When Unleashing vengeance was formed in 2002, it was called Psychotic Fury. Back then it was a tracked thrash/black metal solo artist mixed with a 4 track recorder. Soon It got upgraded to be mixed with a PC... After disbanding it because of issues, I decided to bring it back... It was a good move at the time, because older psychotic fury demos were good... I wish I still had them... I don't...
Soon afterward it started doing normal thrash metal, and got somewhat popular.. I played it at family get togethers for years. But a nasty event hit it in october 2009. 1 year in it was great then at the time. But a virus failure of the mixing PC fucked it up for good...
My computer was hit with a nasty file infector that infected the whole computer. I had to have the hard drive reformatted to get rid of it as the virus was everywhere... The company that built this pc tried to clean it out and failed... This was the first production disaster for unleashing vengeance...
For people who think Unleashing vengeance was easy to make because it was computer generated, let me tell you something. That is FAR from the truth... There were so many disasters like this in the whole career of unleashing vengeance, that it probably holds the guiness world record for amount of catastrophic production failures that hit a band/solo artist...
In October 2009 I got hit with the virus. It infected my PC... I had to have the whole PC reformatted. It came back in early november, 3 weeks later, due to all the business clients that my PC repair shop had. Soon afterward, a newly installed comodo internet security discovered a virus in an effect plugin in my mixing folder connecting to a malware delivery site... I researched it. By this point all I wanted to do is make more music, but I had to be smart. I had to make sure the PC was clean. File infectors are nasty, So I installed sandboxie and comodo...
I was so careful with my setup... I had to look at all the folders... I managed to restore a backup made of my music folder from 2008... In it were module music files, effect plugins and tracking software, plus mixing software. Some idiot hacked my PC to infect my modplug tracker executable to connect to an IP found out to be virus delivery... Now why would they do that? I don't know... I never caught this person in the act again but a lot of weird things happened to this PC that could be a sign of a zombie PC... It is not my PC anymore... I have a new one now that is 7 years old, but this stuff happened long before that, in 2009... It was so suspicious that THAT file got infected...
I had to check to make sure it was not a false positive. It wasn't. A newly installed modplug tracker did not connect to this site.. Funny thing is for years the infected modplug DID act weird. Around 2007 or so It gave me mysterious "do you want to get the latest upgrade" prompts that never worked... It was weird.. Getting the PC into a state to try to make it possible to write another album was my next goal... It was almost impossible to do this. Plugging in my microphone into my PC and trying to full duplex record broke... It simply would not do this... I ended up recording into an External Soundcard and playing with the built in soundcard... That worked... But it was the only thing that worked. It took 2 more weeks of screwing around with this after a 2 week period of fixing the PC from virus attacks to get another cd to be recorded...
What was bad however, is how bad this fucked up Unleashing vengeance's guitar production... The sound had to be redone from scratch from older modules. The sound got fucked up bad... I had to fix it... In early 2010 I thought I did that but I made it worse. I could not tell it was worse though, as reverb was pumped into my PC thanks to my eternal soundcard. The production suffered. I did 6 or so cds in early 2010 that had HORRIBLE production with bad vocal mixes and HORRIBLE guitar sound. Back then it was not well produced but on these 6 cds it got complaints of random noise by some idiot on youtube I won't name...
That was the first production fuckup. It made almost ALL cd's in 2010 sound like crap. Even the good ones that were done in 2010 like a symphony of disgust, army of clones, etc, were terrible sounding. I managed to fix the sound but only partially, making the guitar sound sound better, but the production get worse. This persisted on ALL 2010 releases... A lucky guitar sound fix in 2011 fixed this...
This was by far the most disastrous unleashing vengeance related fuckup ever... In fact the next few are nothing nearly as bad...
Unleashing vengeance would go another year before something similar happened... This time it was not a PC failing but a mixing fuckup brought on by a dying microphone. I had a old shure microphone I used for vocals... All of the sudden I noticed a LOT more clipping happening in the mix mid 2011... It happened on a cd... I had to get a new microphone.. I waited one cd... The clipping got worse and made the next cd "extreme" sound like total crap. I got a new one for the cd after but the amount of work I did to actually mix the first 3 tracks on extreme was insane... I put it through TONS of noise reduction and it finally sounded good. But it took like 1 day per track to mix and that was a record for me. Usually it's 2-3 attempts and it's done... This was repaired by me getting a new microphone from a store later on.
The next fuckup was something that was ultra suspicious for the time... This happened in the winter right after XMAS 2011... The PC suddenly slowed down to a crawl in january 2012... This was right in the middle of finalizing a new cd that needed tracks to be made for it. I needed to track 2 more instrumentals and it was done. the cd had some songs played at xmas 2011 but not a lot...
The PC was SO slow that I could not play music on it. I then knew it was hacked... I could tell. Comodo found several people using browsers to use my PC as a proxy server... Not fun... I ended up formatting the PC and had it restored later.... This actually didn't affect it much, but it did effect the sound of unleashing vengeance, making me redo the guitar sound, effects, etc again like I did in october 2009. The sound was better than the sound in late 2011 but not by much...
The next fuckup happened in march 2013. More than a year later. I had just finished 3 cds for that year and my PC died. The motherboard failed, so did the network interface card and more. Maybe a power surge from lightning, who knows. NOT virus related but sudden and nasty. I got a new PC soon afterward, my current one.. I had so many major mixing issues in 2013 with this PC that it is a record...
First of all, recording vocals and music at the same time with the same software, did some horrible hissy crap in the vocal tracks. Turned out it was recording the music track ultra quietly at the same time as it recorded the vocal track. I fixed this later with noise reduction, but the 4th cd of 2013 was horribly mixed. This made the music of 2013 less well produced overall, but I fixed it later on... But just like in 2009 there was an issue trying to get this fixed... Somehow I had issues with my external soundcard... I fixed them but it took weeks...
From 2013-2015 there were no major issues. But in 2018 there were terrible mixing problems of the 4 major thrash cds done that year... These were brought on by yet another bad microphone... I had to get a new one later on that year, but at the time, it made mixing the albums hard as hell.. I actually tried to mix them the first try, but each time I mixed it it always got messed up. One of these cds has TERRIBLE vocal production due to this, even after I mixed it 5 times and got it right for 3 out of 4 cds... But each time I mixed it, my ears could not even tell there were more problems so I had to re-upload the tracks to soundcloud and noisetrade each time... I eventually got it right...
Since then there was no major issues. I got a new microphone in december 2018 and recorded all cds from then to now fine...
This is proof that music making is not easy, and even if you make the music with a computer, not using real instruments doesn't help make it easier to produce...
I still haven't figured out why that old PC had issues like proxy server crap, modplug tracker getting hacked and similar. I had tons of data on this a long time ago that I was using to try to identify the hacker but I never did.. I had suspects but I could never prove they were involved... It was frustrating. I eventually narrowed down the Virus in 2009 to some file infector that was NOT the one I thought it could be... I never proved my suspects were involves..
The other failures were nothing compared to 2009.. 2009's failure messed up my music for a whole year.. It is weird that unleashing vengeance still did great music in 2010,2011,2012 and 2013 despite the issues these failures caused. I guess luck does play a role... 2018 was a bitch but very doable... But this just goes to show you, you can't say making tracked metal and mixing it is easy!
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