EQ Magazine - July 2008 - (Page 8)

PUNCH IN HEAR, HERE! Louis XIV’s Jason Hill on Abiding by an Analog Ethos BY SHANE MEHLING Louis XIV may not be royalty yet, but with their new album, Slick Dogs & Ponies, the San Diegobased quartet is well on their way. While notorious for their penchant for double entendres and wickedly wild shows, the band has also gained the respect of the rock world for their indisputably rich melodies and bombastic garage rock energy. Wielding a veritable mountain of equipment and ear for retro sounds, singer/guitarist Jason Hill has taken the Renaissance man approach and crafted the sound of his band’s newest release in his private studio. Prying Hill away from his console proved itself to be no easy task but we managed to conduct a quick chat about how Louis XIV produces their signature sound at home. Here’s what he had to say. My first question is about how you recorded Mark Maigaard’s drums. You’ve managed a really tight sound, which is a surprising choice given how many modern rock bands strive for huge drum sounds. That sound drives me nuts; I much prefer a dry drum sound. It’s like every song on the radio has the same open sound. It’s quite boring. We wanted a tighter sound, something where you could really discern the tuning of the drums. We had a very live room with 20foot ceilings, so we built a teepee around the drums with blankets to mitigate that damage. It protected our overheads—which are ribbons, and therefore pick things up in a figure-eight pattern—from any unwanted ambience. The bass sounds as if you recorded a cabinet instead of taking the DI route. That’s right. I put a [Neumann] U 47 FET in front of a [Fender] Bassman 100 that had two speakers taken out of it to make the remaining two push harder. That’s the sound. What about your guitar cabinets? For guitars I’d use either a [Neumann] U 67 alone or in conjunction with a TLM-103, which can handle serious SPL. I’ll put the TLM 103 on the cone and the U 67 on the back of the cabinet. For other projects, I’m a fan of adding a GefelI into the mix as a room mic but I didn’t do that on this album. Which Gefell mic? The old Neumann tube ones from ’62. They’re a bit larger than a U 67. You can really push them; you can put them right on the grille if you want. They seem to have a much different frequency response than, say, an AKG 414 or a U 67 or any of the other condensers I like to use for guitars, so adding them in can definitely add a different dimension to your sound. Slick Dogs and Ponies has a lot of strings in the mix. What made you decide to integrate that element into your repertoire? Electric Light Orchestra influenced some of the production as far as string arrangements went. We worked with David Campbell, and we’d play him ELO and how they recorded strings. We wanted to make them an integral part of the record, almost like a fifth member of the band. In many ways the strings create the dominant melodies of the songs. How did you capture them? We had a few girls from a high school band play the violins, and we just set up two [Neumann] U 47s in X/Y. The cello is a single U 47 pointed right at where the musician’s bow hit the strings. Compressing that particular track really brought out the attack, but it also added a real richness to the sound. Do you abuse your compressor often? [Laughs] I love compression. I absolutely adore it. It just depends on how you use it. The technique is definitely overused, even by me sometimes—I’m guilty of crushing things too much. I have heard so many drums that sound like crap because of over-compression. In my opinion, a lot of the problem nowadays is due to the way digital compressors react with the high frequencies of cymbals and guitars. It doesn’t sound the same as tape compression or an old [Urei] 1176. So we’re back to the old analog vs. digital debate already? Don’t get me wrong; I bounce between my Studer and Pro Tools. The latter is convenient especially for experimentation. And it doesn’t present the same kind of workflow challenges as a tape machine. My 16-track has turned into a 12-track more times than I can count [laughs]. I’m a firm believer that you can make great sounds in the digital world, but it’s so much harder to get warm sounds. Digital sounds a lot more flat and cold. It’s an old argument, but there’s a reason why people still record to tape. 8 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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