Trivium

Our interview finds Heafy residing in his Orlando home off the back
of a lengthy US tour. A man of regiment, Heafy, despite earning time off from the grind, is preparing himself for the next tour. “When
 I’m home from tour, I try to make sure I spend seven days a week keeping up my chops. I spend at least an hour a day practicing vocals and guitar,” says Heafy. “I try to keep very productive during my downtime. In between preparing for tour, I spend six days a week doing Brazilian Jujitsu, and I try and do Yoga and weightlifting as well.”
Along for the return trip to Australia will be drummer Paul Wandtke. The newcomer is the forth replacement since the band’s inception.
On the topic of Wandtke’s induction into the Trivium family, Heafy is quick to reassure that the accumulating tally of ex-drummers is not
a move courtesy of stereotypical rock stardom. “I do truly feel that maybe some of the Trivium fans don’t understand why we do it. It’s not the result of a Spinal Tap moment. We do it out of necessity. We’re hoping this will be the last time. With Paul, we’re finally able to play any song from our back catalogue. We haven’t been able to do that for a while.”

The new addition coincides with Heafy’s return to full strength at the vocal helm. After a performance at US festival, Rock on the Range, in 2014 cost him his voice; Heafy was left in recovery mode and with his screaming duties sidelined indefinitely. “It came down to my screaming technique. A little bit of the singing technique, but a 100% of the screaming technique was completely incorrect. The way I was screaming, I was just shattering my vocal chords. After I lost my voice at Rock on the Range festival, I had to y home and go to the doctor to find
out what the problem was. Thankfully I didn’t do any permanent damage, but I was close. Matthew Sanders [aka M. Shadows, vocals] of Avenged Sevenfold put me in touch with Ron Anderson, a vocal coach he has worked with for the last 10 years. Through working with Ron in the background over last few years, I have finally started to scream again and did so on the last eight-week tour. The Ascendency stuff sounds exactly like it use to. It’s the same sound, but a completely different technique. And it just took me a long time to learn how to do it. I’m glad, I did miss doing it, but I didn’t miss hurting myself. So now I am singing and screaming and doing it correctly and now it sounds right.”


Working for the first time with producer and
fellow Orlando resident, Elvis Baskette, Silence
in the Snow was an attempt to revisit the band’s initial writing process, a band in a room jamming, improvising and allowing the magic to happen. “We wanted to go back to how we used to write as a band,” says Heafy, “On Ascendency we didn’t really have fans and we didn’t have laptops to record with. We would just play in a room and it would develop from there.”
Making a prominent appearance on the record, Heafy says his Les Paul Epiphone Custom Signature series guitars were his go to axes of choice when tracking the album. “A lot of my fans still ask
me why I have a signature Epiphone and not a signature Gibson, or why would you record on your Epiphone and not your Gibson? For me, I wanted to make a signature guitar that was good enough for me to play live and good enough for me to play in the studio. The exact same guitar I play live and in the studio is the same guitar anybody can go buy for a reasonable price. I remember being a kid and wanting to buy many of my favourite guitar players’ signature guitars. I would go to the store and be like ‘oh, I can afford that’, only to find out that the real version is $10,000, compared to the $500 version that I’ve got. I tested out a bunch of custom guitars during the recording process and they sounded great. But I also tried my signature series and to me, it sounded a little better.”