EQ Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 22)

THE PANIC IS ON listening to Danny Elfman and Alfred Hitchcock scores,” says the producer. “If he’s listening to the Beatles, it’s a George Harrison solo record, or the song on Yellow Submarine that no one likes. I told him early on that anything he wanted to do musically—anything at all he could dream up—we could do.” In order to achieve such lofty goals, Mathes needed to find an amazing recording engineer. Enter NYC-based engineer Claudius Mittendorfer, once the assistant, and then tracking engineer for Rich Costey (Muse, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, The Mars Volta). With the right personnel in hand, Panic hit their hometown’s top-of-the-line recording facility, Studio At The Palms in October 2007 to begin tracking. LAYING DOWN BASICS As soon as the members entered the studio, the band went straight to work on “Nine In The Afternoon,” the album’s first single. Everyone had agreed in an early meeting with Mittendorfer that the band would track live to tape. “In our initial conversations—and on ‘Nine In The Afternoon’ specifically—the biggest point we wanted to get across was that we wanted to sound like a real band,” says Ross. “Tracking this album live to tape was totally new to us, and it immediately made everything more organic sounding. It also helped us change and develop our parts during tracking, because we’d do ten complete takes of a song, instead of comping every little piece together, and we tended to change what we were playing each time. We ended up with some really cool stuff that we wouldn’t have played had we recorded the parts separately into a DAW.” “We just recorded a bunch of takes— circa 1968 recording style,” adds Mathes. “I would listen to all the takes, put together an edit, and then we’d do a few overdubs. But the basic tracks—guitar, bass, drums, and piano—were preserved as one performance we could work from.” Like many songs on Pretty. Odd, “Nine In The Afternoon” is energetic pop rock super-sized by huge vocal harmonies and enormous string and horn sections. However, at the core, Panic is a naturally animated band, and having been captured honestly, theirs is a rock sound that stands out even within the lush Mathes arrangement. Mittendorfer captured a variety of sonic personalities by first meeting with each member to discuss a variety of possible sounds for their respective parts. “You always want to have a few options in the end,” says Mittendorfer. “You want to get an edgy sound, and go for an extra flavor, but you want to have a way out of that sound, too. So I always had two amps running when recording Ryan’s guitars. For example, one would be a traditional clean Fender Twin sound, and the other would be some glitch-y, freaked-out amp. Most of the time, the two amps summed together would make up the sound we were going for.” 1081. Even though hitting the tape mellowed out the sound a bit, I still had to use a low-pass filter, because fuzzy guitars can get unbearably bright.” For the pop-rocker, “When The Day Met The Night,” Ross wanted to make a unique sitar sound with his guitar. The guitarist describes his signal chain as “a combination of a Korg Kaoss pad used as a filter, and a Danelectro sitar pedal mixed with an EBow to get a smooth sound with almost no attack, and some reverb to really widen the track.” On most of Ross’ lead-guitar parts, Mittendorfer miked the guitarist’s Fender Twin Reverb with a Royer R-121, and his Vox cabinet (with either a Vox head, or a 36-watt Satellite Atom head) with an active Royer R-122. “I mic the amps roughly two inches from the grille, and a little off center of the cone,” describes Mittendorfer. “It’s always helpful to use a flashlight to actually find the center, before you try to go a little off to the left or right of the cone. I try to get as close as I can without annihilating the microphone, but as the active Royer can’t take as much volume level as the passive one, I can only get within two inches. To combat phasing issues, I have to place each mic at an equal distance from the cone—hence my two-inch rule.” DRUM SOUNDS On Smith’s drums, Mittendorfer switched mics on a song-by-song basis. Mimicking his approach to recording guitar, sought to capture two disparate drum sounds per song—the first being a clean, straight rock kit, and the second being a more distorted, vibey kit that would ultimately be mixed slightly under the straight sound. “I would get a core drum sound—kick, snare, overheads, and room mics—that was pretty clean and uncompressed,” he says. “I wouldn’t even EQ the overheads. I’d just get a nice level to tape, and be done with it. But, I’d add a second kit sound that was heavily compressed, vibey, and dark to help fill out the mix, and give the drums some character.” For his room sounds, Mittendorfer used two stereo pairs, one near and one far. “A lot of times, the bombastic room sound didn’t fit with the songs we were recording, but I wanted to record them for the fills,” he notes. “I used a pair of Coles 4038s that would naturally create this other ‘mono-fat-compressed’ kit sound. I’d run them through the Chandler We just recorded a bunch of takes—circa 1968 recording style. R O B M AT H E S The tracking setup placed Smith’s drum kit in the large live room, guitar and upright piano in the two isolation booths, and bass in a third isolated alcove. All tracks were cut to a Studer A827 Gold Edition two-inch, 24-track recorder using RMG 900 tape aligned to +6/185, and synced to Pro Tools using Audio Kinetics synchronizers. This left Mittendorfer a total of 22 tracks to work with (minus two tracks for a click and timecode). “Every song’s core was tape-based,” he assures. “Only the overdubs were done straight to Pro Tools. On certain songs with minimal overdubs, such as ‘That Green Gentleman,’ about 75 percent of the song was actually cut to tape live in the studio.” GUITAR TRACKS There is a ton of variety in the guitar sounds on Pretty. Odd. For example, for the lead guitar on “That Green Gentleman,” Ross wanted a dirty fuzz guitar sound or, as Mathes describes it: “Something like the old Hiwatt amps Pete Townsend used where the sound is like metal, but it’s not hyper distorted. It’s edgy, but clean enough so that you can hear the chords. To get that nasty, yet really close and direct-sounding distortion, I ran the guitar into a Radial DI with a Jensen transformer, and then routed a Neve 1081 preamp into another “ ” 22 EQ JUNE 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - June 2008

EQ Magazine - June 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board 3 Doors Down, Hard-Fi, Paul Manousos Tool Box Panic at the Disco Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Cakewalk Projects Apple Loops Utility SSL Duende Mini JBL LSR4326/PAK & LSR4312SP Holophone H3-D Creation Audio Labs MW1 Studio Tool Amp Modeler Roundup Eventide Timefactor, Electro-Harmonix Stereo Pedals, Korg Pandora PX5D Room with a Vu: Blues Tunes Studios, Silverlake, CA

EQ Magazine - June 2008

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