Recording - April 2020 - 33

That sounds really fun and
creative!

Maia: Thinking about that reminds
me-the first few acoustic tracks we
did for the first project, were on the
Neumann M149. I wanted the guitar to
be big, broad, real, in your face, and
clean. And we slowly moved to the AKG
452, and it's just tiny. It takes all the low
stuff off. It's the opposite of the M149.
Now it's all I use. It's okay. The guitar
doesn't have to be giant, you know?
Anna: Sometimes I even record acoustic on my iPhone to get that lo-fi compression crunch.

Tell me more about your home
studios.

Anna: I have a MacBook Pro with Logic Pro X and a Universal Audio Apollo
Twin with a bunch of UAD plugins, so I
don't overload the DSP on my MacBook.
I have a pair of Dynaudio LYD 7 monitors and a pair of five-inch JBL 305PMKII
monitors. Maia also has a pair. We intentionally have the same JBL monitors

for mixing. Then I have an Arturia MIDI
keyboard, a janky Alesis QX 49 that I
play pads on. For mics, I have a Shure
SM7B and a RØDE NTK. I have some
amps that I'll sometimes mic up and a lot
of guitars, that's pretty much it. 

What's your setup, Maia?

Maia: Mine is completely different
from Anna's. I use Reaper on a PC going through an RME Babyface because
I travel with it a lot. I usually run the
Neumann M149 through my Rupert
Neve Designs Portico half-rack 5012. I
also have a [Dave] Pearlman TM-1 tube
mic. He's a guy in LA who builds mics
by hand.

I love Dave's mics. I have his
TM-47, which is a cardioidonly 47-style mic.

Maia: This one is so clean and cool
sounding. When I use it, it wants to go
through the Universal Audio SOLO/610
tube preamp-then it's at its best. It doesn't get along as well with the Portico,

but the Neumann does. For instruments,
I have a Nord Electro 3, and I also have
a real piano, a parlor grand, a real
Wurli, and then a bunch of guitars. We
also have a little keyboard that showed
up early in the process, a Yamaha Reface CP. We used it on the opening loop
of 'Play On'. It's one of those crazy little
hybrid instruments that helped define
our sound early on.

Who played the electric
guitars on both the album and
the EP? 
Maia: We both played electric guitar,
but Anna is more than half of it.
Anna: That was usually one of the
last things we did; getting to track electrics was like the reward at the end of
the song.
Maia: That was the thing that we most
likely did in the same room because
you're bouncing ideas back and forth
and finding little signature lines, playing
too much, and then dialing back and
simplifying it.

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Recording - April 2020

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