Francis’ example and keep the poor foremost in our thoughts, prayers and in our acts of charity.
Yours In Christ!
dave
PRAY THE ROSARY EVERY DAY!!
