What’s this? An actual release? That’s right, we worked hard all day so the first thing you would see in the new year was a song release by Kurodust! This is the 99% final version of Doll In The Dust, track 4 from Containment Failure.

You can download below in 320kbps MP3 or use the player to stream it directly.

Hopefully this will get you revved up for the release of the full album, which we will be working hard over the coming weeks to complete. In the meantime, enjoy the song and please pass it along to your friends!

Download:
Doll In The Dust (11.5MB 320kbps MP3)

We also put together a short video with a little bit of background information about Doll In The Dust,  plus the first look at how the song will play in Rock Band!

I realised recently that we have been living in the future for quite a while: video phones, instant international communication, 3D televisions (soon), and we’re about to break into the year 2010, which is the most futuristic year of them all. What does this have to do with Containment Failure, you may be asking? Well, we were all hoping to get the album out by the end of the much less futuristic 2009, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to mix it as quickly as we hoped so we’re now targeting January 2010 for the release of the album.

We start the final mixing this week: Trevor and I will have a listen to what Rob has done thus far, and then we will all decide on changes and additions that need to be made, like backing vocals and effects.

However, keep an eye on this page over the first few days of the new year, as we hope to have a special sneak preview ready to go! Once that is up we will also be trying to drive a bit more traffic through the site to get some anticipation for the album happening, and you may have noticed I’ve made a few design changes to the site to prepare for that. Most notably, I’ve moved the social networking links right up to the top of the page, so make sure to click them and tell all your friends that Containment Failure is imminent!

Seasons Greetings once again from the mixing desk.

I’ve had another busy week working away on ‘Containment Failure’. This week I was working through the all-important vocal takes and lead guitar tracks. This firstly involved carefully cross-editing all the chosen vocal takes to make one complete seamless vocal track. Although somewhat tedious I managed to complete this in one day, enabling me to move onto the actual vocal processing. Choosing how, how much and whether or not to even manipulate vocal tracks is known as a bit of a black art to audio engineers and producers. The human voice has a very large dynamic range (volume) and the subtleties of speech and singing fall under the heaviest scrutiny by the human ear. With these sorts of things in mind I proceeded carefully through the vocal performances making the slight adjustments for level, depth and tone that I felt best represent the record. This process took a couple of days to complete and today I was able to move onto the lead guitar tracks. Luckily not too much work was needed here, just some very slight noise reduction and some minor EQ to add a bit of warmth.

With the completion of these tasks the pre-mixing job is very near finished. All that remains is to work through the extra ”misc” guitar parts and to prepare some reverb and atmospheric tracks to add depth and body to the album. I’ll be tackling most of this next week and then hopefully not too long after the lads will be joining me for the FINAL MIXING job !!!!

…Containment integrity is reaching critical, Cascade failure is imminent.

Rob.

Hi fans, Rob here with an update from the mixing desk.

I’ve been working very hard on the mix over this past week and things are really starting to take shape. I’ve completed most of the track cleanup and initial processing for the rhythm section. Firstly I focused on the drum kit where the foundation of the rhythm sound comes from. I dedicated a fair amount of attention to the kick drum in particular, though it’s a very solid sound on it’s own I knew it would need a bit of effort to get it to play nicely in the mix. I spent a full three days tweaking the drums, fattening the kick, adding a little shimmer to some cymbals and rounding-out the toms.

After that I turned my attention towards the bass, adjusting the tone and dynamics for definition and a good solid low-end. The bass didn’t give me too much trouble and I was able to move on to my guitar tracks later that evening. I’ve just now completed a couple of full days work on the rhythm guitars and performed a few test runs of the whole rhythm section playing together. I’m confident and happy to say that we are well on track towards final mixing, though more work lies ahead as I soon turn my focus to the all important (and often most troublesome) main vocal tracks.

Stay tuned for more updates on the mixing and the impending release of ‘Containment Failure’ !!!!