To Australian riff machine Keyan, British counterpart Connor Kaminski was once just “the Strandberg guy with nice-looking videos.” Now the social media shredders have written an EP together that, after endless short-form content, finally showcases their thrilling talents in full 4K.
They wrote a track each for Kinetic and collaborated on its final piece, the ambitious, 11-minute epic Pirouettewhich puts their unique tones on a dramatic collision course. They aimed to take their careers to the next level, and by tapping into each other’s fanbases, they’ve positioned themselves well for that leap – especially because what they’ve written warrants attention.
The writing process helped them uncover their strengths as players and writers – often in ways that compensated for each other’s weaknesses. “It felt like a home run before we’d even done anything,” say Keyan. “We’re kind of like the Aussie and British versions of each other. We were always on the same wavelength.”
Even with Jack Gardiner and Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood delivering superlative guitar solos on the closer, Keyan and Kaminski’s stars shine brightest – and neither can quite believe how effortless its creation was.
How did the writing process work?
Kaminski: “We wrote the whole EP virtually. You’d think that the time difference between the UK and Australia would be a detriment – but by the time Keyan was going to bed he’d sent what he’d worked on that day, and I was just waking up.”
Keyan: “We both hear and understand the same things about ideas and song structures, so by the time I was getting burned out it was like, ‘Okay, send it to Connor.’
“His 7/4 verse Pirouette is my favorite part of the whole EP. I sent it to him like, ‘Can you figure something out?’ The next day he had a minute-long verse that’s a great transition to the next section.”
Kaminski: “We were similar in a lot of aspects but different in others, which is amazing. Sometimes you get stuck on your own compositional crutches. Hearing someone else put two chords together that you would never have thought of is sick – you bounce off that.”
Did you find a sweet spot between your strengths and weaknesses?
Kaminski: “Keyan’s got riffs for days. I don’t. But what I think I have, which I didn’t realize until recently, is light and dark. I was doing a clinic in Dubai, and I played Oscillate from Kinetic. Someone said, ‘You’ve got light and dark down – there’s so much difference between sections.’ So I think I was able to contribute that part into Pirouette.”
Keyan: “I’m a riff guy. I’m not the greatest lead player. Connor’s definitely got that John Petrucci shred thing in his wheelhouse. Having each other fill in those gaps compositionally is really great.
“I get very tied to a certain mood and feeling within a song. With a song like Pirouette there obviously needs to be changes happening. Connor was the glue that fit all those different skeletal parts together.”
Kaminski: “Even as simple as the fact I love writing verses and I hate writing choruses…”
Keyan: “I hate writing verses!”
Kaminski: “See, we go so well together!”
You’re Strandberg and Jackson artists, but did any other guitars feature?
Keyan: “There’s a very, very low riff for about 10-15 seconds of Pirouette that wasn’t recorded on a Jackson, purely because I had to find a guitar that was long enough to record it. I like to get the guitar as close as I can to native tuning and then pitchshift it down. I don’t want to pitch more than two or three semitones. So I had to whip out the 30” Ibanez Meshuggah signature eight-string M80M.”
What about tones?
Keyan: “When I approached Connor about the EP he was like, “I have this song half-done, but I didn’t record any DIs, and these are the tones.”
Kaminski: “All the tones were 95 percent derived from that song to make it feel like a complete body of work. The philosophy of recording without DI is that, when you’re tracking, you’re having a back-and-forth relationship with whatever you’re playing through.
“How the gain sags and blooms is going to influence how you perform. When you track DI and change the tone, I feel you lose the essence of the performance.
“The main tone for the default rhythms is a capture of the Neural DSP Granophyre plugin on the Quad Cortex, with a Horizon Devices Precision Drive in front for rhythms, and a Klon for leads.”
Keyan: “I’m a stickler for the relationship of my playing going into the front end of an amp, and the way the overdrive pedal and the noise gate work with my right hand.
“So being locked into the Granophyre, which has this mid-range saturation that sometimes gets in the way of precise low-end riffing – especially in drop F# – was a bit of a pain. But it was very rewarding. I ended up using a capture of my Fortin 33 for my rhythms.”
Kaminski: “We were operating in two tunings. I was in drop C and Keyan drop F#. I like to go for slightly squidgier tones that have a bit more gain to them, but it falls apart in F#. You need to tighten the amp and use an overdrive to cut off that low end before it hits the amp.”
How did you tie songs together thematically?
Kaminski: “We played around with the motifs a lot. You might just have the motif come back on a glockenspiel so it sounds different but familiar. Swell’s got a motif; Oscillate has my motif in the verse, and on Pirouette Keyan somehow smashed them together. It sends off the EP in a really cool way.”
Keyan: “That’s a very cool moment. It’s all different tunings and BPMs from across the EP. It took a few days to figure out, but the payoff was unbelievable.”
How did Jack Gardiner and Nolly Getgood get involved?
Keyan: “We’d had conversations about having a guest riff rather than a solo, but by the time Pirouette came together, it really felt like we wanted Jack to solo, and someone like Nolly for a completely different flavor.
“The second they start playing, you know it’s them. Nolly did his solo in the first take. There were no revisions.”
Kaminski: “It’s an absolute honor to have Nolly on the track – he’s a killer guitar player but he never really gets to show off his skills. I can’t hear another person playing that part now. His solo fits so well.”
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