Faded Grey 4

My producer Hadi and I have established a trend in the last couple of years.



Every six months or so, he visits Dubai, and he brings his kemper, laptop, plugins, and whatever new gear and toys he has acquired. I bring in a few riffs, lyrics, my guitars, and songs to work on. And then we record some music.

Usually we schedule only a few days. Most of these sessions are for Greyfade songs, but we make sure to have one of these sessions dedicated to Faded Grey. There is no concrete plan for these sessions. We just plug and play, so to speak.

Now while I enjoy and love the Greyfade sessions, they are usually difficult. Don’t get me wrong, they are so much fun—we crack a lot of jokes, we are very productive, and time flies by so quickly. We both love making music and enjoy the process of recording it, but…we do work hard. 



We work for seven to eight hours. I record all the guitars, layer them (we layered the rhythm tracks six times in the last couple songs), record the solos, and do vocals. We come up with the drum patterns, effects, ear candy. Hadi records bass. We finish all this in one day.



I have a motto: one recording session = one song. I love it and I wouldn’t change it for the world. But it’s a tiring, albeit rewarding, process. That’s Greyfade.

Faded Grey, my chill and easy-going alter ego, is the exact opposite. Here, we are not meticulous. Some songs are built from one Idea that I may have demoed on my phone, but a lot of the stuff we come up with are created on the spot. We come up with a pattern, we loop it, and I improvise my solos on top of it. Hadi makes a few suggestions here and there, and boom. Done. Next song. Sometimes there might be a small glitch while recording the guitars, but we still keep it. It’s as free as it gets.

After we are done recording a song, I’m usually the one who goes, “What do we call this one?” 



Now I have changed the title of a couple of songs while listening to them at a later time, but for the most part we even keep the working title of the song, which one of us comes up with right after recording.

“Hypnotic“ gave some hypnosis vibes, maybe because of its repetitive looping.



“Harmony 10.” I love this one. I was showing Hadi some song ideas from my phone. There was this melody that I wrote on my classical guitar and recorded on my phone. He loved it so much, and he asked me to airdrop it to him. He put that exact recording on the DAW, cleaned it up a bit, and then looped it. That’s how we came up with a song from that phone recording. The title of that melody on my phone was—“Harmony 10.”


“Hey Hope” gave me that hopeful feeling after listening to it. A bit unusual for my songs.


“November Vibes”—I don’t remember who came up with this title, but it has something to do with the time the recording sessions were taking place. Also, November is usually a beautiful period in the UAE.


“Here’s to More“ is usually what Hadi says at the last recording session we have at a particular period when we are done recording, unplugging our gear, and packing our stuff. Since this was the last song we recorded during that session, I suggested to use Hadi’s line as the title of the song.

Recording Faded Grey is easy and fun, whereas recording Greyfade is difficult and fun. I love the process for both. Sometimes though—just sometimes—it’s good to take it easy and chill.