Why did you and Carroll decide to record to tape?
Barton is a storyteller with an affinity for writing songs that are tributes to a particular era. He is a stickler for detail and wanted to stay true to that older '60s folk and jazz sound, which comes from tape. Also, with recording to tape, you are able to capture the actual performance of the musicians playing together rather than building them through Pro Tools editing. These songs were played all the way through. We had upright bass right next to drums in the same room. There's bleed and feel, and that's what Barton wanted. A real sense of his song writing comes through.
Did you use Pro Tools at all for Together, You, and I?
Yes. We used Pro Tools to monitor both input and playback from tape. I routed the four output channels of the 4-track into four inputs of the Pro Tools Digi 002 hardware. I set up four empty tracks in Pro Tools and armed them as needed to use for monitoring tape. As we filled up tracks on the tape machine, we dumped them into Pro Tools and synced them with previous tracks we dumped. We'd make a reference track, dump back to tape, record three more tracks on tape, and repeat the process. Any tracks that we had built up and synced in Pro Tools were bypassed, because we were compiling them to be mixed later. We only tracked to the one reference track from tape, and three empty tracks on the tape machine.
What did you designate the initial four tracks four?
For the first series of takes it was drums, bass, and a click or scratch. One mic on the kick, one on the snare, one for the stand up bass, and one for scratch guitar or click. Some additional scratches such as vocals sometimes went to Pro Tools. Other scenarios were three mics on drums and one on bass, or two on drums and two on bass, scratches going directly into Pro Tools. We recorded them all together in a small room, with plenty of glorious bleed. Most of the background vocals were recorded together as well.
How was it working with the Tascam 34 tape machine?
