The first Acon2 project ended in 2016, and the new constellation, Svend Staal & Allan Stade, took off shortly after the same year.

They had privately for some time been talking about recording some of Svend latest compositions, and now they tried to find a way to give these compositions the right sound and instrumentation.

The recording started in early 2017, and a decision was made to play all instruments themselves.

The recording has been a very long process because the challenge of playing all instruments and the urge to incorporate all the new exciting soundtoys that’s constantly being released.

All recordings started up with creating a basic drum track followed by bass and a few keyboards and guitar. When the musicians had approved the overall form of the track, work began exploring all the endless possibilities at hand, at the same time trying to keep the music as fresh and “live-like” as possible. During a period of a year and a half the twelve tracks evolved from paper to well-crafted pieces of music with a modern sound, standing on the shoulders of Svend and Allan’s musical heroes of the sixties and seventies.

Allan uses a large package of keyboard plugins (Embertone Steinway, Scarbee Fender Rhodes, NI Komplete Ultimate. U-he Diva & Repro 1/5, Toontrack Superior Drummer 3, Izotope vocalsynth,  a.o) and Svend uses guitar plugins & pedalboards made of different brands, along with Gibson, Godin, Martin & PRS guitars. In addition, the Triple Play wireless midi system has been used for bass (using plugins from Spectrasonics & Amplesound) and some solo sounds (U-he Diva). Drumpad was used to provide as natural drumming as possible.

Universal Audio Apollo Twin was used as soundcard, and the music was mixed using Softube Console 1. Mastering was done through Izotope Ozone 8.