judas priest – nostradamus

It’s been a good week for listening in the realstrings.com office! Mixes of the Moscow sessions are coming through from Tim Duncan (all sounding good) and the new album Nostradamus by Judas Priest was released on Monday. Whatever you think of heavy metal, this work is an epic and an awesome achievement.
It’s not everyday the phone rings and someone says (in a Brummy accent) ‘hi pete, it’s Glenn Tipton from Judas Priest, could you put some strings on our new album’.
The contact came through Attie Bauw who produced this album and we talked about various ways of getting some realstrings on the production.
In the end, the recording was done at realstrings.com though the process was odd; the band did not want to release rough mixes from their studio, so I spent a day listening with them, making notes and bringing away midi files from the keyboard arrangements. My task was to recreate synth string lines and in some cases add some arrangement ideas. As all we had to play along to were midi guide parts, it’s something of a miracle that any of the phrasings and articulations worked!
The band used most of what we prepared and judging by some live gig footage on YouTube, some of our recordings are featuring in their current tour also.
The marriage of heavy metal and strings sits well for me – both offer energy and emotion but with contrasting timbres.

The band’s marketing strategy has been an interesting one to follow. Here’s an old-school act making clever use of the social web. I hope the sales match the strategy!As streaming audio/video becomes available, I’ll add it to the media players on the entry page for realstrings.com

We get a pretty good credit in the album booklet!

Better fill in my ppl form on this one – should get some radio and tv play!