Hip hop verses spat over mind bending Meshuggah-esque riffs; it’s a metal purists’ worst nightmare. But whatever your reservations, you can’t deny the tenacity of Hacktivist. With little over a handful of songs and music videos, the UK rap metal djents have managed to gained worldwide recognition in a mere five years. Guitarist, songwriter and producer Tim ‘Timfy James’ Beazley discusses the technicalities of a developing a monster guitar tone, and learning the art of simplicity whilst recording the band’s debut album, Outside The Box.
With the Hacktivist sound incorporating elements of djent, hip hop and grime – there is a lot to account for in a live setting. “We have a backing track that we play to, that means that our drummer is continuously playing to a click track and keeping everything in time. I’ve got midi controlling my guitar amps. It changes all of my patches as the set goes along, so I don’t have to worry about pressing buttons or pedals. It’s quite high tech sort of stuff, but it’s there to make our life easier on stage. Because I’m the only guitarist and I sing, it’s very difficult for me to get up to the mic and sing and make sure I’m on the right patch for lead parts. It’s made my life so much easier.”
“We use Ableton live, so everything is triggered from a laptop, we just press play and the whole set flows – even between the tracks we have some ambient stuff going on. We try and make it as much an audible pleasure as possible. I find it very awkward when bands play and it’s silent while they are tuning in between songs.”
The technical know-how doesn’t end there either. On the topic of the band’s forthcoming debut album, Outside The Box, Beazley confides in a love of integrating modern amp simulators and tube amplifiers. “It’s taken me a while to get back into valve amps, but I am quite proud to use digital to bring the most out of valve amps; they just work so well together.”
Lucky for the band, Beazley’s creative input doesn’t only cover a good chunk of the songwriting, but includes the production side too. Outside of the band, Beazley works as a producer and engineer from his studio, Old School in Milton Keynes in the UK. With the band’s tech reliance and approach to songwriting a key to their success, it pays to have an engineer and studio-owner on board.
“I write most of the music. So I’ll write a shell of a song with all the riffs and rough drums, and then upload that so the rest of the guys can have a listen to it. Ben [Marvin, vocals] and J [Hurley, vocals] will write their bars, Richard [Hawking, drums] will take the drums away and make them a bit more snazzy.
“But, as we write, we record. So there is never really a time when there is a song that exists that hasn’t been recorded. That means we kind of have a working model, and so we just re-record everything and develop the sound.”
With the debut’s release imminent, Beazley reflects on what he got out of the recording process for Outside The Box, “The main thing I learnt was simplicity. I used to rely on putting a lot of processors on my mixes and relied on the fact that just because I’ve used loads of stuff that must mean it’s good. But I’ve learnt to strip back, you know – less is more. Some people record like eight guitar tracks and I just find it’s unnecessary. If you get one fat tone, pan it left and right and that’s all you need. As soon as you start adding more to it you start getting phase problems and it muds it out, and it’s just a pain in the arse.”
BY AARON STREAFIELD
