SLEEP TOKEN + SABOTAGE

the prompt was as follows:

“Recreate Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, in the style of Sleep Token.”

And so we’re off! but first we would need a plan of attack, so we settled on the following:

• guitar, drums, vocals and bass would be recorded
• pull some strings for vocalist and a drummer
• all in all we expected about 40 hours of work in this transformative production

so we got to work! and maybe five weeks later we had a result. however we started with guitar

The guitar was DI, put through the ABASI tone, because it gets pretty close to sleep token with some tweaking, and then pushed through an orange, we recorded some takes and made quickj work of some riffs and established the arrangement very haphazardly.

Vocals were recorded the week after, we had a vocalist come in to do some screams and squeals, we used about three mics for this, a throat mic, front mic and overhead to catch a little room. with some processing it ended up sounding huge, which fit our vision pretty well.

The week after we spent recoridng drums, with about five takes, we had everything we needed. we tried a quadruple overhead technique which caused tons of phasing, but had a cool stereo effect, in hindsight we were basically trying to mush 5.1 into a stereo image, which didnt work well.

One week later, everybody came in with some custom mix decisions and we sparred on getting the balance sounding tight, we had two drum mixes and our main vocals had been recorded at home. we spent the day routing our buses and getting our FX right.

The final week was spent tweaking the mix, in hindsight the mix does still sound very eighties and could use some more layered depth with some more mid ground, but all in all it sounds pretty good nonetheless, the breakdown in the end in particular gets pretty close to the sleep token sound.