Psycroptic | The Scepter Of The Ancients | Full Album Cover

00:00 The Colour Of Sleep
05:00 Battling The Misery Of Organon
08:57 Lacertine Forest
13:00 Psycrology
17:52 Skin Coffin
21:52 Cruelty Incarnate
27:17 The Valley Of Winds Breath And Dragons Fire
32:12 A Planetary Discipline
36:03 The Scepter Of Jaar-Gilon

As some of you might know, I was the live guitarist for Matthew Chalks "The Scepter Of The Ancients". Chalky was the original singer of Psycroptic who appeared on the first two albums including the one on display here. He wanted to bring it back as a 20 year anniversary. If your math checks out, then you'll notice that it's been 22 years since the album came out.

It took 3 years to get the final line-up together and I was the last one to come on board. Erlend Caspersen approached me at the end of August this year, so 4 months ago, and I immediately said yes. We played two shows in Australia on the 4th (Melbourne) and 6th (Hobart) of December. The full line was:

Vocals - Matthew "Chalky" Chalk
Bass - Erlend Caspersen
Guitar - Me
Guitar - Alec Cordero
Drums - Paweł "Pavulon” Jaroszewicz

Huge shoutout to the guys. We had a blast in that one week.

Now to the video. As I wrote above, I had about 3 months to learn and prepare for the live shows. While I was learning the songs I already had the idea about filming the whole album, similar to how I did it with my live set playthrough of the Defeated Sanity set. Originally I also wanted to do it in one take. But in the recording session, after my first blunder in the second song I was like "f*ck this" and I decided to basically do a one-session take. It took me around three hours in total to get a good take of every song. Most of that time was dedicated to the 6th song "Cruelty Incarnate". It was a bitch to get it tight, especially because of those 2 shred breaks in there. So that song was also the last one I filmed in the session. All the other ones took around 3 to 5 tries.

The reason I haven't been too active with videos in the last 6 months was this video and also me trying to get better at mixing (and getting an endorsement - more to this further down). This is the first video (apart from the private audition tapes I had to send to chalky) where I used stem seperation to turn down the original guitars and then I also used the enhancer block in the axe fx to make my guitar a bit wider while maintaining mono compatibility. The guitar tone is super close to the original tone on the album because this was requested by Chalky.

The amp I used in the axe fx is the Cameron CCV 2C. This is probably my favourite amp and the only one where a low gain tone still worked well within the context of extreme metal. Gain turned down all the way to 2/10. Bass, Mid and Treble at around 3.5/10. I also used a tone match block matching the record but that one is only dialed in 30%. That's pretty much it. Afterwards I used a bit of eq to tame the resonances and upper mids.

Last thing: I've been endorsed by Abasi Concepts for 2 months now!