Megalomaniac is a solo album created as part of the Record Production Month Challenge in 2018. The idea was to record and release an album within the month of February, but I decided to take it a step farther and produce an entire album from the ground up, from writing right up to mastering. This was quite the challenge, and an incredibly rewarding (if not exhausting) experience in the end, with the opportunity to really exercise my skills in all aspects of music creation.
As stated above the process was started from scratch, starting with the writing of the music itself. I employed a continuous style of simultaneous creation and engineering, shaping the songs during the hybrid recording/mixing stage. The guitar and bass tones were all created in-the-box using S Gear by Scuffham Amps for all amp emulations. Drums are all Steven Slate Drums (SSD4) with a few different kits for different styles of songs. The keys and synths were a combination of many plugins, including Addictive Keys, Novation Bass Station, KORG Monopoly, and more.
The Slate Digital Everything Bundle is everywhere on this release; VTM to create some tape saturation and add that extra vibe you expect from analog goodness, VMR to handle the bulk of the mixing duties such as EQ and compression (the FG-Stress was definitely worth the wait), various Buss Compressors to tie it all together and finally the FG-X on the way out for some soft clipping on the master. Of course some other plugins were used to help complete the whole picture, including a few different Soundtoys (Little Alter Boy, DeviLoc and Tremolator), Izotope’s Ozone Imager, and a few more that I’m keeping in my secret bag of tricks.