EQ Magazine - July 2008 - (Page 22)

Analog Tape, Blood Sugar , and Random Bits of Genius Convention, XTC, Jethro Tull] did. He stuffed a pillow inside his kick drum, and laid a Shure SM91 on top of it. The SM91 doesn’t always work alone, though. On some kicks, it just doesn’t sound right by itself. In those cases, my technique is to place a Neumann U47 FET or a Beyerdynamic M 88 outside the kick, in conjunction with the SM91. One in, one out. What about toms? If it’s not a 57 or a 421, it’s a Schoeps CMCs positioned either right on top, or, if I want a boomier sound, stuck inside the toms with no heads on the bottom of the shells. You used the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and the 8-voice Oberheim OB-X on Narrow Stairs. Do you find recording vintage synths more challenging than newer instruments? The challenges have more to do with the format than the instrument. If you are on tape, it’s all about commitment. If you don’t like it, you just do it over. That was very much the deal with recording analog synths. You have to settle on your sounds right off the bat, instead of just programming everything in MIDI, and then assigning sounds later on down the road. But doing takes that way is so much more emotionally stimulating. I really think it’s better for your music if you build everything from the ground up. Narrow Stairs has lots of nods towards the Kraut rock scene—it’s very experimental. Do you anticipate that these elements will throw your core fans for a loop? I think so. But I also think that the album is all held together by Ben’s voice and his writing style. It’s not completely removed from anything we’ve ever done. We are such lovers of pop songs, and you can still hear that. Sure, the hooks are there. But there also seems to be a William Burroughs “random thought” approach to the sounds and arrangements. Random events are something I am usually going for, though. For example, Ben will throw together loops on the fly in his delay pedal, and I always have a half-inch deck up when tracking so I can grab anything at any point. I would grab his loops on tape, and then cut up the reel, throw it in a shoebox, shake it up, and then tape it all back together [laughs]. There are a lot of strange sounds on Narrow Stairs. On “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” what sounds like human No automation allowed: Chris Walla plans out his fader moves while Jason McGerr (background, left) and Ben Gibbard (background, right) watch on. right on the cone. All of the signals are then summed to tape. What about mic placement for your guitar amps? With guitars, I tend to like the mic right in the middle of the cone, pushed into the grill. What does dead-center mic placement give you? It gives you the impression the guitar is going to eat your brain [laughs]. I really enjoy that sound. And then I try versions of that placement, angled off axis—particularly with ribbons. I’ll angle them at 30 or 45 degrees. For this album, the ribbon was an AEA R84. Did you use your Dr. Z or Matchless guitar amps on Narrow Stairs? I did use my Dr. Z 2x10 cabinet on the album, but with the Tremolux head. We lean on that Tremolux really hard. Also, our guitar tech builds amps—he calls them Acme amplifiers— and we use them quite a bit. They’ve got a push/pull on/off switch so you can turn it off without losing your volume setup. They are really cool. They’ve got a ’66 Marshall circuit design—Dave Grohl used one on The Colour and The Shape. We couple that head with one of Ben’s cabs that he picked up for $35 at a pawnshop. It looks like someone tried, and failed, to make a Fender cabinet [laughs]. And you used something called The Magnasync—what is that? The Magnasync is one of the cornerstones of Narrow Stairs. That also belongs to our guitar tech. Ampex had the MX-10, Altec had a few tube mixers, and then there was the Magnasync. It’s like an old P.A. amp. It’s all tube, with three tube mic preamps and one line-level master output. We used it for the drums. Each drum was individually miked and run through a ’76 Neve 5316 console. However, we started taping a second set of mics to the kit, so they were phase-coherent, and we sent those signals to the Magnasync. Kick on channel one, snare on channel two, and then the toms Y-adapted together to get into the third input. We would run out of the Magnasync into the Chandler TG-1 limiter, where we would just crush those secondary mics to death. Then, of course, the signal would hit the tape. That is the drum sound on this album. How did you mic the drums? Oftentimes, I’ll put seven Shure SM57s on the kit and that’s it [laughs]. “I Will Possess Your Heart” is all 57s and Sennheiser MD 421s—except for an extra microphone taped inside of the hi-hat. It’s this old plastic Panasonic tape recorder mic I’ve used at different points on a lot of records I’ve worked on. I just love the sound of it. It turns the hi-hat sound into this little burst of white noise. You have to gaffer’s tape the mic to the cymbals to get the effect—you want to lose any kind of resonance. You didn’t really mic an entire kit with 57s and 421s, did you? Even your kick drum? On “I Will Possess Your Heart”— yes! On other songs, I approached the kick the same way Dave Mattacks [drummer for George Harrison, Fairport 22 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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