SHADOWS FALL - At War With Core! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"That's another thing too," sez Bittner. "As much as we've grown as a band, playing live, being a solid unit just by being on the road so damn long for The Art Of Balance, Zeuss has grown as a producer. He's been working his ass off. He's been making records for the last two years and dialing his studio in even more. Plus he's expanded his studio with thousands of dollars worth of new gear. So that's enabled us to have a clear, more powerful sound, because he's expanded his technical capability as well. He did The Rise Of Brutality by Hatebreed, and the Agnostic Front record, and, amazingly enough, he's working right now on the new Sebastian Bach record. But just between our record, the Hatebreed record and the AF record, that's most of his last year. But he's got people constantly knocking on his door right now, just because of the success of our band and of Hatebreed."

"We all busted our ass on this record and did equal amounts of work," cites Bittner, when asked about whether writing The War Within was a difficult process or not. "And it went fairly quickly because we were on the road so long for Art Of Balance, we just couldn't wait to get home and write new material. We're sick of these songs; let's get some new blood in here. But as far as the recording process goes, you know, everybody can't do anything until I'm done, unfortunately. I'm the first one who needs to be done. And for me, I went into this record extremely prepared, just like I did for Art Of Balance, and I finished my tracks in a day and a half. I did seven songs the first day, with multiple takes, and then I did three songs the next day. So I was done; the drum tracks were done in a day and a half. Then it was up to the guitar players to put their stuff down and everybody just worked really quickly. I think I set the tone for what was going to happen. I wanted to get done quickly because I just wanted to get it over with, so I could leave these guys more time in the studio to experiment with stuff if they wanted to. So once the drums were done, everything went really quickly. We were lucky to have some time at the end so we could screw around and try some different vocal things. I mean, we knew we were on a schedule, where we definitely had to have the album completed by June. But we weren't in such a rush because we knew we had a little bit of leeway because the initial weeks went so good as far as tracking goes."

SHADOWS FALL - At War With Core! Page 3