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Grey Mountain is an online collaboration I started working on a couple years ago with Jon Higgs, a member of another forum I post on. He's a prolific writer and had most of these songs mapped out with rhythm guitar and drum parts. I contributed track 4 ("Hermitage"). He and the drummer laid down final tracks, I came up with bass and lead guitar parts, and Jon and I did vocals. He's got a great heavy/power metal scream, and I got to do some background chanting and harmonies in addition to my usual death metal growls. I'd say the rhythm guitars and overall pace fall in the heavy metal/doom realm, but there's a good amount of death metal influence, some lighter post-metal atmosphere, even a tiny bit of black metal here and there.
The solos were a challenge; I'd never done an album's worth of solos before and I usually stayed away from writing them for my own songs. This project pushed me out of my "lick library" pretty quickly, since it called for a lot of leads and solos, but many of them were in similar keys over similar chords and rhythms. Nothing wrong with that, but it took some effort to find space for my own ideas within the riffs and figure out ways to keep from repeating myself too blatantly. In the end it was a heck of a lot of fun. Also a lot of emails and file transfers, and a lot of obstacles overcome. We moved up to VT right after I finished the bass parts, and I did the lead guitars last summer after getting past the damn sewage flood in my studio.
I'm not sure of Jon's recording rig, but the lead melodies and solos and assorted bits and bobs were on my Epiphone and Schecter 7-strings through the Pittbull 100CL, and the bass was on my Ibanez 6 string through the Traynor. The rhythm guitars are in drop B tuned to A=432Hz. I tuned the 7-strings to 432 but kept them in standard B to E.
Two tracks available on Bandcamp and Ampwall now, and the rest of the album comes out on March 7th.
Bandcamp link
Ampwall link
Thanks to Toilet Ov Hell for their positive review:
TOH Grey Mountain Review
Hope you enjoy, please check out the rest of it once it's available.
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