CONTAGION - THE GUIDE
September 2002

On Saturday the 14th of September Arena came to Holland to let the Cage-crew hear Arena’s new album Contagion. That day, we sat down with John and listened to the album together, with the purpose of John giving comments and information about the songs on the album. It became a technical guide through Contagion and the process of creating an Arena album… Enjoy… 

In the beginning there are basically a bunch of Malaysian voices on top of each other, and a gunshot at the end. That’s the intro to Witch Hunt.

1. Witch Hunt
This track was originally - I think - in D, but we dropped it a tone, because it suited Robs’ voice a bit better and also because the guitar sounded a bit heavier. Clive recorded that ‘Flood gate’ part at his house. What else can I say about this… After the second chorus, there’s about thirty voices doing backing vocals. Clive and I, we each did half of the backing vocals, the harmony part. 

Is this the sort of stuff I’m supposed to be babbling on about? I can’t imagine somebody being interested in all this…

Okay, what you hear now was originally supposed to be a keyboard solo [the first guitar solo – eds.], we actually had it as a keyboard solo. Originally it started out as a guitar solo, then Mike Stobbie and Clive decided it was going to be a keyboard solo, so they did something on the Virus, which is a new keyboard that Clive has bought, and then for some reason, I don’t know why, they decided that it didn’t sound good as a keyboard solo and it became a guitar solo again. Clive didn’t like the original one that I put down and I must admit, it wasn’t that great, so we put down another one. 

2. An Angel Falls
The piano in this one, actually on the whole album, is a plug-in for ‘Nuendo’, a virtual instrument. It’s called VST Grand. Clive used a keyboard piano on previous albums. We found this, or actually bought it. It’s a Steinberg thing and it’s really, really good. And the same goes for a lot of the organs. He usually uses a VK7 organ as well, but a lot of the organs, they’re not actual keyboards, but virtual instruments. 

It sounds really good, we’re really pleased with the way it sounds. It’s actually a sample of a Steinway piano, all the notes are sampled, so it sounds a lot more authentic. Is that of any interest to anybody? And then it ends with a telephone voice, and just a Hammond organ. We quite like the effect. 

3. Painted Man
For this song, I recorded a guitar solo at Mike Stobbie’s and I basically wasn’t really happy with the sound we got at Mike’s studio. Because, what he does, he records everything DI’d, which means straight into the mixing desk. I like to mike my amplifier up and record that way. So we didn’t really agree on that point. But we decided we did like one of the parts I played halfway through the guitar solo that I did with him, so we mixed and matched. We used half of the one I recorded at my studio and half of the one we recorded at his studio. But it was difficult to match the sounds, because obviously his one was DI’d and mine wasn’t. So I did as best as I could with the equalization and the matching, but it still didn’t sound convincing. And we decided during the mixing, to make it sound less apparent. I mean, the sound wasn’t bad, but it was just different. If you listen carefully, you can hear the switchover. So halfway through the guitar solo you hear a keyboard coming in over the top, to kind of harmonize with it. And it sounds really nice. It was just an accident…but a very cool one!

There are loads of keyboards in it, you can hear that. We particularly like the vocal effect in it, it’s a preset in Nuendo (hard disk recording program), it’s called ‘telephone’ I believe. We tried out a few different vocal sounds, and that one we really liked. But it’s just in the first verse, then it goes back to normal vocals. 

4. (This Way) Madness Lies (instrumental) 
This is an instrumental track. It started out like a bass solo kind of thing, because there was a lot of very fast bass in it. But of course, I’ve taken over!! The bass playing in this song is awesome.

Something else worth pointing out, just so that people know; again, the bass, it was recorded at Mike Stobbie’s studio. Mike’s speakers sound very different from mine. I wasn’t too happy with the sound when I got it in my studio, so we put it again from the flat signal through a processor. We put it through a plug-in called WARP VST, which is an amp simulator. And we had it set up to sound like an old Rickenbacker, which is a very cool sound. Clive really wanted this guitar solo to sound a little like Steve Hackett, you know, with the long sustained notes. 

What else can I tell you.. Oh, yeah, there is something else about this. We spent ages trying to get this at the right level, the rising keyboard part. Just a bit too loud, just a bit too quiet. We kept making Cd’s with mixes and going up to my room, listening and saying: ‘No, it’s too loud now!’ But we changed a lot of the keyboard sounds on this track. Originally, we had that nice organ and soft string pad, you can hear that, and we changed that about three times during the course of this song. 

It’s a real stereo thing, this album. We’re really pleased with a lot of stereo things we did. We made sure that everything has its place. Now the bit at the end, that was a very, very last minute thing. During the mixing of the track we decided to do a guitar solo. There wasn’t originally going to be a guitar solo, there were just going to be big chords. Clive said to me: ‘We’ve got to put something on there, because it sounds like a film backing soundtrack at the moment’. So we put this very mad guitar solo down at the last minute, which I’m very happy with. It’s just a very in-your-face guitar solo, it’s rocking! 

5. A Spectre At The Feast
I really like this.. Well, they’re all good, of course! Clive’s keyboard sound in this is awesome. It’s really good. I got Rob to re-sing all his vocals when he came to my studio. We planned to use a couple of words here and there from Mike’s recordings, but basically what we ended up with at my studio was seven tracks of uncomposited vocals and it was taking forever to go through them, to decide about the best bits and glue them all together. So we just basically recorded all of them again, as we went along. 

I really like the way Rob sings here. I actually had a really bad cough when I did the backing vocals. I spent most of the time lying on the floor, coughing my guts out, but we got it done.

Now, there’s something very interesting happening in a minute. It’s that two-part harmony there. It sounds quite like that thing Freddy Mercury did. And then the guitar part comes in. I really like what happens here, what actually happens is that the vocal morphs into the guitar. If you listen to it on headphones, it sort of gets more distorted, more and more like a guitar. And by the time the band comes in, it sounds just like a lead guitar. It’s all those little things, just little moments like that. You come up with these ideas as you’re mixing…

At some point Clive is singing background vocals. Right at the top of his voice, you should have seen him, I’m sure he had on the tightest trousers possible! 

6. Never-Ending Night
We used real wind chimes I think, in this track. Rob came up with this vocal line. The demo version I did is different. He’s doing the phrasing in different steps and it sounds a lot better. He did it by accident, because he doesn’t really knows what he’s doing... just joking [laughs] He comes across things by accident, but if they work better then it’s a blessing.

Then it goes into the big guitar solo. I really like the way the drums and the bass accent here. You can see Ian is putting a lot of thought into what he’s doing. You can hear the Hammond organ here too, that’s the B-4 plug-in. It’s a sample from an original Hammond organ, so it sounds exactly like the real thing. It’s not like a synthesizer. We spent a lot of time getting the tones right. 

I’m very pleased with the second bit of the solo, where it sounds more ambient. The first part is quite like Gilmour. 

7. Skin Game
This is a very deep sound, that’s down to dropped C again, I think. You tune the guitar strings down and they’re almost flapping! That’s going to be a problem live. It’s not ‘how are we going to play?’, but, ‘how are we going to keep my guitar in tune?’. 

Mick wanted a kind of Led Zeppelin groove on the drums. Then the sneering vocals, I really like the way he sings this. Then you’ve got your lead guitar, one octave apart from another. Really high up, almost like that track on the first Zep album, where it’s just following the lead vocal. We were all doubling, I think Clive did, and I did too, doubling what Rob sings. Just to give it impact. 

There’s an awful lot going on in this track. There are lots of things that lock in together. 

The whole end section, the multi-vocal part, is my favourite part of the whole album. It’s a really wide multi-vocal. I love that string pad that Clive’s got going in the background. Then the acoustic guitars come in, these big acoustic guitars. You’ve got the lead guitar doing the counter-part there in one corner of the mix, suggesting the notes of the lead vocal. The singing in this song is just awesome; when he goes up to the high note at the end…You’ve got your two harmony parts locking in with him. I just love this section…

Then we thought: ‘how are we going to end this?’. I run out of my guitar solo, and it just goes to acoustic guitar and vocals. It was just an accident and it sounds awesome. That’s the way a lot of these things happen. I think we were originally going to do a fade out, but I’m glad we didn’t.

8. Salamander
I really like Rob’s singing in this song; it’s a really aggressive sound. Some of Clive’s organ parts are just awesome. I love the marcarto strings in the background…

We wanted the chorus to sound really ambient and big and grandiose, and the verses to sound aggressive and kind of metal. There’s lots of good lock-ins with the drums and the bass. It just all locks in perfectly. 

In the chorus I’m doing a two-part with Rob. I had a really bad cold that day… 
I still think we changed some of the keyboard parts when we got to the point of mixing. We changed the inversions of the chords in some sections to break it up a bit. 

Clive decided at the last minute that we should have a guitar harmonizing the moog at the end. This was literally a couple of days after we started the mixing, so I had to get the guitar back out and put down the harmony part. Just before you start mixing, you’re listening to the songs and you think whether or not you can improve some things. Can we do anymore with it? You know, just the finishing touches. The proverbial icing on the cake!!

9. On The Box (instrumental)
This was originally supposed to be solely a keyboard solo, but we decided that it would be good if we split it up. So Clive took the first half and I took the second half. 

I really like that guitar part, it was originally Clive’s part, he wrote it. Then that organ solo, brilliant! I don’t think Clive has ever done an organ solo in Arena before. So there you go, you’ve got one now! Again the B-4, I think. 

It’s a bit mad really, this track. I mean, the way that the organ solo works around the chords, is really clever. Hinting all the time with the chords. Very melodic. 

You’ve got the Andy Summers guitar coming in there, for some reason. The Walking On The Moon guitar. Clive wanted a Steve Hackett kind of fading thing on the guitar. Then of course, it’s my turn. I start noodling away. I’m very pleased with this solo indeed.

Luckily, I got to put my solo down after Clive did his so I got to do something flashy. Usually I’ve got my part down and then he goes and outdoes me. That’s the normal procedure. So I win on this one! Only kidding Clive!

Then, again, Malaysian voices chanting. They’ve already made an appearance at the front of the album. Here they are again. Then the Morse code, at the end, that’s actually a Hammond organ with all the low-end taken out of it. You’re going have to get your Morse code book out to find out what it says!

10. Tsunami
This is quite unusual, this track. It’s in 3/4, and it also changes time signature a number of times. This is cool, actually. We got a kind of a jazzy background guitar here. Clive’s doubling what Rob does an octave below. Gabriel did that a lot, like on Digging In The Dirt, one vocal an octave below the other. There is a very long echo on Rob’s voice. We initially wanted it to be quite dry. We tried mixing this so many different ways. Originally, the voice went really small. That radio sound again. Everything went really small and dry, but we wanted the voice to stand out and have the band go very quiet. 

Then we go to this Tool kind of section, this is Micks. You really can’t dance to this, so don’t try. I think after that, it’s Clive’s section. Huge, great cathedral organ over massive, huge power chords and bass pedals. 

The singing in this track is great as well. I’m very pleased with the way we mixed this. The voice slowly fades away and then Brian May makes an appearance. We wanted that kind of multi harmony lead guitar creeping up behind it. While it’s creeping up, the band’s fading out, the voice is almost gone. It took a lot of doing. 

11. Fallow Ground
Well, the only thing I can tell you about this is that this was the first track we mixed. This was the one we started with and that’s what sticks in my memory.
The Painted Man theme comes back in this track. There are little things like that coming and going throughout the album that tie it together and make it cohesive. It’s a heavy concept album! The piano is back again, the VST Grand Steinway sound. 

Then you get into the chorus. There’s a vocal effect in it we really liked. Have you ever listened to The Wall by Pink Floyd? Do you know the song with the echo in it? [Is There Anybody Out There? – eds.] You can recognize that sound in the chorus. It gets smaller and smaller as it goes of into the distance and becomes increasingly lo-fi. 

It’s those little moments, you think of them as you go along. It was good to work out all these vocal lines. It was just Clive and I with just an SM 58 in his room, and we decided what Rob was going to end up singing. Rob has only changed things slightly, just to suit his voice better. He interprets things slightly different and it just sounds great. 

12. The City Of Lanterns
When you’re listening with headphones, you can hear the wind coming in. I love the vocal sound, it sounds intense, quite breathy. You can almost imagine the condensation coming off the breath. Of course, it was inside my studio, so there was no mist!! It sounds to me as if somebody’s on a boat with a lantern, and going across a lake. It’s beautiful.

The way he sings it is just beautiful. These falsetto things, he didn’t used to do a lot of that. But because that’s the way I sing a lot of the time in The Urbane, and because I got to do the guides he’s started utilising it a lot more. It really suits his voice. 

13. Riding The Tide 
Clive’s big keyboard solo! Again, the guitars were done at the last moment. Clive said: ‘get on and do the guitars for it’. So it’s kind of funk in 7/8. The variations in the sections are really good, I think. I like the changes in keyboard lead sound and the changes in dynamics between the sections. Yeah, we did well. 

14. Mea Culpa
This is going to be a bit of a favourite of everybody’s, I think. It kind of takes you by surprise the way that you’re listening to this extremely hi-fi album, and then all of a sudden you hear the sound of a needle dropping on a record and the sound of vinyl crackle. Again, we’ve utilised a morphing effect here. I love the way you go from this extremely lo-fi, almost 1920s sound and then it morphs back to the present day and becomes hi-fi again. 

You’ve got to hand it to Rob really, he sings this brilliantly. Clive used a harmonium sound to back up the piano. A harmonium is basically a very small church organ. Then the brass comes in to add width to the sound. I love this track, it adds a nice colour to the album.

15. Cutting The Cards
I recorded the acoustic guitars in the beginning of this track at Stobbie’s. There’s just a single guitar line playing, quite Jimmy Page, really. Then it goes into this Spanish kind of sound. Clive does the backing vocals in this track, I think. No, actually we both do but I join him later on. I used to tease him, because the first harmonies in the intro acoustic chorus sound a bit like Jethro Tull! Kind of a ‘folky’ edge to it, but it’s cool. Clive asked: ‘Can we really do that?’ Yes, of course we can! It’s a Medieval Spanish song! There’s a lot of things in this album that you haven’t heard on Arena albums before.

Okay, now we go into the heavy bit.. I suppose in some ways it’s quite straight ahead, but it’s going to be a good live song. I like the keyboard counterpart here. Then the guitar counterpart comes in. Then there’s the point where the whole thing momentarily stops. It was Clive’s idea to let everything die for a moment because there are a lot of things going on that just keep going at that point and we weren’t originally going to mute them. It sounds like the song is falling off a cliff. 

16. Ascension
More Malaysian people here, chatting away. I should point out, actually, there’s a few things on this album that you might not notice. For example, if you listen carefully at the end of A Spectre At The Feast, there’s some backwards speaking. You have to figure out what it’s saying. It’s been detuned, so it’s a lot lower as well. Amongst the voices here Rob puts in a familiar line [only audible with headphones on – eds.]

Okay, back to the song. Again, the way Rob sings here is beautiful. This song is just huge! Well, I don’t know what else to say about this… I like the guitar sound in the verses. There’s two: a double tracked clean chorus guitar and an acoustic guitar. During the second verse, piano comes in. Clive plays a counterpart on the piano, I really like it. Then, in the chorus, it’s half 12 string sample on the keyboard and half actual plugged-in acoustic guitar, DI’d to get that really crisp sound. I spent a long time playing it and you can just about hear it!

At the end, Clive wanted this ethereal vocal coming out of the mix just so you can barely hear it, like it’s way off in the distance. That’s your album finale! No heartbeats…no big guitar solo, just vocal. I’m very, very pleased with it. Listening back to it now, I think about all the things we came up with, all the ideas, all the moments and all the messing around and experimenting… It worked out really well. And we’re very happy with it! I hope you like it as well.

By: Marcel Kolenbrander and Hanneke Beers