How did the recording process evolve? How were the first albums recorded?
Greg: Well, before Chris and John were in the band, it was all done on my 4-track. One day I came home from college and my parents had bought a new stereo — it was very a low-quality one with all kinds of flashing lights. But it had this ten-band equalizer component, and I borrowed it so I could EQ two of the tracks on my 4-track. I also had this dbx compressor that could only compress 1.4:1 — that was the maximum. It was for audiophiles to listen to classical music. I don't know what it was called, it just had one knob for ratio and one knob for gain.
So a lot of your approach to EQ'ing came from working with this kind of stuff? This was your outboard gear?
G: You say outboard gear, but it was a 4-track — it didn't have any outboard gear capability. It didn't have effects sends. What I would do is take one of the outputs from one track, send it to something and then plug it back into the mic jack, and to get the final mix I'd use the headphone output.
That's how The Man, The King, The Girl was recorded? What about Holdypaws?
G: Holdypaws we recorded with a friend, a friend who had what at the time was a $30,000 Pro Tools system and we recorded at his house. The Man, The King, The Girl and Halfbird were recorded on a 4-track.
How much have you guys recorded with other people? Nowadays you primarily record yourself, right?
G: Put it this way — Holdypaws was the only time something got done start to finish with somebody else's help. I had been working on the 4-track for several years, having a very frustrating time. On the early records I'd do something like sit there with this cheap, ten-band equalizer and have the stereo set so Nevermind was playing on the CD player and the 4- track was playing on the other input and I'd try to make the bass drum sound like the bass drum on Nevermind, and then do that with the guitar and the bass. I got to where I felt like I was pretty good at it, but here was somebody offering to record us with this fancy recording system, and so I'd think to myself, "This is it! All my problems will be solved! All the secrets will finally be revealed by someone who really knows how to record." But as soon as we started working on Holdypaws, I realized no one's more qualified to record Deerhoof than we are. Professional engineers have their experience, but I had my experience too, and even though it was self-generated and kind of weird, it still ended up counting for something. Ever since then, we've always done most of the work. It seems like you can either go to a medium or high-budget studio for one day, or you can use the equipment you have or can borrow from friends, and do it as long as you want. I realized there was no comparison — the time was so much more valuable than the fanciness of the equipment.
MS: Maybe we can talk about the record- ing of a particular song then. How did the song "Milk Man" get recorded?
G: When I first wrote it, Satomi and I were in Japan. I had been told many times that Deerhoof is cool because of the way we were so heavily influenced by Shonen Knife, and I would think, "That's cool... one of these days I'll have to hear them." We got a chance to go see them in Japan — it was the first time for both of us — and we really liked it. And the next morning I woke up and I had all these musical ideas in my head that actually were influenced by Shonen Knife. Later, we decided we wanted to record it, and Chris, John and I each had computers that had Pro Tools Free on them. With Pro Tools Free you can't record more than two tracks at a time. We had five drum mics — so five drum tracks — so we had all three computers set up at once, and we'd press the spacebars all at the same time.
Chris: For preamps, we just used a Mackie mixer. We had one good mic — John's $200 Studio Projects mic. The rest were Shure SM-57s and 58s.
G: I just want to say this — the mics did not sound good. The mic placement was not good. The tuning of the drums — not good.
But it ended up sounding good, right?
G: [laughs] Thank you.
You were never happy with it?
C: There was just tons and tons of tweaking and processing — and this is an album where every single song is pieced together from tons of little pieces.
G: I was using an iMac G3 that didn't have that much hard drive space. A lot of times I was processing and overwriting files, so I had to be sure with each edit. I had also started extracting drum kits from other CDs — I didn't know there was such a thing as a sample library, but that's what I was building. I'd start listening to records with that in mind. So a lot of the drums on that song was me pasting in a snare drum or bass drum sample for every time I hit the snare or bass drum, and blending it together.
G: We only had eight tracks because it was in Pro Tools Free, and five of those were drum mics.
How did you set up those drum mics? Was it kick, snare, overheads and room?
G: We didn't have overheads — we didn't have a boom stand!
John: We had one mic that was half snare, half tom. There was a kick drum mic.
G: There were two room mics — one was hanging from an easel, and one was sitting on an exercise machine...
J: We were in this attic above Chris' parents' garage.
C: It was a big room with high ceilings and wood floors — it was a painting studio. It had a big window. Then we went in and did guitars, and I remember I did every section separately...
G: It wasn't every section — it was every chord!
C: [laughter] I'm not a very good guitar player, and I can't keep perfect pressure, and we wanted each note of every arpeggio to be perfect and ringing, so we recorded every chord separately. I loved it — I really liked breaking it down into these small pieces that were totally manageable. There wasn't the pressure of having to get one perfect take with the perfect feel... every single moment had the perfect feel — it was the perfect artificial performance. We'd have to retune for every chord, too. The intonation on my guitar was not too good, so we'd retune for every chord. If we had good guitars, we wouldn't have had to do that...
G: I'm not sure about that. It sounded better that way anyway. It wasn't equal temperament — the chords were all extra in-tune.
So you were making this perfect virtuostic performance?
C: It wasn't virtuosity we were after...
G: This is what it was — Chris' parents had cable at their house. They had these music channels, and I'd never had these in my life. At home, Satomi and I have this radio, and it's from Japan and all the frequencies are for Japanese radio, so we can't get any radio stations. We don't have a car — basically I never hear pop music except when I go to Chris' parents house. And this is when I realize what pop music sounds like. It's not virtuosity — it just sounds so perfect. Every sound is huge, there are these gigantic guitars and gigantic drums, and I really wanted to make "Milk Man" sound like that.
How different do you think the guitar you recorded was from the finished sound?
G: Very different. Now of course, the law of entropy says we can't make a guitar sound any more clean, but a lot of times sounds are getting more and more distorted...
Do you use plug-ins for distortion?
G: Well, Pro Tools Free doesn't have a distortion plug-in. You can get distortion in Pro Tools the same way you can get with anything, which is just by turning it up.
C: Or by EQ'ing things multiple times...
G: Or doing anything that makes it go past zero. That kind of distortion in Pro Tools I like because if something went into the red there, it was distortion, but it seemed to add a color — it was trebly distortion...
J: It doesn't soften attacks the way other kinds of compression do, even supposed brick wall limiters. G: As for the bass on "Milk Man," the bass is all samples. It's one sample, just pitch shifted — every note pitch shifted.
Where did the sample come from?
G: Um... ESG?
Everybody samples ESG!
G: Yeah, but they are all sample beats — we just sampled one note. On "Milk Man" there's a lot of pitch shifted samples, like I'll have one piano note shifted up and down throughout a song. I practically fainted a couple months ago when Satomi and I walked into the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. There are 13-year-old kids playing with a computer on display that's got GarageBand and there's a keyboard there with these perfect samples! It's not like they have a single sample that's being pitch shifted, they've got a different sample for each note, with different volumes too. Every instrument in the universe is coming out perfectly with this keyboard and I ask, "Well, how much is that?" and it's like $100! I've been sitting here slaving away pitch shifting single piano notes extracted from some CD for months at a time and I didn't realize this existed.
What about the vocals on "Milk Man"?
G: With Satomi we found that things really worked nice when we would record her voice through a microphone and put her voice through an amplifier and record her voice through the amplifier at the same time. On the iMac there's a sound output, the headphone jack, and I could take the original vocal recording out and put it through a guitar amp and find a nice little setting with a certain reverb or certain distortion or something. We'd mic that and then record that back in and then line up the two tracks. They're really hard to hear, but I sang some backup harmonies on that song. That's just the iMac's internal microphone — I didn't have any microphone at the house at the time. I think we have recorded several songs' vocals that way.
You spend a lot of time recording the perfect drum sound or the perfect guitar sound. How much work do you do getting these sounds to work together? Is there a lot of going back?
G: So much. We worked on "Milk Man" for six months, and that's six months pretty much full time. You want to know my trick? My trick is, A-B it with something else I like. At that time I was going back and forth with this band Les Nubians — they had an album called One Step Forward that I would play all the time. We were flying back from an England tour, and they had it on the radio on the plane. It was this super clean, totally perfectly recorded music, obviously super-high budget. Every sound on there was so clear — every single thing that any instrument does is perfectly audible. I'd play "Milk Man" and I'd play that, and ours would just sound like complete mush. Going back and forth with something like that, like a model, it was always helpful in trying to figure out what was wrong.
