EQ Magazine - July 2008 - (Page 18)

Analog Tape, Blood Sugar , and Random Bits of Genius “There is no Pro Tools, no Logic, no DAWs at all used on this album,” Walla says when asked about Death Cab for Cutie’s second major label effort, Narrow Stairs [Atlantic]. “I never use that stuff. All our records since Transatlanticism have been tracked straight to tape. There is no automation—it’s me cutting the half-inch masters together. I have never done it any other way, and I never will. Clearly people are making great records in digital platforms, but I am not one of those people. I’ve screwed around with it a little bit, and I am just not good at it. I am really good at keeping things together with performers in real time. I am not so good at deferring decisions until they are too many.” Thankfully, Walla has a group of musicians like Ben Gibbard (guitar/vocals), Jason McGerr (drums), and Nick Harmer (bass) that can step up to the plate and lay down solid tracks. Together, the group has been referred to as everything from “the new R.E.M.” to the poetic heirs to Leonard Cohen’s throne. But while Death Cab for Cutie have furthered the college-rock agenda with its previous recordings, Narrow Stairs sees the group taking an abrupt left turn, and exploring the dark underbelly of rock. Embracing dissonant and abrasive soundscapes, Narrow Stairs is Death Cab for Cutie breaking all the rules the band had imposed on themselves over the course of their past seven studio albums. All the rules except for one, that is. With Narrow Stairs, Death Cab for Cutie was intent on creating a great rock album the way their ancestors did—one splice at a time. Here, Walla reveals his studio approach for EQ readers. Both you and Ben Gibbard have forecasted Narrow Stairs to be a radical stylistic shift for Death Cab for Cutie. I’ve heard that punk and synthbased music was an influence on you when writing and recording this album. Is that true? That made the public record? I love it! I was doing an interview with a German magazine, and they asked me what the new record sounded like. I said, “It’s half-way between GG Allin and Fleetwood Mac.” I’m a huge fan of [’90s synth-punk band] Brainiac, and Nick is a huge metal fan, so that description is not totally untrue, but it’s not really the story. There wasn’t really any specific set of reasons why Narrow Stairs sounds the way that it does. It has more to do with our process than any specific sonic goal. We knew we really wanted to track a record together in a room. The linear four-guys-in-a-room-playing-a-song factor is really the biggest reason for the sound. Had the band not recorded that way before? We’d never tracked live before. We would record everything instrument by instrument. That is how I learned to record. I actually bought my first 8-track before I bought a guitar. If I wanted to record music with a friend, someone had to engineer, and someone had to play. That is how I recorded everything I ever did in high school, and that is how Ben and I recorded our first music together. When Ben got the idea to record something where he played everything himself, I was totally into it, but that meant that everything got laid down one instrument at a time. My solo record [Field Manual] was recorded the same way. It’s all overdubs—all little building blocks of music—because I played everything, except most of the drums. With Death Cab, I wanted to get everyone in the same place at the same time and just record it all together for once. I assume that, for you, tracking to tape is about making decisions in the moment? From 2004 to this year, a lot of my work has been in analog. It’s not a departure for me. On the Decemberists’ The Crane Wife that I did with [producer] Tucker Martine a couple of years back, nothing ever left the tape machine. It was done at 15 ips with Dolby SR. That was such a great experience. It makes you zoom out on everything. You can’t get immersed in whether or not one snare hit was totally perfect. I mean, you can obsess, and you can try to fix it, but if you goof it up, you’ve wrecked it. There’s no non-destructive editing when you’re cutting and splicing analog tape, so you end up re-evaluating what your version of perfect is. I think that’s a healthy thing to do. As the members have to concentrate on getting a good group performance, how much does recording live to tape make a band work harder? It does make the band work a little bit harder. But, more than that, it makes the band think differently. It’s Ben Gibbard laying down guitar tracks for the Narrow Stairs sessions. Chris Walla (background) and Ben Gibbard (foreground) winding down at the end of a long day. Chris Walla recording percussion overdubs at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco, CA. 18 EQ JULY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

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

EQ Magazine - July 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Louis XIV, Four TET and Steve Reid, Can Your Record Go Gold in the Digital Age Tool Box Death Cab For Cutie Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Propellerhead Reason 4 Sony Acid Pro 6 EDAX Audio Labs VTP-100 M-Audio Profire 2626 Tape Simulator Shootout Tape Simulators Sounds Room With a VU: Infrasonic Sound Recording Company, Los Angeles, CA.

EQ Magazine - July 2008

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