Recording - April 2020 - 35

Maia: Can be a ton of no fun. But comping other people, I
love it, and often I would just give Anna a final comp.

the space to just live with it for a day, take a breath. And we
always ended up finding that place of agreement again.

I've seriously heard that you're famous for your
comping skills.

Essentially you guys come from different musical
worlds. Maia, your first album was done in 1997,
and you've spent time in the Nashville and LA
studio world as a producer and songwriter.
Anna, you're from the more DIY, in-the-box home
studio world. What do you think is the biggest
thing that you have learned from each other?

Maia: I think it's just about patience. I don't mind spending a
lot of time to get it exactly the way I hear it in my head.
Anna: One problem I have is I like to look at waveforms
when I'm singing harmonies. For instance, in the song 'Chocolate Sauce', I needed to go home and look at the waveform
while I was singing so I could match Maia's phrasing.

A touchy subject often when I interview singers,
is vocal tuning.

Anna: Maia would generally do all the tuning.
Maia: We have no ego about that at all. If you get a killer
performance with a few pitch issues, you could go sing it a
bunch more times, or you could just take the note down five
cents, and it's great.

Moving to mixing, any favorite plugin EQs or
compressors?

Anna: For EQ, I like the FabFilter ProQ, because it's easy to
single out frequencies. I also like the API 550 EQ plugin. For
compressor plugins, I like the Waves CLA stuff a lot, and I think
the CLA 76 was used on most of the songs, or sometimes the
SSL Bus Comp or the Waves R-Comp.
Often for tracking, I would use Waves CLA Vocals. It gives
a decent level of compression, a little bit of width, a little bit of
delay, but not too extreme.

Would you actually track through it and print it,
or are you just monitoring through it?
Anna: Usually just monitoring. I like the freedom of being
able to mess with things later.

When it came time to mix the album, did you
get into bus compression and EQ?

Anna: We've never been asked that. Wow. I guess I would
say, the payoff of fine combing. From a lyrical standpoint, going back over and making sure everything is locked in. Then
translating that into production. That was something that I felt
like I hadn't really understood before we started writing.
Get the take, but also learn the balance between accuracy
and feeling. Anytime Maia sent me an audio file, I could trust
it. Then I could mess it up.
Maia: And smash the 16 tracks down to one [laughs].
Anna's response is very similar to mine. I could get really
wrapped up in the perceived perfection of a track or a vocal.
Anna showed me how to trust the earliest things. Like, that
rough track that was right. I don't have to take it fifteen more
times. That early take is what's delivering the feeling of the
song, and it's okay to just move forward and trust that.
I started trusting Anna's skills very early on, which meant I didn't
have to worry about the quality. I was free to think about the creative elements. Even coming from two totally different experiences
and being born two decades apart, we found an alignment very,
very quickly. It doesn't have to be precious to be right, and what
could be right for the song or for the production doesn't have to be
perfect. I'm working on a solo album right now and I'm absolutely
using those things that I got out of our Roscoe & Etta work.

I really want to thank you guys. This has been great.
Anna: Thank you, Paul.
Maia: Great talking to you.

Anna: Yup. I watched a lot of videos... I don't remember my
exact chain because it was constantly changing, and it was
very minimal. In addition to EQ, I like the Waves L3 multi-band
limiter and iZotope Ozone 9. I will say, if you don't have something on the output bus as you're you're tracking and mixing,
tacking something on at the end of the process can usually
create more problems.
Maia: Plus we mixed it knowing that it was going to go to a
mastering engineer.

Since there's two of you, how do you tackle mix
disagreements?

Anna: We were generally in agreement. If I thought a mix
should be a certain way, I'd tell Maia, "Hey, I'm just making
one more tweak, and then I'll send it, and I'll see if you hear it."
Which she would, but it was more like let's bounce a couple of
options, sit with them for a few days, go on a walk or a drive
with different speakers, that kind of a thing. And ultimately, I
think we would land at the same conclusion.
Maia: There were only a couple of songs that we had to
do that with. And on those occasions, we gave each other
RECORDING April 2020

Recording - April 2020

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