New Album and Video from Porcelain, Produced by Scott Evans

Over the weekend, I stumbled on the new single and video “Apocalypse” by Porcelain and noticed that it was produced, recorded, and mixed by Tape Op contributor Scott Evans. The song sounds awesome; big, heavy, and riff driven. Scott did some skillful work capturing it. Guitar, bass, and drum sounds are all super solid, but not at all stock sounding. Check out the video for "Apocalypse" below.

I reached out to Scott to find out more about the recording, and he told me, “We tracked at Estuary Recording in Austin, TX. It's a chill, comfortable spot with an old Quad-Eight console and a bunch of good gear. I think most people use their outboard preamps, but I wanted to work on the console – fortunately Michael Landon, who owns the studio, was super cool about making sure the console was working as well as it could. Which it mostly did!

When we arrived the live room had a lot of gobos and absorbers in it and was quite dry, so we moved those all out to open up the room. We hung a few omnis off the conduit and pipes up near the ceiling for room mics, and I ran a couple of [Electro-Voice] 635's up the stairs that go to the lounge for more distance. That room is pretty mellow, but we coaxed out some action.

We tracked the songs live to Pro Tools, except for vocals. I always track and mix from one big session. In this case, by the time I left Austin we had the whole record sequenced in Pro Tools. Everyone was very dialed, so basics didn't take long. Vocals went super fast too – two to three takes per song max. We had seven days booked for tracking but finished a couple days early. I changed my flight and used our last morning to sequence the record with everyone there, then do a full listen through of our rough mixes. If I remember right, two people in the room cried! 

Great band, great folks, great record, great time. I stayed with Eli Deitz, the drummer, and we got breakfast tacos from a different spot every day. Magical.

I mixed at my studio, Antisleep Audio in Oakland, pretty much right when I got back. I mix on my API 2448 console, not because I think analog is magic but because I really like getting a mix going with faders, having meters and solo buttons in front of me with no scrolling, etc. I do parallel drum processing on the console, into a short analog mix bus chain, back into Pro Tools to record mixes. If I do any analog processing on individual tracks I use hardware inserts in Pro Tools so that I can do volume automation after inserts. For instance I was running Q2 Compex 500s on kick and snare and I like having the compression pre-console-fader. 

While we were tracking the Porcelain record, I ran headphones and our working mix entirely in the box, so when I got home I fanned out the tracks to the console and spent a couple of days getting things to a state where I was ready to share with the band. The "one session" thing lets you jump around a record and see how different songs are working, what you need to automate, etc. It's a cool way to work but the tradeoff is lots of automation. I try not to get too far into automation until the band and I have talked about a first pass, but it's inevitable to get into it pretty early. Once the faders are about where you want them for the record, they're probably not moving – it's all automation. And not just volume automation, lots of plug-in stuff too. EQ moves, reverb changes, whatever. But the Porcelain record is intentionally pretty straight up, and if something needed cooking we did most of that while we were tracking. In the end, I clocked about three days mix time for the whole album. I think I actually did a revision or two on my own after the band approved, which sounds insane but I really wanted this record to come out just so. I sent Greg Obis [Chicago Mastering Service] one 47-minute WAV file to master from.”

The full LP, Today's Minor Victories, is out October 23rd, 2026 on TODO Records. Look for a full interview with Scott in a future issue of Tape Op.

https://www.porcelainatx.com/

Additional session photos by Scott Evans.