So is this where you recorded Party Music?
No, that was recorded in a garage. We're still getting this space going. It's my gear and this other guy's space.
All of Party Music was done in a garage?
Yeah, well we mixed it at Hyde Street I was going right into Pro Tools, through this Focusrite Red.
That was for the vocals?
Vocals, but pretty much I ran everything through this, just because I didn't have a mixer at the time. Vocals, bass, samples — anything live or line in that needs a signal boost I'll run it through here. The good thing about it is I can't tell that I've put a signal through there. That's bad to some extent, like, it doesn't give you any kind of feeling about it, but I do that in the mixdown. Especially since I'm new at tracking, I don't want to mess it up.
So this [10-space] rack was all the gear you were using?
That and the LA-4, but I'd only use a little on there, even on things that I thought needed more compression. I would always go pretty conservative with anything that I'd put on there. Sometimes we'd have a Neve strip in here, but I'd never use it since at Hyde Street we have all of that stuff there. So I pretty much went direct as much as possible and then re-amped it. And then I also had the choice of amps that I wanted. For the performance, while the musicians were playing, I'd throw the SansAmp plug-in on that. That sounded real good, actually. There are a couple places where we just kept the SansAmp. Before this, I'd done the three previous albums on analog. I was all against digital like, oh it's not going to sound as good, this and that. Originally I just decided to go ahead and do it like this, because I chose the creativity over the sound. But then, as I got into it, I realized I wasn't really making a compromise at all. Especially, because when we mixed it, we went through the board at Hyde Street
What board were you mixing on?
It's an Amek, but I'm not sure which one. [Ed. Amek APC 100]
I've been impressed with how the vocals sit on your last couple of albums. It's really clean — they sit right out front.
I did all the vocals for the last album on that mic right there — it's a Soundelux mic. It sounded cool. Performance wise, I did redo a couple when we were mixing down, and there were a couple songs I wrote while we were mixing down. Like I had all the music, but the lyrics weren't together. But you wouldn't be able to tell those tracks apart, the $2500 mic versus the $10,000 mic. When I'm recording, I'm just making sure the level's cool, not going into the red, and on Pro Tools I haven't found a reason to print real loud. I can stay soft if I need to, just to stay away from the possibility of distorting, and I don't hear any extra air or anything like that.
Well that Soundelux is a good match for your voice, it captures that really tactile, out-in-front feel.
Yeah, I really like it, and times that I've had singers up in here, they like it too. That was one thing that was hard, when we recorded our other albums at Hyde Street, one mic would sound cool to me one day and a few days later it wouldn't sound good. I don't know if that has to do with some of those old mics. They change depending on humidity, whatever, so we'd always have this whole long time of switching mics, trying mics. Which was cool, cause they had a lot of mics. Also, we don't have a lot of the things we had at the garage here, like these boxes I would hit. I was recording just hitting a box to throw under the kick. I just found out that that is a South American instrument...
What, a cardboard box?
No, like I saw Lauryn Hill on stage, she had a couple of these boxes, they're made for that, to be mic'ed. She'll be playing the guitar and hitting that, it makes a real boomy 808 type of sound. But I was just using a regular box, like that [a flight box for gear] but it was empty, it had some of the metallic stuff jangling on it. Some of that stuff nobody will hear but you, but you can get into recording it.
What tracks is that on?
I don't remember — I did it on a lot of things, and some of them made it on there. And that's kind of how this whole album was recorded. Like, we'll have a clavinet, and just try different clavinet parts on every song, and then it'll only stick for a few of them. I think that's what happens when you get Pro Tools and you get all these tracks. You build it up to a big mountain of sound, and then you carve out your song. And that's how I did this album.
What gear did you do your first albums with?
I was using the [Roland] R8, that's still where I get my 808 sounds from.
Does that do sampling?
No, the sounds just come on cards. For sampling I used the Akai. And then the Vintage Keys module. Genocide and Juice was just these three things, and I didn't like some of those keyboard sounds. They were too thin, just coming out of the Vintage Keys, though some of them we were able to thicken up.
So when you go into mix, is it just you and an engineer?
