In the liner notes of The Meadowlands, it says "recorded/mixed on 16-bit ADATs." That seems like and odd thing to boast about!
Charles: That's my own little geeky bit of self- congratulation or something. We're like the only people who are still using these things, although they're kind of like a weird bargain now. We have four of them now — an XT and three blackface ones — although we usually only work with two or three at a time. We haven't bought any for a couple of years, but even then, when one would break, it became cheaper to go buy another one, because you can score these things for between $125 and $150.
Did they break a lot while you were making the record?
C: After a while they did start breaking all the time. There's a function on the ADAT where you can fire it up and see how many head hours you have on it — I think it goes up to about 10,000 hours, or something retarded like that. Well, at some point, we lapped them. I don't think you're really supposed to get that far! ADATs are kind of the worst of analog and the worst of digital all rolled into one. Digital without any kind of flattering analog effect combined with VHS tapes, moving parts and tape transport issues.
Weren't you tempted to switch over to a more flexible and reliable computer- based system or DAW?
C: No. There were financial limitations and I wanted to avoid the learning curve of being on a new platform. There was also stupid psychological stuff like the fact that when we started this record, we thought that we would be done with it in a month. Ultimately, though, we would be better suited to using a computer and we will at some point, if only so that we can compare options more effectively. Because as you're making a record the way we did and noodling around on the guitar and saying to yourself, "Oh this part's really good... but is it better?" When you have a computer you can just put it down and A/B it. Then you realize that if the guitar is going to play this new part, that the bass should really be doing something different as well. Now when you're trying to alternate between these combinations, there's only so much you can do with ADATS and a Mackie 24x8 [console].
Kevin: We had to get it right on one track. We couldn't have 80 versions of our vocals like we could if we were working with the computer.
C: Next time, even if we have a computer, there will be a set of new limitations. And those will be that nothing is recorded until it's right in the basement!
Four-plus years leaves room for a lot of tinkering. You must have redone everything several times.
C: Yeah, except that we never redid any drums. When we originally set up and recorded the songs for this album in the last house that we lived in, we worked on them for a few months, and even got fairly close to completing some of them. And then we realized that it wasn't really what we wanted to do. We had a lot of big rock guitar on there, a lot of Marshall half stacks and Les Pauls. We had a decent traditional guitar sound, but it wasn't serving the music in the way that we wanted. So we worked and drove these songs into the ground across two and a half years and then we had to move, set up shop here. We had already set our first mastering date, which was like in October of 2001 or something...
Setting a mastering date can be a good way to actually force yourself to finish up a project.
C: It really is, and that's kind of why we did it. The time leading up to that session with Alan became the most miserable six weeks of my life because we thought that we were still going to walk in and master the whole record in one shot but we were making big, crucial changes to the songs. And so even though the drums remained exactly the same as this hard rock version of the album that we had made with big distorted guitars, there were songs that were ending up with only a piano or a baritone guitar on them.
Sorry to harp on this, but unless your drummer had died or something, it seems like a really weird exercise to change songs around that much while retaining the original drum tracks.
K: Fucking weird isn't the word for it. It took us five years!
C: There are so many ways that you can sabotage yourself unintentionally, and your working method is one of them. Not redoing the drums almost wrecked us because it was such a dumb way to do it. But I don't know, we got stubborn or something. It would have been much easier to take a break, get our heads together, rehearse and rewrite as a band, make it happen in rehearsal and then make that translate to tape with minimal overdubs. But the overdubbing and rewriting without redoing the drums was part of the learning process. The funny thing is though that we come out of this thing feeling, [assumes big Super Man Voice] at the height of our musical powers! I feel that if we go into the basement now to record a song that we'll be more capable of making those editorial decisions right then and there — like they're supposed to be. I'm sure that every musician who's reading this is like, "Duh! You're supposed to figure this stuff out before you record."
The way that you approached recording and arranging the guitars is of the things that gives this record its vitality. The sounds are all small and colored enough so that even when there are a lot of tracks going at once, you avoid that sludgy wall of barre chords that makes mainstream records and the radio so unlistenable. Guitar sounds seem to just get bigger and bigger. It's like the arms race or something!
C: Totally! Mutually assured guitar destruction! The sound of the guitar on the radio these days is almost like a keyboard or something. All those scooped, huge Korn, Foo Fighters sounds have taken rock music, which I certainly think of as being eighth notes, and reduced it down to quarter notes, because now all you hear is an arrhythmic wash accented only by the kick and the snare. For me, indie rock — or alternative or whatever you want to call it — is still steady eighth note driven. With the Pixies, the Ramones or R.E.M. that's what's driving the song along.
As a guitarist, was it difficult to downsize your own tone?
I always had a crappy sound, and it went very, very wrong for a long time. Recording was the same thing because you lose perspective on — without actually listening your memory plays tricks on you like "I want my clean guitar sound to sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan," which has like this huge low end when he hits the strings, and when you listen to those records, the guitar does kind of sound like that, but not exactly the way that you think it does. When you actually listen to the sound you realize that it's actually smaller than you thought and that you're just blown away by the ferocity of the playing.
Beyond the guitars, it seems that you also play with the notion of sound quality a lot on the vocals and other instruments. The sounds of the drums and bass, for example, vary wildly throughout the record.
C: That's cool if it came out that way, because that's pretty much what the goal was. There are so many albums that have a consistent sound from top to bottom. That's not a bad thing — in fact, it's usually a good thing. It's what you do if you're recording a record quickly in a studio. You get a drum sound, you get a guitar sound, and you work accordingly. For us, though, because we don't technically record that great to begin with, and because we're limited by ability and time and money and equipment, we just try and get it to work as musical thing that makes the songs better. If you look back to the sixties, recording was much less consistent because when you went into the studio, you were recording a single and therefore only one or two songs. When things were compiled onto albums, your instrumentation and sound might be different just by default. Those old Stones records aren't about fidelity, they're about each song. Each song seems to stand as an individual, finished product and drums sound different on each one.
