A photo of Caleb Shomo's five-piece hardcore-punk metal band Beartooth who have just released their brand new album Disease on Red Bull Records.
© Nick Fancher
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This is what Beartooth's Caleb Shomo thinks about music technology
Ohio metalcore band Beartooth have released their new album, Disease, on Red Bull Records. We asked frontman Caleb Shomo about how technology has shaped his life, his music, and his tour flights.
By Eddy Lawrence
5 min readPublished on
Beartooth's latest (third) album is called Disease and fits perfectly into a back catalogue that already contains an EP and two previous albums with the titles Sick, Disgusting, and Aggressive.
This time out, though, the band, led by frontman and principal songwriter Caleb Shomo, sound bigger and louder than ever before. After recording previous Beartooth records in his basement studio at home, in Columbus, Ohio, Shomo wanted to capture the live fury of the band's hardcore-infused metalcore.
This doesn't mean Shomo has turned his back completely on music technology, though. As he explains below, it's still central to his music-making.
What impact has music technology had on your life?
Technology has absolutely shaped my life, by giving me the tools at a young age to learn how to start mixing, how to start creating my own demos. It honestly shaped a ton of what Beartooth is, because the majority of our songs are written in my basement studio, and there’s no way I’d be able to do that now if I hadn’t been learning from a young age. Tech is absolutely massive for me.
You wrote and recorded the first two Beartooth albums at home in Ohio; what kind of set-up do you have?
I have your basic home studio rig, but with a whole bunch of preamps and microphones. So I have a Mac, like the trash-can tower that’s decked out as fully as I could get. I use Cubase, and then I have a bunch of preamps all going into an interface and analogue digital converter. And that all goes into the computer, and then I have various drum kits and guitars and all that stuff.
What are your favourite bits of music tech?
Cubase just has a DAW [digital audio workstation], which for recording is unbelievable. I think it’s very user-friendly but still has the capacity to do everything I ever want. I’ve never run into anything that I couldn’t achieve using Cubase, which is cool, so I swear by that. 
Hardware-wise – I love API [microphone] preamps. They have a very well-rounded, pretty straightforward sound, and they’re always pretty punchy. I also have a Neets preamp that I really like, and a Telefunken tube mic that I love on vocals.
Are you excited by the way apps like GarageBand and SoundCloud have revolutionised the way new artists record and collaborate?
I think it’s rad. A lot of people from the older generation think that not everybody should be able to make a record that sounds crazy when they don’t know what they’re doing. But I think it’s really positive; it just means that everybody has the chance to record a song. Whether it sounds good or not is another thing, but just having the chance to record it, and have that experience, is massive. It gives a lot more people the opportunity to see what they can do. I just love that anybody can give it a shot.
You recently spoke to young people at the Grammy Camp about breaking into music. What technology would you recommend to young artists starting out?
Honestly, anything that you can get an idea down on is crucial. For me, I just use Voice Notes. I know people that have just used GarageBand on their phone. Like literally, they will plug a guitar in and write out their ideas on GarageBand on their phone. 
But I would say just get a laptop, get a cheap interface, and start learning how to put together demos. Things like GarageBand and Logic are cool. I prefer Cubase, but it’s really all about your DAW, what you’re comfortable in, and what you can move fastest with. Whatever gets the sound in your head down onto the hard drive fastest.
A press photo of Columbus, Ohio metalcore band Beartooth.
Red rage: Beartooth© Nick Francher
You’ve said it was important for Disease to have a live feel; did recording it change your relationship with technology?
Yeah, it made me understand more about hardware specifically. Prior to that, the majority of stuff I was doing on the computer was more software emulations of a compressor, or of a preamp or whatever. But being at a place like Blackbridge Studios in Nashville that has all of the hardware you could imagine that anyone’s ever made a plug-in from, it was really cool to hear how those all sounded. It made me understand how much more important hardware is, and that it really paved the way for what we can do now just on a laptop.
To me, it’s all about finding the balance of using technology to make real things sound better. I love messing with new pedals – I’m definitely not like, "It’s the old way or the highway", but I basically want to find ways to make it sound like the records I loved from the '70s, ’80s or ’90s, before the tech was really prominent, but find cooler and more efficient ways to get it there.
What’s your current favourite piece of tech?
I’ve always wanted a Tesla since they came out, but I’ve never pulled the trigger. Honestly, my Switch is real crucial on the road. Just to have something I can bring with me on airplanes, that I can bring with me anywhere, and it has the power to run proper games. 
It’s the coolest mobile gaming device that I’ve used, I really dig that. I’ve never been much of a PC gaming person, but I’ve always loved console controllers, they’ve always felt good to me.
Have you ever seen something that made you think, "holy cow, we’re living in the future"?
Sometimes, when I look at a commercial for whatever new iPhone is coming out, I’m like, that shit is insane. I saw recently a TED talk [by Raffaello D’Andrea], who built these drones that basically work in synch with each other, and can essentially think for themselves when given a task. That was some of the most future shit I’ve ever seen.
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