KSUA plays four square with Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories”

On this web page I will share my long experience in recording brutal heavy metal tunes and provide (I hope) helpful articles, settings and sound samples for everyone who’s interested in.

My name is Christian Stab, I’m born 1981 and live near Frankfurt, Germany. I started playing guitar in 1990 with an old acoustic guitar from my parents. In those days my father showed me the first cords and so I started strumming around and learned the first songs. Very soon I took guitar lessons from different teachers and learned standard blues and rock styles. After a few years of studying and playing in school bands, I quickly developed a taste for speed and tried to use the dark side of the Force…

My way to aggressive music started by listening to punk and grunge. In the early 1990 grunge bands like Nirvana conquered the charts and it was really easy to play their songs. Then I found my way from Iron Maiden to Metallica. James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett influenced me most and I think you can hear a lot of them in my riffing. It was at this time (I think I was 15 or 16 years?!) when we founded our first band, started writing the first songs and tried to do the first recordings without much success. We used 6 mics routed into a cheap-sounding mixer and recorded the sum with Cubase 2.0. The result sounded terrible. Perhaps I will upload some examples of this session?! Or maybe better not!!

After my first band (we called us ‘Awful Dark’; what a crappy name) dissolved as the result of the first gig, I started playing in a crossover band called ‘Sniper at Work’. It was a lot of fun and a great time. We recorded a number of songs and from the earnings of our shows we could even afford to record an EP in the studio which was called ‘trigger in your head’. Back then, there was no Internet community like myspace or facebook and so the EP was never really released. I think there are about 40 copies in the cd shelves of your friends and of some people that visited our shows. Shortly after our singer left the band, we put the project on hold. And so I took a journey across different rock cover bands to a female-fronted alternative rock band called ‘Fitful Flake’. With this digression from brutal styles I learned to improvise and to jam in different styles what is not really a widespread discipline in heavy and brutal tunes. But I found out that I miss the aggressive way ofplaying.

In 2007 we founded my current band called ‘kohatred’. With this project I decided to deepen my recording skills and recorded the first album called ‘feel the silence’. On the search of the perfect sound I tried different amps, cabinets, microphones, guitars, plug-ins and even different strings and picks. In addition to my own experiments I read thousands of articles in the web… and now I decided to share the results of my experiments with the whole world and with everyone who’s interested in.

So, that’s all about me. If you have any questions or you think that I can help you out, don’t hesitate to contact me. But note that I get a lot of mails and I might not be able to answer them all…