Let's start by talking about your current approach to recording. I saw that the most recent Octant album [Car Alarms and Crickets] was finished this summer.
Yeah, we started in October of last year and worked on it over a seven-month period.
And were you recording in your house mostly?
We pretty much did it all out of our apartment. In Seattle, the rent is so high we just had a tiny little apartment. Compared to now, in Chicago, we have a much larger apartment paying the same amount of money. But it was tiny in Seattle — we had one room that we lived in and one room we converted into a recording studio. And then I did all the drum tracks in a practice space, which was really hellish because I was surrounded by hardcore bands. I would have to get there at five in the morning, before all the slackers got there. There were many times when I set up all my microphones and then there would be this loud "bwwwwwah." So that's part of the reason that it took so long. There were a lot of re-dos.
So, would you bring an ADAT down to the practice space?
I have a [Roland] VS-880 hard disk recorder. I use that to do all my field — I call them field recordings, where I go places and record my instruments that are too loud to record in my apartment or I go and record other people, other instrumentalists, in their homes. Then I sync them up in Pro Tools after that.
Are you using the Digidesign 001?
On the last record I used Pro Tools 4.3.1 and I didn't have the Digi card — I actually did it on the Mac A/V card on the G3, so it was all in 16 bit, it wasn't 24 bit. But then what we did is we went into a studio that had a full-on Pro Tools 24-out system and we bussed all the tracks out through tube compressors and tube amps and tracked it analog to clean off the rough digititis. And it seemed to work pretty good. In retrospect, I would probably invest in a 24-bit card and do it that way, but we were kind of tight with money.
So with only an A/V card in, you could add, at most, two tracks at a time?
Some of the stuff was done mostly on the VS-880, where I would put a test tone on every track, and then peel them off, two at a time, into the computer — sync them up there. I really focused on getting good tracks, trying to develop each track, as opposed to when you're in a studio where you're pressed for time and you just play and then see what you get, make the best of it in the mix-down. I wanted to do the opposite thing and work on all the tracks, work on incorporating digital-style recording with live recording. "Digital", meaning loops and edits and sound manipulation.
How did you record your first record [Shock-No-Par]?
I tracked that all on the VS-880. It has 64 virtual tracks, although you can only play back eight at a time. I used it as a storage — a tracking device. I would record the drums in Tassy's parents' garage, or in various other places, and then go home and add tracks. I would store up about 16 to 24 tracks, and then we took it into the studio at Jupiter and at that time we synced it to a 24-track 2" machine. We then peeled the tracks off onto the 2" and mixed down analog. It was similar to the second album, but done a bit different. With the VS-880 you don't have as much editing capability as you do on a computer.
Would you choose to do it that way again?
I think for the next recording we may go into a studio and do it live because there's more acoustical elements to the new material. I'm really longing for really deep analog sounds. It'll probably be partly done in a studio — definitely the drums in the studio and a lot of the bass — and then I'll have all the tracks dumped onto Pro Tools and take it home. And then embellish in Pro Tools — or, actually, I've been using Logic so I'll probably use that. I might do some mix-downs in the studio, but I'm really looking for more fidelity in the recordings. The next record is more conducive to that style of recording — it's more warm, the songs are warmer.
Do you use recording in your writing process, as a tool for writing, or taping practices?
Actually, I have been doing it that way for a while now. I've come full circle. In other bands, and when Octant first started, it was more of an art project. I had these kinetic sculptures that I was sequencing on a Mac Classic. I would make patterns with a grid sequencer, a step sequencer. It was pretty random. I would place drum notes on the computer and then use samples. Different samples would go with different drums. I would have vibraphone sounds or bell samples going with the drums. Then I'd mix up the patterns and vary them as the piece went. It was one piece, basically, called "Remodeled Percussion."
Was that the robotic drums?
It was that and some other sculptures that went along with it, and other sound mechanisms. That was for an installation performance. And then it evolved into a band after that. But now I'm going back to where I'm sitting down and writing the material instead of writing while I'm recording, how I have done with the past two records. I'm actually sitting down with a piano or a guitar or a drum sequencer and composing, as opposed to creating loops or patterns as I'm recording.
