Recording - March 2021 - 30

Sons of the past,
brothers of the future
In the studio with Hearty Har

out to the tape machine, and then while listening in real time, I
delay the track on the duplicate depending on how much actual
time difference there is between Pro Tools and the vari-speeding.
Then when you're satisfied, you line it back up in Pro Tools.

That's wild!

Shane: It usually takes a few passes, like, " Oh, the flange
wasn't heavy enough on that one. " So, we'll do another.
Tyler: And you can feed it back a little bit into itself to get
kind of deeper flange.

So, it doesn't sound like you guys use a lot of plugins.
Tyler and Shane: No, we hate plugins. [both laugh]
Shane: They're OK. There are some good ones out there.
Tyler: I have a couple of plugins that I also have the hardware of, so if we're doing a rough mix or tracking, I'll use
the plugin like a placeholder and go back and process it with
the hardware later, which is kinda cool. It speeds things up
a little bit.

How many tracks are your songs typically?

The Echorec Notice the typo

Shane: A good number because we have all the digital
tracks and the tape imports and various analog effects on their
own tracks, and there's not really a lot of plugins, so we end
up having a lot of tracks.
Tyler: And then what I do is, I sum them down into groups
and go into my dad's room and run it through his Fairchild and
not really compress it so much as boost it right before it starts
distorting, and he also has two API compressors. So, I treat
each group of things very specifically, and then at the end of it,
you have maybe 20 tracks to work with rather than 70.

Being brothers, how do you guys deal with, " I want my
vocal louder. No, it's too loud. I want more kick drum... "
Are you guys pretty much in sync most of the time?
Shane: Certain things we might go back and forth, there's
too much delay or effects on your voice or too much reverb on
the snare or something like that. But most of the time, I feel like
we're trying to get to the same thing. I think we have similar
tastes, and we collaborate well on that aspect.

Was there a song that was maybe the hardest to mix
or bring into existence or one that was the easiest?

Tyler: 'Can't Keep Waiting' was the first song we ever did in
our studio. I don't think we had the tape machine yet, and we
didn't really have an idea about recording. We just knew the
sound we wanted. So, it was rounds and rounds of processing
and messing stuff up, and it took forever, but I feel like with that
experience we learned a lot, and it was a good challenge.
Then, 'Radio Man' was really fast.
Shane: And that was done directly after 'Can't Keep Waiting'.
Tyler: I also opened the studio up to record other people,
which helped me learn my method and apply it to our music.

What do you feel was the hardest thing to learn?

The MCI
30 RECORDING March 2021

Tyler: Just getting really good drum sounds. It took a lot of
experimenting and headaches, but now we have it dialed in.
Shane: In the beginning, figuring out how the patch bay works
and the tape machine, and getting used to doing everything

Recording - March 2021

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