Quasi are a unique band. Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss play all the instruments and both sing, though Sam's forte is manic guitar and keyboard work and Janet is a drummer extraordinaire. They used to be in Motorgoat, a more conventional "rock" trio and Sam was in the fine Donner Party combo from San Francisco. They've been playing out as Quasi since mid 1993, sometimes employing extra musicians but lately, not.
Their first CD, Early Recordings, came out earlier this year and it an amazing release. There's pop songs, there's noises and there's always a keen sense of musical and sonic adventure going on. They're nearly done with a new album, which is set to be even stronger in the pop song department and will have a different sound, due to the use of rock band Pond's nifty little recording set up (Sam shares a house with Charlie from Pond.)
I met up with Quasi after band practice at Sam's late one Friday night....
How did you guys come about recording at home and having the 8 track?
S: Before my first band, Donner Party, I had this friend who was the original guitar player in that band. He got a settlement from a malpractice suit and got all this money. We were playing music and this was when home 8 tracks first came out.
J: Way back in the old days!
S: 1982 or 83. We went to the music store and bought this equipment and he paid cash for it. We used that to record Donner Party stuff, later on. A couple of years later we moved up to San Francisco and he dropped out of the band and eventually dropped out of music. I never saw the stuff til years later. He moved up to Portland and I was, "What are you doing with that 8 track stuff?" He said it was in boxes at his parent's house. I said, "I'd love to buy it off you if you were gonna sell it cheap." So, I got it from him.
Pretty cheap?
S: I think we payed a thousand bucks for a board, an 8 track, a 2 track, some cables, a delay unit, a couple of mics...
J: We got a lot of other stuff at the Portland Music half price sale. Have you been to that? Invitation only. We got tons of stuff. Mics and cords and mic stands. It was great and I've never been invited again.
Freeloader. What type of decks and mixing board did you end up with?
S: It's a Fostex A8.
J: Bottom of the line.
S: You can only record 4 [channels] at a time. The next year they came out with a deck that you could record all 8 at the same time.
What was the mixing board?
S: A Fostex model 350 mixer.
J: It doesn't have much EQ on it.
When you do stuff what do you mix to? Do you borrow a DAT?
J: For Motorgoat stuff we went right to DAT.
S: We used the 2 track for Quasi.
And then dump that to DAT?
S: Yeah, and then use the DAT to master [the CD].
So the Motorgoat stuff you did straight to DAT. Did you notice a difference?
J: I did. The Motorgoat stuff actually sounds pretty good. We labored over it a lot more. But the music isn't as good! The recording is surprisingly good. The Quasi stuff, we just try to get the songs out. More performance orientated instead of worrying about if the rack tom is miked right.
Aren't you doing 3 mics on the drums?
S: We used a lot of different ways.
J: I'd read about triangle miking in some stupid drum book and we'd try it and it'd be horrible. We wouldn't redo it, we'd just leave it.
S: We tried a pretty wide variety. I think that 4 mics is good for what we do. You can mic the snare and the bass drum and then 2 just stereo in the air.
The simplest way.
J: You can lose a lot of toms.
S: It's the principle of diminishing returns. If you set up those 4 mics you get pretty good to totally fine, and then you could spend hours and hours getting just slightly better than that.
J. Sam's the impatient one and I'm the perfectionist.
You like to get it sorta rough, "It'll work," and run with it?
J: It depends.
S: I don't like to spend a lot of time dillydallying over little increments of sonic quality. As long as it sounds pretty good...roll tape!
Do you ever get mad at him for working too fast that way?
J: No, 'cause if I do feel like we gotta work on it more, we'll work on it more. He always lets me work on it more. He just doesn't want to work on it more.
S: It's not so much recording, it's also mixing.
J: He kinda shuts off.
S: I'll get it to a point where I'm happy and then if it needs to go further I'll just leave it.
J: It was nice mixing with Charlie [from Pond] around, 'cause he's like me. He could work on one thing...small changes. Once I zone in on something it's gonna bug me if I don't fix it. If I don't notice it, I don't notice it. If I notice it then I gotta work on it. By listening to our records you would never think that it was like that. It's all really loose.
S: People are surprised that we did it on a 1/4 inch home studio. I was talking to Mike from Sidecar, and he said, "We just recorded and we used 2 inch tape."
J: 2 inch tape? Where'd they get that?
S: I was, "Why are you doing that? What's the deal?" I told him we recorded on 1/4 inch 8 track and he was, "Really?" 2 inch tape? Just leave that for big budget studio people who have 2 inches worth of tape to waste.
J: But to be inexperienced...
A band can be wasting their time on some of their first ventures into the studio, spending a lot of money, and still getting something that doesn't sound good to them when they could just buy a 4 track cassette deck.
S: An inch and 3/4's of tape is not gonna magically make you sound better!
J: Not to rag on Sidecar, though.
S: They haven't had that much experience.
J: It's hard to experiment on 2 inch tape. There's something about paying $12 for a reel of tape. You can goof around. You can spend the whole reel playing one note.
S: A lot of stuff on our record, we'd just roll tape til the tape ran out. We went back and we'd overdub over parts that sounded cool.
I'd find it hard to imagine Quasi going into a studio and being able to work. Playing at home you can take your time.
S: It's been pointed out, by prominent thinkers in the past, that it's very important for the workers to own the means of production. You will always have abuses and oppression if a third party is in control...
J: The record business, right there!
S: People are surprised that you can make an album.
J: You don't need a lawyer to make an album!
S: You can make an album in a cheap studio and nobody will even know the difference. The average person can't tell the difference and doesn't care.
A lot of times they'll spend a lot of time trying to get something to sound as gritty as an inexpensive studio. When you go to record, where do you do it? Do you do it here?
S: We recorded the first record at Janet's house. The basement, living room.
J: Drums sound much better in the kitchen. The cymbals sound better. We had everything set up in the basement. It's out of the way and we had all the cords running through the floor. You could turn the tape on and run downstairs. At any time it was set up. Here, we actually did some stuff in the kitchen too. On the new record.
S: We finished another record. We did it on Pond's deck, an Otari 8 track half inch. We're moving up. We've doubled our tape volume!
J: I think it makes a difference.
Catches more.
J: Yeah. We have better room mics now, too.
What kind of mics do you guys like to use?
S: We used only [Shure SM] 57's on our whole first record.
J: Think we could get an endorsement?
S: We used Pond's gear. Still a lot of 57's but they have some other stuff.
J: A kick drum mic. Some condenser mics. I think the 57's sound exactly the same. Maybe even better. But I'm totally sold on the condenser mics. You could just have those and something on the bass drum and it would be good. Your snare might not be quite as loud as you want it to.
S: They're pretty specialized for drums or a room mic for some ambient thing.
Sometimes they're too sibilant, like for vocals.
S: A 57's fine for vocals as far as I'm concerned. I'm used to the sound of my voice in a 57.
J: We had another one, it looked Las Vegas-y, with a silver round top.
S: That was a 58, I guess.
J: It never really worked.
S: It's fine.
J: It doesn't work. You have to give it so much power to get a signal out of it.
S: It's not distorted, it just doesn't seem to have the output.
Is there any "odd" pieces of gear you use?
J: The secret weapon.
S: We have a Sonic Maximizer.
J: And the delay.
S: The delay's busted. It doesn't work anymore.
J: We would use it instead of using reverb on the snare. We would use really heavy delay. Like slapback.
S: The drums were fucked on that record [Early Recordings], 'cause we recorded on the fly and didn't pay much attention to the sound. I used distortion boxes on the drums. I just did all kinds of fucked up things to make it sound interesting.
While you were mixing it?
S: While mixing and while recording. I would put the mics up and listen to it and it would not sound too great. It would be better to make it sound deliberately fucked up.
J: There are drums on that record where the cymbals are so loud. It's hard to listen to sometimes. I like it in a way. But the Sonic Maximizer really helped.
Do you use that for tracking?
S: Mixing.
J: It brightens it up a little. You have to make sure you don't put too much on.
S: We got really excessive with it. Just put a tiny bit on there and it's pretty noticeable. You think, "If it sounds good with a little bit, it'll sound great with a lot." You have to hardly use it at all. It adds a little more vibrancy to the mix.
Do you have any idea what it's doing?
S: I had it explained to me once. There's an Aural Exciter and the [BBE] Sonic Maximizer and they work with two different principles and I can't remember which is which. I think The Sonic Maximizer takes the high end of the spectrum and the low end and separates them out and puts a teeny bit of delay on the rest of the spectrum so the high end is hitting your ear first and it jumps out at you. The Aural Exciter works with harmonics.
It takes high harmonics and distorts those and blends them back in.
S: Yeah. That's what the Aural Exciter does.
I thought the Sonic Maximizer gave you the low end first. In a straight mix the lows are arriving to the listener after the high end, because of physics.
S: It has only a couple of knobs. Low and high. It's really simple but it definitely makes a difference. It's pretty subtle but it's a nice thing.
Did you use that on Early Recordings?
S: That album's pretty weird. It was mixed at different times. It was all these tapes lying around. We just piled them up and dumped them onto a DAT. There was no method applied to that project at all. That's just the nature of how that was. The second record--that we've finished mixing, it hasn't been mastered--was more traditional.
How do you approach a recording session?
J: We've done it every different way. There's some stuff that Sam plays everything and there's some stuff where I play everything. It could just have started by putting a guitar line down and making it into a song. There was a song where I played the drums, in some weird format, and then made a song on top of it. Sam, certain times he'd put the guitar down and I'd have to overdub the drums. It was really hard. Sometimes we play guitar or bass and drums together. We've done it a lot of different ways.
S: The approach that we used on the record that we're working on now was more standard. We re-
corded basics together, then overdubbing.
Do you think that came from playing live more?
S: Yeah. We had the songs already worked out. The stuff we have now is just like our live set and then we put little treats on top of it.
Do you guys ever bounce tracks?
S: I don't do full bounce. Like taking all the tracks down to 2 and then freeing up 6. Sometimes I'll take 2 tracks and I'll mix them onto one track. Like 2 vocals and bounce them into one harmony track to free up another track. I do limited bouncing.
Is there noise reduction on that deck?
S: Yeah, I think there's Dolby on it but I don't use it.
J: No Dolby. Noise. That's what it's all about.
S: We'll reduce the tape hiss and we'll also lose the top end. Tape hiss is really only noticeable when the music is quiet which doesn't happen all that often with Quasi.
Is there anything either of you have been listening to lately that you like the sound of?
J: I've been listening to Alien Lanes by Guided By Voices. That's the greatest. That's such a perfect example. They obviously didn't get caught up in making it sound perfect but it comes across as better. The songs are good and it sounds better. It's not all fancy. It's more the spirit of the recording. The buzz of the amp adds some texture. I've been really pleased with listening to that. You put it on and you don't think, "Well, they should've gone into a big studio."
S: The only name that comes to mind that's been doing something consistently interesting is Jim O'Rourke of Brise-Glace, Faust, and Gastr Del Sol. Pretty much anything he does is interesting. He's such an advocate of tape splicing and loops and I've been thinking I really want to start messing around with that.
You could record 8 track loops on your deck.
S: This friend of mine made a whole tape for me of different loops that he had done on a 2 track deck that he found in a garbage can. It's great. Just think what you could do with 8 track loops.
