In what order do you generally lay down tracks when you're recording?
Usually it's the drums first, with a scratch guitar and vocal track. On our first album (Papas Fritas), the drums were mostly done with a single PZM mic.
Really?
Yeah, we'd put it under the snare. On a few tracks we also used a [SM] 57 on top, and on "TV Movies" we used a 414 to pick up the brushes better. But mostly a PZM. On our second album (Helioself) we used four mics for the drums. We'll track them all to separate tracks, but we always bounce the drums down to mono as soon as we need the space. Vocals come next, to make sure there's enough space to get them together. You know, enough room to bounce stuff around, submix harmonies and doubled harmonies. The most important thing is to get the drums, get the track together, but then get the vocals and build around the vocals. I don't know enough about mixing, maybe guys can make room for the vocals at that stage no matter what. But that way, everything else gets built around the drums and vocals, so that the other parts are reacting to what are really the most important parts.
Yeah, there are guys who can mix and make space for vocals, but it might take a lot of EQ.
With vocals, getting the performance is the most important thing. I don't mess around that much with micing techniques but more with which mic I'm using. You're singing the melody, and you just want to get that strong and in front. You're not going to create space with vocals, you're going to create it with other instruments. So after we do the vocals, usually bouncing them down to 2 or 3 tracks, we build around them. Guitar, piano, organ, other percussion come next. Sometimes these get bounced, if there's two parts in different frequency ranges and I need the space I will combine them on one track. Sometimes I'll mix two parts on a bounce, but one really quiet if it's a part that I don't really care if it gets lost. If it pops up in a couple spots, that's cool, it adds to the layering without really taking up room. Bass goes down last, on it's own track, to keep it punchy.
Let's talk about history a little. Were you doing 4-track stuff before you got together with Keith and Shivika?
No, that's really how the band started. I had gotten a 4-track and was just starting to mess around with that stuff a bit. I was in the big band at school and in a smaller jazz ensemble and then a free improvisation ensemble. I got a 4-track to start recording that stuff. And then I was getting into the idea of, instead of just recording spontaneous improvisation, getting into layering. I was listening to bands like Sebadoh, Tall Dwarves, stuff like that. Stuff where you knew they were 4-tracking. Shivika inherited a drum kit from her cousin, I knew her because we're both from Delaware, we went to high school together, and she wanted a place to keep it, and I wanted to start writing songs to record. And it just kind of grew out of that. Keith was around too. We kind of formed to play at a friends party but it started on 4-track, just messing around with that, but we got pretty into it. We didn't have much for gear, had a standard grey Tascam 424. I had a 57. I used a headphone for the bass drum microphone... have you ever done that, plug the headphone out into the input jack?
Did you think that one out, like, oh, that'll be like a large diaphragm mic, good for bass?
Oh, no [laughs]. It was just there. And I have a silver Electrovoice mic from the 50's, that I inherited from my grandfather. The kind you might see on old Byrds records.
A condenser?
No, dynamic, kind of what was a 57 back then. A live mic for bashing. And we were recording and playing some parties. We had done some songs and a friend of mine said, "Do you want to put that out as a single? We were just mixing down to cassette at that point. So we went into a 16 track studio in Boston, a place called Birdog Studios and started recording some stuff there. We tried "Lame to Be," which is on our first album. They had a 16 track one-inch, and a pretty big room. I was starting to have some idea of how I wanted it to sound, but I really didn't have a very clear idea. I was like, "make the guitars sound like tin foil." And the guy was like, "what are you talking about?" He just wanted to set up the mics, record what we do live, and make it sound professional. He didn't really want to produce... his idea of producing was setting up mics and recording. But we had no idea what we wanted to do either. So that just didn't work out. My big trip with it is that, when you're playing live, people can see you, there's more than one sense being engaged. And when you're recording, you can't just record what you do and put some reverb on it, unless you're such an amazing performer. You've got to make a listening experience. They've already looked at your CD booklet a couple times, there's not more visuals than that, so you've got to make the listening experience more visual. You've got to create a sound environment that the listener can enter into, or hear textures develop and shift, you know what I mean? You're creating a picture. With the latest album we took that even further. With that song "Say Goodbye," that's about turning into an angel. So we wanted to have lots of soft and airy sounds, like the organ with the high bells. And there's that song "Live By the Water," which is about moving out into the country. You're going to use acoustic instruments; you're not going to use electric guitars to write a song about living in the country. And there's "Rolling In the Sand," which is about when we played at a bar where a fight broke out, so we used an old saloon-style piano with thumbtacks. Just trying to create a picture with sound. The downside of that is that sometimes people thought the music was too theatrical, too much like a show tune. Minty Fresh contacted us, and we hadn't had a good experience in the studio, so we decided to get our own stuff. I got the 8 track [a half-inch Otari] and a Mackie 1604, we bought a 414, and a couple PZM's. Minty Fresh is in Chicago, so they got me in touch with Brad Wood, who said, "Oh, Radio Shack has these PZM's, you should check them out." I think he had only done the first Liz Phair album by then, he wasn't quite so well-known. So I got that stuff, and I just concentrated on drums a lot. I knew I didn't want big, loud drums. Just figuring out, oh, I'll mic it from there, or put towels over them, which is anathema to most drummers. "How dare you duct tape tissues to my drums?" But it's just a question of what works. And we just started recording the album in our basement. We realized we had all these songs from when we started playing but how were we going to make a band out of this? We had recorded them as we went along, and it sounded like too many different styles. How to unify it, through different arranging techniques? Like the muted guitars and drum sounds, that was trying to make it more unified. Reading interviews with Lindsey Buckingham, he said, "My greatest contribution to Fleetwood Mac wasn't as a guitar player or a singer or a songwriter, but being able to take these three songwriters and create an identity for the band." Realizing that it's not just recording a drum kit, or getting a cool guitar sound, it's creating a whole sound for the band. There's a quote from Brian Wilson, talking about Phil Spector, where he says, "I wasn't really into production until I realized it's not just the song, it's like you're creating a two-minute experience for the listener, not just a two-minute song. A great record should be like an experience they've had, that they can go back to whenever they put on that record." I have pretty grandiose role models [laughs].
Did you kind of bash around in the dark awhile when you first got the 8-track? While you were trying to get this vision together?
Yeah, for a really long time. Our first single was "Passion Play," with a string section. I thought that would be cool, but I didn't really know what I was going for, I just thought it sounded kind of retro. And "Lame To Be," our first version was what we did live, distorted guitars, but on the album, I knew I wanted it to sound different but I didn't know what it was. When we play it live, it's like this, [plays descending bar chords]. But I realized I wanted it to be like this [plays descending bass line with suspended harmony]. It's not just sound that makes a recording, it's how you decide to harmonize.
There's that piano part on there too, that ascends at the end of each line.
Yeah, to break all the parts up, [plays parts on piano]. That's when I started to learn to play piano a bit too. And realizing what a lame instrument the guitar is because you're just playing chords [laughs]. In that song "For No One" by the Beatles, he just plays a C chord the entire time. Same with "Penny Lane," he just plays a C chord the whole time and moves the bass down with his left hand. But with guitar, you see the natural relationships...
The three and the five always following the root.
Yeah, exactly. So I was just getting into that, there was a lot of bashing around.
Did you reach a point where you said, OK, I've got it now, we're going to start with the first song and do it right?
Kind of. I started getting some things together. It was kind of like when you're bashing around on a paper for school and it takes you forever to figure out how you want the paper to be but once you do you're like, "Fuck, now I gotta write the thing." So, yeah, I got the drum sound in place, and the whole muted guitar thing came from thinking of how to make the rhythm more harmonic. Putting polyrhythms in there that aren't just percussion, that are harmonic or melodic too. Like guitar parts that hit the chords on the two and the four with the snare. It was kind of a drag because I'd play it for my friends and they'd be like, what is this? This doesn't sound like you guys. We sound like one thing live but this is what we sound like in the studio. I always like that, when you see a band live and it's different from the record and you've learned something more about them, as opposed to just hearing them play the record. So yeah, we were bashing around, the record company was like, just record it!
Had they seen you live at that point?
They hadn't seen us live before. Anyhow, from playing jazz in the big band, the guitar players in those bands are never just strumming chords, you know, they're filling in holes and hitting spots. So I've never been the kind of guitar player that just strums chords, I've always wanted the parts to be smaller.
So once you have the drums and vocals down, do the other parts develop out of improvisation, or do you know what everything is going to be before you roll tape at all?
