Album Rating: 1.5

^ yeah! that cover iz lezz gay compared to zis!

Album Rating: 1.0

wow this album suckeddd

Album Rating: 4.0

I feel like Time 2 is gonna be much more in the vein of the first Wintersun album, so I'm not too disappointed by this. Kinda grew on me.

Album Rating: 1.0

ya grew on u even tho it leaked 6 days ago

Album Rating: 4.0

i've listened to it a lot in those past six days, end to end probably ~25x

Album Rating: 1.0

ooooooooh

I felt the pacing of the album was not what it could have been. The interludes preceding every song really take out the flow of the album for me. Very well written review, though. I'd pos.

Album Rating: 3.5

I like this but holy shit, it took him 8 years to write? I think my expectations were a little too high given that someone could write this in a year if they wanted.

It took him 8 years to write this AND Time II wiz

Album Rating: 3.0

have you learned NOTHING from Muikuli?!?!?!?!?!?

Album Rating: 4.5

Lol, people. It DID NOT take him 8 years to write. It took him probably about a year to write (late 2005, early 2006) ALL THE SONGS WERE WRITTEN DURING THAT TIME. If you want a full story on why it took so long, it went something like this:



1. Problems in recording in the summer of 2006 with equipment breaking and other problems stretching the studio time needed just to record guitars and bass.

2. Mäenpää starts doing orchestrations and concedes that he does not have enough processing power to do it with his PC.

3. During 2007 he orders more powerful PCs from foreign countries, which arrive to Finland broken during delivery 3 times in a row. The process of sending broken PCs back and forth takes multiple months.

4. Late 2007, early 2008, the orchestrations still prove out to be impossible to work on with the new PC's with regular crashing occuring. Jari says that during this period the problems were really hurting his motivation, especially when he would lose hours of work with the crashes despite constantly saving back-ups. Also he has now run out of money.

5. In 2008 Kai Hahto calls people from Nuclear Blast and tells them that they have to provide them with the best mac computer available or this album will never be finished.

6. When Jari finally gets the Mac pro, doing the orchestrations becomes easier, but still takes him 3 years (for 80min+ of music, mind you, not just Time I, still ridiculously long time ofc.).

7.late 2011 mixing starts

Album Rating: 4.5

Around christmas of 2011 Jari says that he needs to get every cubase plugin he has updated to 64-bit before the mixing can be finished which is going to take a couple of months. They also re-record the rhythm guitar tracks as Jari was not satisfied with the original recordings anymore.

8. Early 2012 Nuclear Blast suggests that the album is split into two so Jari can focus on just mixing the first half now and get the band touring quicker

9. Around July of 2012 the mixing of Time I is completed

10. Time I was released in 19.10.2012 after one further delay due to CD copy production delays.



In conclusion: The most time consuming fact was the lack of memory and processing power of a single computer put together with Mäenpää's complete inexperience with producing something of this scale. Jari said multiple times that it would have been much faster if he had had the kinds of "computer farms" high profile hollywood film composers like Hans Zimmer or whoever use.



For reference, there are 1682 different tracks in total on the song Sons of Winter and Stars.

Album Rating: 4.5

No problem.

Album Rating: 3.0

Muikuli Wintersun Scholar Extraordinaire

Album Rating: 4.5

Well, that number is a bit misleading, cause you never actually have a thousand tracks playing at the same time. Maybe more like a hundred. It's just that instrumentation and effects and everything is different for each riff. And the song had to be worked on in separate projects for each different part of the song for the RAM memory to be sufficient.



Also, in a recent Finnish interview, Jari was asked that exact question: "What can you do with 1600 tracks that you can't do with 800?"



Jari: "Like Yngwie Malmsteen says, "more is more"! For me, it originally started when I heard Devin Townsend's Infinity album and it blew my mind. I wanted to do an album like that with lots of layers and overlapping melodies, but of course with my own style. Townsend has been a big influence





So there you go, blame Devin Townsend (and Yngwie Malmsteen).

Album Rating: 3.0

Muikuli !!!



what else can you tell us?

Album Rating: 4.5

I don't know... Anything you like, I guess. That recent Finnish interview (on Inferno magazine) is actually a really good one with 4 pages of stuff.



He says, for example, that mixing Time II is probably going to take about 4 months so he'll have to use the breaks from touring to do that. The second album is supposed to have more variation and contrast. He thinks the first half is more traditional sounding.



Also, he's going to get a mobile studio (laptops, I suppose) on tour to work with Kai on the material he has written during the last few years so that the gap between Time II and the follow-up should not be anything like 8 years.



This was a pretty interesting comment too:

"In the future I want to focus more on arrangements. I think I have a lot to learn there. Of course production can also always be improved".



Also, for those interested in hearing more guitar-driven versions of the songs, the live studio rehearsal that comes with the medabook release DVD offers pretty much that. A very nice bonus.

Album Rating: 4.5

^Jacbuibim, you might want to check out the Sons of Winter and Stars project demonstration from the DVD where Jari shows different instrumentations going beneath the layers separately. Can't find it on youtube yet, but it should be uploaded somewhere online sooner or later.



There is an instrumental version of this CD that was limited to a 500 copy release that is already sold out, but you can find that online.

Album Rating: 4.0

Agreed that people are missing the point with the 8 years thing. It took that long because Jari is obviously pretty incompetent as an audio engineer not because he was writing this forever



But anyways this is pretty rad, I had no expectations for this but its full of fun and cheese that I used to love in my metal. The orchestrations work better than I thought they would and tbh I'm glad the riffs are simpler and work more in context as part of the larger harmonies instead of being overbearing.

Album Rating: 4.5

"Agreed that people are missing the point with the 8 years thing. It took that long because Jari is obviously pretty incompetent as an audio engineer"



I don't disagree with this. I was simply telling what Jari has told about stuff that went on over the years to his fans. But I think he can be somewhat excused for the "incompetence" having no resources or training and thus learning everything the hard way during the past several years. The well respected audio engineer Nino Laurenne actually told Jari that it'd be best if he mixed it himself as no-one else would be able to make it match his vision.