"This is a good story to start a Tape Op interview," Chris Cohen of Deerhoof tells us as we press record on the tape recorder. "I just learned yesterday that you can use inserts in Pro Tools Free. Up until now, every time we'd do an edit or EQ something or add an effect, we'd process it all. So if we wanted to change something, we'd have to go all the way back to the beginning. This morning I was trying to figure out how many years of my life I wasted by not knowing that." A step back: Our band The Mae Shi shares a record label (Kill Rock Stars) with Deerhoof. As home recordists, we had often dreamed of a time when we could afford a professional recording session, and our dream producer list invariably included names like Steve Albini [Tape Op #87], Brian May, Flood [#115]... and whomever recorded Deerhoof's Milk Man. Milk Man seemed like a real achievement — every guitar arpeggio, every bass hit, and every drum hit had an effect. Spin called it "a perfect album." When we approached the band to ask who had recorded the album, we were shocked to find that there were no producers, two- inch tape machines or expensive German microphones used. Milk Man was recorded by the band itself, on three Mac G3 iBooks running Pro Tools Free simultaneously, with most tracking taking place in an attic in Chris' parents' house. For their most recent record, The Runners Four, the quartet (drummer and founding member Greg Saunier, singer and guitarist Satomi Matsuzaki, and guitarist John Dieterich are the other three members) upgraded to a Digi 002 Rack and Pro Tools LE and rented a 200 square foot practice space for tracking. The band has mastered their last seven albums and EPs — Holdypaws, Halfbird, Reveille, Apple O', Milk Man, Green Cosmos and The Runners Four — themselves, using a homemade system that makes no differentiation between mixing and mastering. We sat down with Greg, John and Chris in Chris' Oakland apartment and discussed recording, songwriting and mastering over homemade pasta and apple pie.
How did the recording process evolve? How were the first albums recorded?
Greg: Well, before Chris and John were in the band, it was all done on my 4-track. One day I came home from college and my parents had bought a new stereo — it was very a low-quality one with all kinds of flashing lights. But it had this ten-band equalizer component, and I borrowed it so I could EQ two of the tracks on my 4-track. I also had this dbx compressor that could only compress 1.4:1 — that was the maximum. It was for audiophiles to listen to classical music. I don't know what it was called, it just had one knob for ratio and one knob for gain.
So a lot of your approach to EQ'ing came from working with this kind of stuff? This was your outboard gear?
G: You say outboard gear, but it was a 4-track — it didn't have any outboard gear capability. It didn't have effects sends. What I would do is take one of the outputs from one track, send it to something and then plug it back into the mic jack, and to get the final mix I'd use the headphone output.
That's how The Man, The King, The Girl was recorded? What about Holdypaws?
G: Holdypaws we recorded with a friend, a friend who had what at the time was a $30,000 Pro Tools system and we recorded at his house. The Man, The King, The Girl and Halfbird were recorded on a 4-track.
How much have you guys recorded with other people? Nowadays you primarily record yourself, right?
G: Put it this way — Holdypaws was the only time something got done start to finish with somebody else's help. I had been working on the 4-track for several years, having a very frustrating time. On the early records I'd do something like sit there with this cheap, ten-band equalizer and have the stereo set so Nevermind was playing on the CD player and the 4- track was playing on the other input and I'd try to make the bass drum sound like the bass drum on Nevermind, and then do that with the guitar and the bass. I got to where I felt like I was pretty good at it, but here was somebody offering to record us with this fancy recording system, and so I'd think to myself, "This is it! All my problems will be solved! All the secrets will finally be revealed by someone who really knows how to record." But as soon as we started working on Holdypaws, I realized no one's more qualified to record Deerhoof than we are. Professional engineers have their experience, but I had my experience too, and even though it was self-generated and kind of weird, it still ended up counting for something. Ever since then, we've always done most of the work. It seems like you can either go to a medium or high-budget studio for one day, or you can use the equipment you have or can borrow from friends, and do it as long as you want. I realized there was no comparison — the time was so much more valuable than the fanciness of the equipment.
MS: Maybe we can talk about the record- ing of a particular song then. How did the song "Milk Man" get recorded?
G: When I first wrote it, Satomi and I were in Japan. I had been told many times that Deerhoof is cool because of the way we were so heavily influenced by Shonen Knife, and I would think, "That's cool... one of these days I'll have to hear them." We got a chance to go see them in Japan — it was the first time for both of us — and we really liked it. And the next morning I woke up and I had all these musical ideas in my head that actually were influenced by Shonen Knife. Later, we decided we wanted to record it, and Chris, John and I each had computers that had Pro Tools Free on them. With Pro Tools Free you can't record more than two tracks at a time. We had five drum mics — so five drum tracks — so we had all three computers set up at once, and we'd press the spacebars all at the same time.
Chris: For preamps, we just used a Mackie mixer. We had one good mic — John's $200 Studio Projects mic. The rest were Shure SM-57s and 58s.
G: I just want to say this — the mics did not sound good. The mic placement was not good. The tuning of the drums — not good.
But it ended up sounding good, right?
G: [laughs] Thank you.
You were never happy with it?
C: There was just tons and tons of tweaking and processing — and this is an album where every single song is pieced together from tons of little pieces.
G: I was using an iMac G3 that didn't have that much hard drive space. A lot of times I was processing and overwriting files, so I had to be sure with each edit. I had also started extracting drum kits from other CDs — I didn't know there was such a thing as a sample library, but that's what I was building. I'd start listening to records with that in mind. So a lot of the drums on that song was me pasting in a snare drum or bass drum sample for every time I hit the snare or bass drum, and blending it together.
G: We only had eight tracks because it was in Pro Tools Free, and five of those were drum mics.
How did you set up those drum mics? Was it kick, snare, overheads and room?
G: We didn't have overheads — we didn't have a boom stand!
John: We had one mic that was half snare, half tom. There was a kick drum mic.
G: There were two room mics — one was hanging from an easel, and one was sitting on an exercise machine...
J: We were in this attic above Chris' parents' garage.
C: It was a big room with high ceilings and wood floors — it was a painting studio. It had a big window. Then we went in and did guitars, and I remember I did every section separately...
G: It wasn't every section — it was every chord!
C: [laughter] I'm not a very good guitar player, and I can't keep perfect pressure, and we wanted each note of every arpeggio to be perfect and ringing, so we recorded every chord separately. I loved it — I really liked breaking it down into these small pieces that were totally manageable. There wasn't the pressure of having to get one perfect take with the perfect feel... every single moment had the perfect feel — it was the perfect artificial performance. We'd have to retune for every chord, too. The intonation on my guitar was not too good, so we'd retune for every chord. If we had good guitars, we wouldn't have had to do that...
G: I'm not sure about that. It sounded better that way anyway. It wasn't equal temperament — the chords were all extra in-tune.
So you were making this perfect virtuostic performance?
C: It wasn't virtuosity we were after...
G: This is what it was — Chris' parents had cable at their house. They had these music channels, and I'd never had these in my life. At home, Satomi and I have this radio, and it's from Japan and all the frequencies are for Japanese radio, so we can't get any radio stations. We don't have a car — basically I never hear pop music except when I go to Chris' parents house. And this is when I realize what pop music sounds like. It's not virtuosity — it just sounds so perfect. Every sound is huge, there are these gigantic guitars and gigantic drums, and I really wanted to make "Milk Man" sound like that.
How different do you think the guitar you recorded was from the finished sound?
G: Very different. Now of course, the law of entropy says we can't make a guitar sound any more clean, but a lot of times sounds are getting more and more distorted...
Do you use plug-ins for distortion?
G: Well, Pro Tools Free doesn't have a distortion plug-in. You can get distortion in Pro Tools the same way you can get with anything, which is just by turning it up.
C: Or by EQ'ing things multiple times...
G: Or doing anything that makes it go past zero. That kind of distortion in Pro Tools I like because if something went into the red there, it was distortion, but it seemed to add a color — it was trebly distortion...
J: It doesn't soften attacks the way other kinds of compression do, even supposed brick wall limiters. G: As for the bass on "Milk Man," the bass is all samples. It's one sample, just pitch shifted — every note pitch shifted.
Where did the sample come from?
G: Um... ESG?
Everybody samples ESG!
G: Yeah, but they are all sample beats — we just sampled one note. On "Milk Man" there's a lot of pitch shifted samples, like I'll have one piano note shifted up and down throughout a song. I practically fainted a couple months ago when Satomi and I walked into the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. There are 13-year-old kids playing with a computer on display that's got GarageBand and there's a keyboard there with these perfect samples! It's not like they have a single sample that's being pitch shifted, they've got a different sample for each note, with different volumes too. Every instrument in the universe is coming out perfectly with this keyboard and I ask, "Well, how much is that?" and it's like $100! I've been sitting here slaving away pitch shifting single piano notes extracted from some CD for months at a time and I didn't realize this existed.
What about the vocals on "Milk Man"?
G: With Satomi we found that things really worked nice when we would record her voice through a microphone and put her voice through an amplifier and record her voice through the amplifier at the same time. On the iMac there's a sound output, the headphone jack, and I could take the original vocal recording out and put it through a guitar amp and find a nice little setting with a certain reverb or certain distortion or something. We'd mic that and then record that back in and then line up the two tracks. They're really hard to hear, but I sang some backup harmonies on that song. That's just the iMac's internal microphone — I didn't have any microphone at the house at the time. I think we have recorded several songs' vocals that way.
You spend a lot of time recording the perfect drum sound or the perfect guitar sound. How much work do you do getting these sounds to work together? Is there a lot of going back?
G: So much. We worked on "Milk Man" for six months, and that's six months pretty much full time. You want to know my trick? My trick is, A-B it with something else I like. At that time I was going back and forth with this band Les Nubians — they had an album called One Step Forward that I would play all the time. We were flying back from an England tour, and they had it on the radio on the plane. It was this super clean, totally perfectly recorded music, obviously super-high budget. Every sound on there was so clear — every single thing that any instrument does is perfectly audible. I'd play "Milk Man" and I'd play that, and ours would just sound like complete mush. Going back and forth with something like that, like a model, it was always helpful in trying to figure out what was wrong.
You'd listen to both these tracks through the same speakers?
J: Yeah, we'd import it into the session.
G: Somehow a roommate of mine left behind some unpowered computer speakers.
J: They sound basically like hiss.
G: That's not true! If I turn up the computer's volume all the way and put the speakers up to my ears, then I can just barely hear the music coming out. And if I mix so that everything sounds right with that, then it's just guaranteed that the mix will sound fine.
It's like mixing on the internal speaker of an iBook or something.
G: Exactly, but it's not even that loud. These are quieter. For us finding vocal volume is not a simple matter of turning it all up or down. It's automation. It's, "I can't hear the 'p' on that word, I can't hear the 'h' at the end of that other word, and this one note is getting buried." Those kinds of things are very apparent on very tiny speakers at low volume. I guess our method is to always search for flaws and search for things that are wrong with it. Try to imagine the worst-case scenario over and over again and try to find a way to make it work in the worst-case scenario.
J: It's interesting. I wonder if the stuff you read in Tape Op, you know, like you read about the guy who recorded Steve Winwood, and that's what you associate with producing and recording an album. But do people exist whose sole job is vocal production? I wonder if that exists?
G: Going back to watching videos at Chris' parents' house — we'd hear these pop hits and on the vocals, we'd hear how every line seemed to have a different delay on it. This one would have a certain kind of reverb, and this one would sound really close. It was just like electronic music, where someone had just gone in and meticulously crafted each note.
I imagine that once you get into the big studios there are probably ten people who work for one guy and that some of them are better at some techniques than others.
G: Here's the thing — the CD that was made with those ten people working on it costs $15 at the record store. Our CD costs $15 at the record store. Now if I'm the record shopper, and I have $15 dollars to spend, what do I care if Deerhoof's budget was such that they couldn't hire ten people to work on it? I don't care. Maybe I just want someone to have really devoted themselves to it. I can sit on my indie high horse and laugh at VH-1's specials about Def Leppard in tears because they couldn't get that one guitar overdub right and think, "Why did they put so much effort into something that ended up sounding so terrible?" But then I can't make fun of them if they're trying harder than I am! It took them four years to do Hysteria. Same time it took to make Halfbird. Anything less is a copout if you're going to laugh at Def Leppard.
How did the process change for The Runners Four, the newest record?
C: With the new record we were recording a lot of instruments at the same time. We did a lot of research to try to find ways to make instruments sound separate, but at the same time really complimentary. When I listen to Trout Mask Replica, I can focus on one instrument for the entire record and realize how amazing that instrument was as a composition on its own.
What did you do to get this separation on The Runners Four?
C: Well, one thing was we did all the guitars direct through [Line 6] Pods. We'd run through the Pod and run another signal direct. We probably would have recorded the bass direct if we had found a sound we liked.
Did you choose to use the Pods because you liked the way they sounded or because they were easy?
C: To me, I really like the ease of it. I got one and liked it right out of the box. I felt like there were so many sounds in it that I liked. Starting from scratch with it, compared to what we had before, there was just so much more at our disposal. Another thing we had in mind was we wanted to record ourselves, and we wanted to be able to record every single day for three or four months. We got a practice space, and the Pods meant that we could record every day and not have to worry about separation.
G: On The Runners Four we made every decision together. We didn't do "majority rules." Everybody had to be satisfied with it for us to move on.
You guys have mastered all of your albums except your first, correct? Slim [Moon of Kill Rock Stars] told us it started with a bad experience you had with a mastering engineer.
G: The first CD was mastered in a normal, professional mastering place. It's a repeat of the story I was telling you about recording Holdypaws. I just figured, "Ah, finally I'm going to get to meet the pros. They're going to finally make it sound good." I realized that's not what it is. To make it sound good requires thought. Not that any of those people don't think, but if I am specifically dissatisfied with the sound of something, there is no way some other dude who's hearing it for the first time is going to get what's in my head that I wish it sounded like. He can't extract that from my mind. It made me realize that it's up to me. I can play a Deerhoof song we're working on, back to back with the latest Gorillaz hit, and the Deerhoof song doesn't sound as good. But taking it to a mastering pro is not going to cause it to sound as good. I really have to go in and try to find out what the difference is. The mastering pro is very good and experienced at what they do, but it's not a life- and-death thing for them. It's not an obsession and it's not a matter of desperation on their part. When you're recording your own music you feel desperate that you want it to come across and you want people to get something out of it, or you want them to listen to it over and over again. You're just dying to make this song not pale next to somebody else's song, at least in terms of the sound, and therefore get passed over and not listened to. You just want to give the song a fighting chance. So a lot of it has to do with sheer volume. We've had such a difficult time with all of these — Reveille, Apple O', Green Cosmos, Milk Man, The Runners Four — just trying to get them as loud as the kinds of high budget, commercial CDs on major labels that come out that are hits. We'll do everything by the book, "Hey, we put it through our L1, and it's just not as loud. What's wrong?"
Maybe it's the L1.
G: Yeah we used the L1. I didn't use it in Pro Tools Free because it's not in Pro Tools Free, but when John got the pay version of Pro Tools we got the L1.
One of the things you hear is, "Don't mix your own stuff, and don't master your own stuff," and that's something you've obviously disproved in practice.
G: We haven't disproved that because the warning isn't, "Don't mix it yourself," it's, "Don't mix it yourself if you want a certain result." And that result is something that sounds smooth and clean, something that exudes health. I don't think our music exudes a lot of health — a lot of mental health. It sounds worked on and obsessed over.
Part of that warning is, "Don't do it because you can't trust your own ears."
C: Yeah, that's what we disagree with. I think we trust our own ears.
G: When it comes to final mastering, a lot of it's psychological. You can make the beginning of the song very loud, but distorted, but have it trail off some imperceptible amount at some point, and bring that kind distortion back at key points. We did a lot of really tiny volume automation — we'd turn up the whole song on the master and it's distorted the whole time. But then we'd find the actual notes where it sounded the ugliest and turn it down to the point where it didn't sound bad anymore.
J: It's like surgery. Like microsurgery.
If you're doing mixing and mastering yourselves, do you draw a line between the two? Do you bounce to a stereo track and work on that?
G: No. For instance, during recording John would play a certain guitar sound through his Pod, but we then would have a Y cable and he'd also record a direct track. Then we'd put that direct track through another Pod or some kind of amp simulator thing, or through a small speaker, and combine them together. You can add a little bit of distortion or change the character of the distortion by EQ'ing slightly and then change it by putting it through another Pod and blending it in a little bit. Or you can do it again by turning it up so that it's clipping, and then making a separate clipped track and blending it in another bit. There are a lot of songs on The Runners Four where there'd be ten guitar tracks of one performance, all blended together. And we'd do this for each note he'd play. And on every note on every track would be a squiggle of volume automation. One would have reverb and one wouldn't, one would sound like it's in a room. At some point it struck me that if I didn't take responsibility for making a song sound the way I wanted it, no one else would. It's more than dollars. It's more than fancy equipment, and it's more than even time. For us, mixing and mastering involves a lot of very depressing times, a lot of soul-searching, and a lot of weird things that you usually wouldn't associate with twiddling some knobs and that kind of thing. But the advantage of that is that you hear the flaws very clearly, just from sheer repetition. We don't want there to be somebody out there who's listened to Milk Man more than we have. I really admire and envy other ways of working and people who can do things in other ways. But I feel that at least for myself, and probably all four of as a band, we're kind of incapable of approaching it in any way other than that most extreme putting it to every possible test: What does it sound like in the background while people are having conversation? What does it sounds like through tiny speakers? What does it sound like cranked up on the headphones? What does it sound like on a stereo when somebody's got the bass and treble knobs turned up all the way and that's how they keep it? What does it sound like if you hear the first 30 seconds of it as an MP3? That's how it's going to be on the iTunes music store. If that first 30 seconds sounds bad next to the new Gorillaz single, then people aren't going to download it.
[laughter] It's interesting to me that you use Gorillaz as a comparison. You said that you feel like Milk Man doesn't sound as good as the new Gorillaz record. Is that right?
G: If I didn't then, I should have. Go to iTunes and do a preview of a Gorillaz song and then do a preview of a Deerhoof song. Ours just sounds like some static in the background.
If you had all the money in the world to make an album, what would you do?
G: I have dreams at night. I have dreams that my band goes to a studio and records with someone who really knows how to record us, and I play the drums. "What's that mic there?" I don't know, I don't care. I play and I worry about the drums. And when I say, "dream" I don't mean "goal". I mean literally at night I dream about that.
C: I was reading in Tape Op about "Brown Sugar" — when the Stones recorded it they were on tour and just booked it for a couple days. That kind of thing would be great, but I also like what we did. I like the idea of recording in someone's house or setting it up and doing it over a long period of time. All of those things are different and really great, but if I had to choose what I had to be in the world I'd much rather be a musician.
Let's discuss album order. Are there albums in particular that you look up to or use as models? How do you approach the whole song order thing?
G: I can remember working on the album order for Reveille, and taking Queen's News Of The World and thinking, "Okay, which song is which song? I'm going to put it in the same order as Queen's News Of The World. " I had been sitting here in my dungeon listening to Reveille for two years — occasionally listening to Queen's News Of The World. And since I've been sitting there matching guitar EQs to Brian May all this time, I'd think, "This Deerhoof song is the analog to this Queen song. It's obvious to everyone, so I'll just put it in the same order." But it didn't work.
J: It's so easy to convince yourself after a while that that's some kind of analog to listening to the entire album, just hearing the transitions.
G: It's not true. Some songs are long, some are short. A lot of the time the key relationships between the songs are different, or the tempos, or the fact that this one has this crazy guitar noise in it and the next song has another crazy guitar noise in it that just spoils it. You discover what the variables are as you go along. You don't have an idea beforehand.
J: Plus, depending on what stage of the process you are in, a lot of this stuff is still up for grabs. The tempo and the key can be changed. That changes the tempo and even the sound of the instruments a little.
Since Satomi isn't here, do you want to talk about her a little bit?
G: Satomi's opinions are often the most penetrating. She didn't want to come today because she thought it was just going to be a lot of technical talk and she thought she wouldn't have anything to say. She always knows when something is mixed wrong, and I trust her opinion more than I trust anybody's, definitely more than I trust my own, but also more than I trust Chris' and John's. When she hears something and says, "That's good" or "That's not good," I know she's right. That's what I would do if I had an unlimited budget! I'd hire Satomi to record our next album.
Are you guys working on another recording right now? Or are you taking a break?
G: I'm never looking at Pro Tools again. I got so burned out just looking at Pro Tools.
What are the kinds of things you do when you're taking a break? Do you avoid listening to music?
G: No! That's the only time I can listen to music. When we're working on the album, there aren't any leftover minutes to listen to music other than the music we're working on. It may seem silly, if we're working on an album for six months, then that six months I'm basically hearing nothing else.
Like the Gorillaz.
G: Yeah. A thirty second iTunes preview of a Gorillaz song.
