So let's talk about your new record.
Mark Eitzel: When we were first mixing "Patriot's Heart" with Monte [Vallier] he did a brilliant job. We edited it so that the bass was loose with the drums because it was played kind of weird. The piano was loose as well. This guy mixed it for us. We paid him. He took the bass and piano parts and put them exactly with the kick and snare. The kick and snare were not in time either but the track didn't work at all.
Tim Mooney: No, it didn't. It felt wrong and it took a while to figure out why.
M: I did a lot of the editing and I thought I had just done it wrong because he is so much better at that kind of stuff, but no.
I have seen that kind of thing a lot. That is the worst thing you can do is start using your eyes to mix songs.
T: For that song we were listening to old soul records. We were trying to find a groove.
M: Was that "Me and Mrs. Jones"?
T: It was "The Bitter Line Between Love and Hate".
M: Yeah, that was what it was. So when we mixed it again later with Matt Pence [at Echo Lab in Denton, Texas], we used an earlier version that didn't have the edits. It was no dis on Monte. I mean, he didn't know what to do. It was like a six-minute song with no variation. It has got the same groove. It has got out of time guitar playing. I thought it all worked really great — put the faders up and it's done. That is what Matt did.
I noticed how important it is to let the bass and kick just be out, the way they look, especially with a soul feel. The bass is just going to look late.
M: Yeah. Like with "Love Is". When I did the editing on the bass, I wouldn't use my eyes. It felt good. I would just take a piece. If it was ahead, I would just leave it ahead.
Do you guys end up doing a lot of editing on the record?
M: Well, we both did it. I mean, we would do a lot of stuff here, and then I would do stuff at home because I've got an MBox. We did all the editing before we took it to mix, and we printed everything, because he uses Nuendo and he didn't have Pro Tools.
Right. So you just printed the whole track out.
M: We just printed out all the tracks. And he didn't do much editing. Yeah, but we recorded the first ideas onto 24-track...
T: I think half the record was that.
M: Two-thirds of the record. And then we transferred it onto Pro Tools, mostly because I just knew with vocals, you got to comp them, and it took forever to comp them on analog. It's just a lot of fucking work. I thought we could save time and money. What a fool.
No, it's true. Pro Tools can be great for vocal comping.
M: And also with Vudi we didn't have very much time. We had Vudi only like five days total in the whole recording process. So, basically, we just have him do like, 'Okay, do another take,' and then we'd have to piece it together because he didn't have time. You know, he drives a bus.
Right. You got to be on schedule in that business.
M: He does. Yeah, so he gave us like two days every fifth or sixth week. It was really hard.
So did you do a lot of home recording since the last AMC record?
M: Yeah, I did my last record, Invisible Man, on Pro Tools.
Just by yourself?
M: Uh-huh. That's why it sounds like shit.
T: We beg to differ.
M: And I had Alex Oropeza mix it. And he was great. He taught me some stuff.
So did you just dive into it yourself?
M: Yeah, because I worked with Jason Carmer [Third Eye Blind], and for various reasons he could no longer work on the record, so I had to change. I didn't have enough money to work in a big studio. When you're working at Coast, I can't fucking pay the bill there. But I could afford to buy a G4 and Pro Tools. So that's what I did. And I only used three songs out of the ones he recorded. I did the rest myself. That's why I got a potbelly; I just sat there and I edited for weeks.
How did you do the tracking? Did you just have drummers come over?
M: No, I used drum loops. And I did piano myself. No one played on it. Well, except for the three that Jason recorded. And they actually sound the best because the man's a genius.
He's good at what he does.
M: He still has like 12 of those songs in a drive somewhere, and I wish I had them. But they'll never surface, I think. He's probably lost them.
T: Hopefully not.
So what did you learn from home recording? What from that experience did you bring to this, now that you're back in the studio?
M: I didn't bring much because it's a band — it's not me.
What about editing skills?
M: Well, when we first started talking about this, I pushed the computer on Tim. Take the whole time issue. If you don't have a band that rehearses all the time, things are going to be out of time a lot. And the only way to get them in time is to edit. And, you know, most bands rehearse for months, and they tour a lot. Well, we hadn't been together for ten years, and we didn't have time or we didn't have this concentration with people always playing. So the only way to get around that, I thought, was to put it in Pro Tools, and try to edit. But his idea, too, was to try to make California. [to Tim] Remember we talked about that?
T: At the beginning?
M: Yeah. And make it kind of a real-sounding record. So, basically, I didn't want to use granular synthesis or anything. You know what I mean? I wanted to make it real sounding.
T: I think Shuffler got used. M: Shuffler, yeah.
That's where you hatched the plan to record to tape and then transfer to Pro Tools?
T: Yeah, and we tried to get it on tape as soon as we had the idea, as quickly as it came to us while the song is fresh. And that worked pretty well.
M: It did. Like "Another Morning". I mean, that's the second take that they'd ever heard. They never heard the song before. We played it once. They got it.
And that song has this beautiful flow to it.
M: Yeah. I know.
It's very natural.
M: Yeah. And that's something that we never really did before. We hacked everything to death. We just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.
T: Yeah, they were all a month of with the producer, or a month of hacking in the old days.
M: Right. We'd come in the studio sometimes and find the engineer surrounded by tiny, little pieces of tape, and he'd been up all night. And he'd just look at us with a dazed expression and go, "Now it's in fucking time."
T: So this may be the least edited.
M: It might, actually. It really might.
Did Matt mix your album in the computer?
T: No. It was through a board, a Neotek Elite. We used a hybrid of analog outboard gear and stuff in the computer. It worked really well. He totally got what we were on about. It is hard. This record is hard, because we couldn't mix it anymore. We had worked on it a long time and knew all the stuff was supposed to be there but couldn't figure out how to put it together. So it was good to have fresh ears and the right ears. He just took what was there and went farther with it.
What was the reason for the reunion?
M: It was time. We all kind of thought it was time. I started talking with Tim three years ago. And I had been talking with Danny and Vudi, briefly, about it. And Tim finally said, "Okay, fuckers, you know, I have a studio where we can record."
