Nerd heaven: Dan Swanö's studio guestbook
I can out-nerd almost any metal nerd. This comes from having to do thousands of blog posts. After a certain point, one must chop really finely. I can and will get excited over things like the materials used for guitar picks or the cuts of trousers worn onstage. If you put a gun to my head and said, “Your life or a 500-word essay on neck-through vs. bolt-on necks”, I would emerge alive, quickly.
So Dan Swanö’s studio guestbook enthralls me on a deep, nerdtastic level. (Thanks to Deciblog for the tip!) Bands that recorded at his Unisound studio signed the guestbook. Swanö presents its contents from 1996-1997 here, along with commentary on each session. It’s not much – just 29 short entries – but it’s so much.
Decibel‘s most popular feature is the Hall of Fame, where bands discuss how they made their classic albums. Swanö’s commentary offers another perspective, the producer’s. It’s a great fly-on-the-wall look at the shenanigans that go on in recording. Some highlights: sampling a Dream Theater kick drum and using it on an entire record by another band; Swanö’s joke power metal project with 3/4 of Opeth called Steel; and recording goth versions of songs: “Drum-machine, computer bass and the whole she-bang”. Yes, I find these things funny. Yes, I am single.
Then there is super-nerdtastic stuff like repeated, loving mentions of the Roland VS880. The VS880 was one of the first (if not the first) commercially affordable digital multi-track recorders (a 1GB hard drive, ooh!). I remember when it first started appearing in music store catalogues. Little did I imagine that it would be responsible for some of metal’s most (and least) classic records.
The guestbook also has historic stuff like Edge of Sanity, Opeth, and, uh, Millencolin recording sessions. Decibel readers might remember the Hall of Fame feature on Katatonia’s Brave Murder Day in issue #37 (December ’07, The Black Dahlia Murder cover, order here). One salient aspect of the feature was the clash between the band and Swanö over the album’s weirdness. His commentary here is a cool supplement to the Decibel feature.
English is clearly not Swanö’s first language. (Also, many of the band entries have text in Swedish.) He writes in wry epigrams that recall Mikael Åkerfeldt’s stage banter. Their one-sentence nature sort of cries out for a comic book treatment. I suppose a comic book of studio shenanigans in low-budget, late-’90s metal productions would sell to about 20 people. But I would be one of the 20.
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UNISOUND STUDIO GUESTBOOK, 1996-1997
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