Charlie Griffiths

Guitar Jar: Your guitar sound is huge on the album. Can you tell our readers what guitars and amplifier(s) you used and is this different to what you would use when playing live with Haken?

Charlie Griffiths: We double tracked the rhythms using a Musicman John Petrucci model on one side and my custom built 8-string on the other. That guitar was made for me by my good friend Pete Rinaldi, who plays guitar in the band Headspace. It has a 30? scale, and Lundgren M8 pickups and has a really full, even tone – it sounds great recorded. As I said, we re-amped the guitars and used an Engl Powerball simply because that’s what was in the studio. I’m really happy with it. Live Hen and myself use Axe-FX Ultra’s, which is the best piece of gear I have ever owned!

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.

In the YouTube video titled "Lundgren M8C Pickups / Strandberg Boden NX Demo," Charlie Griffiths is seen demonstrating his .strandberg* Strandberg Boden Metal NX 8 Electric Guitar in Black Granite, equipped with Lundgren pickups. The video is provided by Charlie Griffiths Guitar and includes a detailed demonstration of the gear used.