What is this building we're in?
My parents built their house and finished it in '76 — the year I was born. I was actually born in the house. My pop is a musician so he had bands. After the house was done, he started building this [the second structure] with the idea that it would be a place to hang out and play music.
Did your dad teach you music when you were young?
Yeah, my dad sparked that first interest. For some reason, I gravitated to drums. Their drummer didn't show up for rehearsal one time so Pop was like, "Just get over there and play some drums."
You picked up other instruments along the way — bass, guitar and keyboards?
Yeah. I was definitely fortunate to have access to everything.
Did he have anything to record with when you were young?
I think he had a reel-to-reel at one point, but I never used it. In high school, the 4-track that I first started experimenting with was his. I think it was a [Tascam] 424.
So you ended up moving back here a few years ago?
Yeah, it's been almost four years. My wife and I moved out here to have our first child. We were living in the [San Francisco] Bay Area and it's expensive there, so we thought we'd get a couple of years where we didn't have to work that much and could be with our daughter. Before we moved, I recorded a 4-track demo called The Bedroom Recordings just to get songs done. That's what Ubiquity [Records] picked up on. Some of the songs I recorded at that point in time are actually on The Fix in a different form. Later we decided to move back up to the Bay Area because of school options for our daughter Stella and to get more of a community vibe. It had been pretty isolated. Ubiquity put out an EP [The Real Better Believe] that had a few of those earlier songs — mostly 4-track stuff.
Were they meant to be demos?
I was recording to get stuff out of my mind and onto something — it wasn't really to demo them out to do them later. When the album started to come to fruition, I wanted some of those songs to be represented. However, it made sense to re-record a couple of them in order to fit sonically on the album.
What did you record The Fix on?
One song is on a 4-track from that time period, some of it is Pro Tools and some of it is an 8-track 1" machine — just between those three things. It's pretty back and forth. Some of the drums are recorded on the 8-track 1" and a lot of the embellishments — top end stuff — are done in Pro Tools because it's easier to set up.
Did you track drums on the 1" and put it into Pro Tools?
Yeah. For half the songs on the album the drums were done on tape (and some of the bass) but the rest was done on Pro Tools. I love working in Pro Tools and I love the sound of tape too, so I try to use both of them. Sometimes it's just easier to use Pro Tools, especially because there's rarely anyone out here with me. Running back and forth trying to get levels — it's a lot easier with Pro Tools.
Some of the drums on The Fix have a crazy quality — kind of roomy but a little overdriven and sort of crunchy, mid-fidelity. What is causing that?
I like to mess around with overdriving preamps. However, it's more or less about trying to figure out what I want to hear versus trying to make it a certain way. When it sounds right, it's right. I'm not that technical in terms of recording. I put up a couple of mics and move shit around until it sounds good. Sometimes it sounds cool to turn the preamps up — maybe that's what you're referring to.
A preamp would also bring up the room tone when you distort it — I was hearing that — but then there would be other songs that sounded gated.
Super dry? I love using gates! Sometimes it's only gated on the actual snare. I would say about 85 to 90 percent of the drums on the album were done live. I usually start with drums, put them down first and add on to the top. As far as the gating goes, sometimes I'll gate the live snare or I'll just put a snare on top from the drum machine or the Nord keyboard. On the song, "Are You For Real," it's a live drum part. On top of [those drums] are kick drums from the Nord and snare drums played live to augment what the drums were doing. I got heavily into gating the drums.
It's a cool contrast. Some tracks feature roomy, crunchy drums and other songs are real tight.
Yeah, that's what gating does — it tightens everything up. It becomes so attack-y.
It's synthetic but not synthetic.
It's like a drum machine, but it's live drums. I'm a huge Questlove and Sly Stone fan -the drums are always so cool — in your face and present. There's a whole cliché with gates in the '80s — with the toms and whatnot — but for me the best use of a gate is for the dry effect.
Do you ever gate other instruments to tighten them up with the drums, like put the bass through a gate and trigger it from the kick?
No, I haven't. I gotta try that now! I've heard about people triggering the bass gate through a kick drum. I've never tried because I don't know how to set it up.
Use the "key" input. You can set this so the kick hits and bass attacks slow behind the hit, so the input kind of sculpts the gated sound.
That sounds cool for a handful of songs — to mess around with.
Occasionally this works.
Of course. That's what I found with the gates in general — sometimes they really work and you usually know when it doesn't.
What gear did you have for recording The Fix?
I bought a board, a handful of preamps, new speakers and some [Empirical Lab] Distressors after I got signed, using the advance. I beefed up the studio, but I had been building it before then. For the last ten or twelve years I'd been accumulating a lot of the instruments. In the process, I've moved from a 4- track to ADATs to a reel-to-reel and then to Pro Tools — the standard stepping-stones of recording. I had one of those [Tascam] MX-2424s for a little while. That was right around when the Digi001 came out — you remember the whole Pro Tools hysteria? I bought into it. [laughs] Out of all those mediums, the 4-track and the Pro Tools are still here.
