EQ Magazine - December 2008 - (Page 20)

FOR THE RECORD the U.S. James says that the band had recorded in various studios in the relatively rustic surroundings of their Kentucky hometown throughout their decade-long career. For Evil Urges, the group felt they needed a change of scenery, and therefore left their Midwestern abode and headed towards the bright lights of the big city. But while they knew that they wanted an urban environment to work in, they were undecided on where to set up shop. At Chiccarelli’s urging, the band hopped in the van and soon found themselves in New York City, sitting at a Neve 8088 in what is unarguably one of the East Coast’s greatest recording facilities: Avatar Studios. Chosen not only for its first-class gear list or the convenience factor of being smack dab in the middle of West 53rd St., Avatar was also the perfect studio for My Morning Jacket to work in due to its multiple (five), spacious iso booths. “We were going to record bass, drums, two guitars, keyboards, and a lead vocal, all live,” Chiccarelli explains. “We had to be able to isolate everyone. We also wanted a lot of space for each player so we could easily audition different amps and keyboards on the spot.” Before the first tom was tuned, the band decided to utilize Avatar’s Studer A-800 MARK III 24-track tape machine for the majority of the tracking. “We used Pro Tools for additional tracks of horns, strings, background vocals, etc.” Chiccarelli says. “But all of the tape editing was done with a razor—old school.” “We did the guitar and vocal overdubs in Pro Tools so we didn’t have to link up two tape machines,” James adds, going further to proclaim his love of the integrated approach. “It’s the best of both worlds. I just wish that there was another way to meld the sound quality of tape with the workflow advantages of digital. But with anything digital you’ll always have the problem of people infinitely editing and f**king around. We spent the first half of these sessions without a computer running. It made things much simpler.” The decision was made to record each song from the top-down, collect multiple takes, and then comp together the best performances. “They’re such good players that it wasn’t an issue,” Chiccarelli says of the band’s ability to pull off a respectable track in a single take. “But sometimes the chorus is a little better in take four and the bridge is better in take three and you like the outro from take seven . . . we wanted to leave ourselves with lots of options.” oing into Avatar, I knew which songs I wanted to sound dry and tight, and which songs I wanted to sound open and roomy, so we immediately set up two rooms for two different sounds,” says drummer Patrick Hallahan. “The rather large main room was the right environment for big-sounding songs like ‘Evil Urges,’ and ‘Smokin’ from Shootin.’ A ‘dead’ vocal booth worked perfectly for the more machine-like beats on ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Parts 1 and 2’ and ‘Highly Suspicious.’” Besides the occasional TR-808 kick sample being blended in as a helper track and the Roland CR-8000 chugging away in the back of the mix on “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Part 2,” the oftentimes cold, industrial percussion one hears on Evil Urges is all man-made. “Obviously drum machine sounds are shorter, punchier, more compressed-sounding, so we needed a small, dead acoustic space to replicate that,” Chiccarelli tells. “We were lucky that this vocal booth worked so well. It barely held his kit. But the low end really built up in that small room and it made the tracks sound quite punchy.” Surprisingly enough, the few effects that Chiccarelli used on Hallahan’s drum tracks were dialed in and committed to during the tracking process. “Joe is very particular about getting as much done pre-mix as possible, so most of the signal processing was done as the tracks were recorded,” Hallahan says. Chiccarelli adds: “I don’t leave a lot of decisions to mixing. I print the sounds how I want them because I don’t want to leave these things until later. When I bring up the faders I want to hear the way the record is actually going to sound.” According to Chiccarelli, the magic of Hallahan’s drum sounds cannot be attributed to mic choices or signal paths full of boutique gear but, rather, the drummer’s masterful technique: “When it comes to getting that tight, dry sound, we would do things like mic only the top of the snare instead of our regular over-and-under miking. And we would deaden the heads so there wasn’t so much resonance. But it’s all about Pat’s stick technique. He would choke up on his stick, which keeps the stick from rebounding and therefore keeps the head from resonating much after a strike. That’s what made the machine sound.” “G M indful of the fact that a rock record is only as good as the worst guitar sound contained in the A LITTLE EQ “I should note that the one other piece of gear used all over this album is the Chandler TG12345 Curve Bender equalizer,” Joe Chiccarelli tells us as we’re finishing up a last-minute fact check on the story you now hold in your hands. “I used this as the final stop on my rough mixes, which [mixing engineer] Michael Brauer modeled his final stereo mixes after.” Chiccarelli calls the Curve Bender, which is modeled after the EMI TG12345 desk used to record the Beatles and Pink Floyd at Abbey Road, “very powerful and rock and roll sounding. A couple of clicks—the boosts and cuts work in 0.5dB increments—can dramatically color the overall sound of the mix. I've subsequently used the same EQ for recent projects like The Raconteurs, The White Stripes and Brandi Carlile.” 20 EQ DECEMBER 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

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

EQ Magazine - December 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In My Morning Jacket Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Cakewalk Sonar 8 Propellerhead Reason 4 Indie 500: Lunchbox Pres and Compressors 500 Series Preamps 500 Series Compressors Gadgets and Goodies Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - December 2008

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