CANNIBAL CORPSE Guitarists Talk About 'Evisceration Plague' Songwriting Process

Joe Matera of Ultimate-Guitar.com recently conducted an interview with CANNIBAL CORPSE guitarists Rob Barrett and Pat O'Brien. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: How did the songwriting and recording process differ this time around for "Evisceration Plague" to that of previous efforts?

Rob: The songwriting process was quite similar to how we did it the last time around with "Kill". Alex [Webster, bass] would demo his stuff with a drum machine and give us the tab for the riffs and he'd give Paul [Mazurkiewicz, drums] a click track to any of the songs that had tempo changes. Pat and I prefer to work one on one with Paul when we have ideas. It is a more hands-on approach. I like to write with the drummer because I'm always feeding off of what he plays to the riffs I show him. Sometimes he'll play beats that I wasn't even hearing for the part and we end up developing the song that way. I show him the riffs that I have and we turn it into a song together. Then when we had a song down tight enough Alex would record the drums through his laptop and then we'd put guitars on it with a POD and Alex would put his bass on there at home. Then whoever wrote the lyrics to the song would do vocals on it and we'd send it to George [Fisher, vocals]. The recording process was different in a few ways. This is the first time Paul recorded his drums to a click so it was much less time consuming and less guessing…

Ultimate-Guitar.com: Are you always consistently pushing yourselves when it comes to the creative process?

Pat: Oh yes, we are always pushing ourselves to a new level and trying to always do something different that we haven't done before. In as far as, using different scales or using a different approach even though we're doing the same type of music. After all, it is death metal so it is going to be what it is. But we do have to do different things to keep the process exciting so that it is always new and fresh. And we definitely used some different things for this album.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: The album was recorded at Mana Recording Studios. What did producer Erik Rutan bring to the recording process?

Rob: Erik strived to get the best performance out of us as possible. He's very meticulous about tones and has a very good ear for death metal in particular. We've been good friends with him since his days in RIPPING CORPSE so we go way back. It's a comfortable vibe in the studio with him at the helm and we all respect his opinion.

Read the entire interview from Ultimate-Guitar.com.