Deliverance Session diary

When everything was fine, we were working like hell. Recording drums from 10 am to 10 pm, and then I had to find a secluded spot to finish off the songs I had, and even write more material. And everybody else were kind of depending on that I'd be there to help them sort out their own contributions, which I obviously wanted to. Lopez and myself went through 3 different drumbeats at the time. Then we just recorded everything as we came up with the ideas. We had the demos as basics and Lopez more or less did "Lopez" beats out of my original ideas.

We we're working around the clock pretty much and the only rest we would get was them 5-6 hrs sleep on a air mattress on the floor. It was bad, real bad! We're all smoking like hell, 2 packs a day per person. No ventilation...no air, no sun, just problems. Stressed out beyond belief, and although we're working hard, we got thrown back by technical problems, sometimes severe, every day. Literally every day something happened that made us feel like we have to stop. Just go home and forget about these records and Opeth. I wanted to cry several times! This is my life and I saw it crumbling to dust. And it was my fault since I choose the studio and just how we're supposed to do this.

For the guitar sound, the original idea was to have 2 guitars with a nice, crunchy and heavy sound. But we didn't haven anyone to help us set the sounds. It's a difference in knowing what sound you like to play with, and what sound that actually sounds good on record. We ended up tracking the rhythms 4 times with little distortion on each guitar. This gives a full and rich textured sound. We had met this guy, Fredrik, in the pub....a rare night out, and I was complaining about our problems. He said he could help us out, I said fine.

So, we had this guy we've never seen before in our lives & just met at the pub, helping us setting the guitar sound. Weird! Anyways, he's a companion with Anders Friden (In flames) in their studio, which just happened to be a part of Studio Fredman. So basically he knew pretty much how to set a similar sound to what we've had in the past.

We were progressing, although slow. We got some work done....all the drums for "Deliverance" was done in about 10 days and then we spent another 5 days for "Damnation".