Controlled Chaos: All Shall Perish Guitarist Francesco Artusato on Writing, Recording 'This Is Where It Ends'

Hi, everyone.

This is Francesco Artusato. I play guitar in All Shall Perish and The Francesco Artusato Project. Welcome to my fifth Guitar World column.

This week I’m going to talk a little about how we wrote and recorded the new All Shall Perish album, This Is Where It Ends, that just came out this summer.

We started writing some of the material while on tour in Europe last year in September. We mostly had some riffs and arrangement ideas at that time that we were sharing with each other. It was the first time Adam and I were writing music together with Ben, Mike and Eddie. It felt like we were on the same page from the beginning in terms of writing.

A lot of the riffs and ideas that were written during that European tour made it to the album. It was only after that tour, though, that we really started focusing on writing the new record. Most of the writing was done individually in our home studios, since I live in LA and the rest of the band lives in the Bay Area. Sometimes we would send ideas back and forth until we would come up with an idea for a solid structure, and other times one of us would just write the most of one song and send it to the rest of the guys so that we could finalize the song in pre-production.

I spent a lot of time writing the leads and solos for this record. Some of them came out very naturally and quick and some others took more time experimenting using different scales and ideas to give the necessary amount of variety. I pretty much had complete freedom working in this department, and it was overall a very stimulating process. I definitely had every single part written down before starting the final recordings.

We had the entire album written and all the pre-production tracks done in about three months. Everything was done using our own home studios, recording bass, guitars and vocals and programming drums using Guitar Pro and Superior Drummer 2.0.

Only drums and vocals were then recorded in the studio by Zack Ohren, while guitars and bass were recorded as DI tracks and then sent to the studio to get them re-amped. We ended up using mainly a Peavey 5150 head with a modded Marshall cabinet and a modded Tube Screamer, and also an Engle Powerball for some of the leads.

We were really trying to get a more organic sound with this album compared to the previous ones. The drums, in fact, are all natural acoustic sounds with the exception of the kick. We didn’t want an overly quantized feel; we wanted a very precise and accurate, but natural-sounding album.

The time we spent in the studio for vocals and some of the final touches was very calculated and organized. Everything in this record ended up sounding exactly like we wanted, and that’s one of the reasons we are all extremely satisfied with the final result.

The first album from the Francesco Artusato project, Chaos and the Primordial, was released on June 28 via Sumerian Records. The new All Shall Perish album, This Is Where It Ends, was released on July 27 through Nuclear Blast.