Kim Deal is the founder and frontwoman of The Breeders, whose landmark album Last Splash turned 30 in 2023. She also spent quite some time playing bass and lending vocals to The Pixies, but she's a massive creative talent in her own right, self-taught and scrappy (before she could even hit the record button, she had to learn to solder cables). With her own inimitable aesthetic as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer, Deal continues to make her mark on modern music. Additionally, she continues to grow in her understanding of audio techniques, now effectively engineering herself as she has been recording remotely since the more locked down days of the pandemic. Tape Op chatted with Deal over Zoom, her presence animated and theatrical, as she walked us through her continued path forward, despite all of the changing technologies and global disruptions along the way.

Let's start with your relationship to recording gear.

I started with a push button – the cassette comes out, that sort of thing. This was like, sevs ['70s], so the next thing was the TEAC [Tascam] 38, the 1/2-inch, 8-track. My dad was a physicist. My brother's the one who really helped me with making my own cables; grabbing a bag of tips and soldering [them] on. I didn't want to waste money. We were in Dayton, Ohio – Huber Heights. There was no huge Guitar Center, or someplace where we could go to buy cables this long [gestures] and 30 to a pack. There was no internet or anything, so we'd make our own. So, the first idea of wanting to do my own recording turned into this fucking soldering, but I loved it anyway. It was so fun, but it's a lot. And then [came] the MXR Thirty-One Band EQ. I was a novice recorder then, and my friend – or one of his engineering friends – suggested, "It's not even going to work right," unless I have a patch bay. But I was just sitting there looking at all the holes and thinking, "I just want to come up with some workshopping ideas and make some cool sounding shit." I don't think I ever plugged one thing into that patch bay. I wouldn't even... how am I going to find it? Nobody said anything about labeling or anything. It's just a piece of metal with holes, so [many that] I'll never be able to follow where the cords I just made are going! Anyway, I had that going for a while. But then, always what happens is whenever I've got a good idea, I want a little bit of a recording of it. I get into the recording, I think it could be better if I add this pedal or whatever, then all of a sudden, I've got this fucking bullshit system where it's too much recording shit. Now, whenever I want to add something, it's too much, so I just pull it all aside again. So, then I started doing the 4-tracks. Guided by Voices [Tape Op #6], in Dayton. It was in the early '90s when I saw the 4-tracks. I don't remember seeing them around in the '80s. I was just on my 1/2-inch reel-to-reel. I got really stuck in those for quite a while; I liked that very much. But I was never good at it. Tobin Sprout [#20] from Guided by Voices made some pretty good sounding recordings on 4-track, but I never could. I didn’t want to know about gain; I just wanted this thing to sound cool. "Oh, look. The gain stage is fucked up. Boy, doesn't that sound good! Now I need to do a dub mix on 2-track, because I want to add some stuff. And now it's just like [makes distortion noises]. Okay. Well, I guess I'll have to start over again." So, it goes on like that. And then I had my bout with the [Tascam] 388s, which are ridiculous. My friend, Chris Ivan, in Dayton is my tube guy. I asked him, "Can you fix my 388?" And he said, "Ah, Kim, now that's consumer grade." One motor does both of the drives. It's always breaking. So, I did have a bout with some 388s, but then I went to the 16-track Tascam [MSR-16] 1/2-inch. I've got that now.

We would try to do demos in my house in Dayton on this. I had the machine upstairs, with the snake all the way down the steps from the second to the first floor, going into the bathroom through the laundry chute, from the first floor into the basement, where we can plug in the microphones and rehearse. We can actually get a demo. We were doing it on 4-track, but you don't get a sense of it. I thought, "Maybe we can make it sound good," but I never could. But it was enough to think, "This could be a good sounding song. This drum pattern is good, and it sounds...

The rest of this article is only available with a Basic or Premium subscription, or by purchasing back issue #159. For an upcoming year's free subscription, and our current issue on PDF...

Subscribe for free here

Or Learn More