EQ Magazine - July 2008 - (Page 9)

So you track to tape, bounce to Pro Tools, edit, and then send back to tape? Exactly. Though a lot of times I’ll use this old Revere tube tape machine I have that just sounds incredible. For this album, all of the piano tracks were recorded onto that, bounced to a Studer, and then shot over to Pro Tools to add layers. It was a master stereo, so I’d go through the channel and out the master compressor, which sounds amazing, especially for drums. It’s got a unique sound. But to access it I’d have to go through the headphone jack and into the tape machine. It was totally rigged, and people would say I was out of my mind, but it sounded the best. How do you approach a Louis XIV mix? I’ll try to throw everything up on the faders and go from there. I don’t just start with the drums like some people do. For this album, I actually enlisted the help of Mark Needham for mixing because I had just gotten sick of listening to it. Our last record [The Distances from Everyone to You] was an easy mix; I’d just subgroup all the drums into one or two tracks and often just a single mono signal. Then I’d throw the rest of the instruments on, basically making mono channels out of whatever I had. But for this record we did so much when tracking. Every song has five or six sessions of drums all comped together, where this one snare drum will pop in for two beats on the chorus, and a cello would pop in on the verse. There was so much going on, I had a breakdown. It was like trying to wrangle cats back in the house [laughs]. There are some interesting pans on this album. Were those done at your order? I love hard panning almost as much as I love compression [laughs]. I’m a real big fan of taking mono tracks and just sending them all over to one side. Hell, I’ll do the same with stereo [laughs]. You can’t get any better sound than what you’ll find on a Beatles record. By today’s standards, those drums supposedly don’t kick hard enough or whatever, but I fell in love with that sound. When you are editing and mixing in Pro Tools, do you adhere to the old-school approach of using analog outboard or do you secretly use plug-ins when no one is watching? I’m not opposed to using plugins, but I don’t really use them. I’ve fiddled around with [Audio Ease’s] Altiverb because I don’t have a real plate though. Still, I try to approach my projects when they are in the box as if I was still on tape. Editing out all the pops is a nice option to have, but I always have to remind myself to stop watching the screen and listen instead. It’s not got much to do with the sonic quality; it’s about the process. I don’t need every cut to be clean, every fade to be perfectly measured. I don’t want to stop being musical and start being mathematical. Also, I think I just respond to the sound of the metal of an actual unit [laughs]. Is there a sound to that? I don’t know, except I think an 1176 sounds great, and the plug-in version, while decent, doesn’t sound the same. Louis XIV (left to right): Mark Maigaard, Jason Hill, Brian Karcsig, James Armbrust. www.eqmag.com JULY 2008 EQ 9 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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