Haken – Aquarius (Re-issue 2017)

Guitar Jar: I have to say I love “Aquarius”, it’s one of the most exciting prog-metal albums I’ve heard in a long time. The entire production of the album is epic. Where did you record the album and was it a fairly straightforward process?

Charlie Griffiths: Thanks a lot! The whole writing/recording process took about 6 months I think. Hen wrote all the music and we would all meet up as a band and work on the arrangements and tweak the songs to everybody’s liking. By the time we came to record the album, we’d already been playing it live, which really sped up the recording process. We recorded the Drums at Misha Nikolic’s Monster Trax Studio in Chiswick and did all the keyboards and vocals at our home studios using Logic. All the guitars were recorded clean, straight into Logic, using Amplitube to approximate the tones we were after. We were really working against the clock and I seem to remember we got all the guitars done in a week and a half. We then sent all the tracks over to Christian Moos at Spacelab Studios in Germany for mixing. Christian re-amped the guitar tracks and that’s what you hear on the record.