David Longstreth: of the Dirty Projectors

The days of white lab coats at Abbey Road are long gone. Recording technology has never been more accessible to musicians, and there is a well-defined lineage of great artists who can both craft a song and perfect its sonic reality. The Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth is among the best of them. From home recording experiments to live orchestra cut-ups to hi-fi conquests, he's covered an intimidating amount of ground in ten years and twelve releases. The band's latest LP, Swing Lo Magellan , is the culmination of his abilities as a songwriter and an engineer. 

Could you describe the recording setup for Swing Lo Magellan?

We rented this house in upstate New York about three hours from New York City. That was the house Amber [Coffman] and I lived in for a while as I was writing the songs. The process of demoing into making finished recordings was a pretty seamless one. A lot of the recording was super casual — more just about the vibe of the performances. In making demos of the songs it was just like "get the idea down as fast as possible." The intention was to go back later on and re-record things in a more professional or hi-fidelity way, but we found that so many of those early first takes had this real vibe to them. When we set up to record the rhythm tracks, there was an attic that was this pretty tight 'A' frame triangle shape and wood every surface. The room itself was just gorgeous. We set the drums up at one end. From there it was about setting up the bass cab in a way that was isolated, and we put the guitar amp down on the second floor so we had control over that.

The room wasn't big?

No it was pretty small.

Maybe the reflections of all the wood made it sound bigger...

When I listen to the album it doesn't sound big — it sounds really close and really tight. We were into those Glyn Johns recorded Stones records — things like that. 

So a lot of it was tracked live together?

For sure. The rhythm section stuff, not the vocals. It's always tricky because with Dirty Projectors songs there's often a collage-like element. So, on a song like "Offspring Are Blank," the chorus has this really naturalistic sense of space like it's really being played in a room. Then the verse has this huge [Roland] 808, a crazy weird manipulated cabasa sound, and double-tracked, three-part harmonies hard-panned on either side — so that's a very artificial or surreal space. On this record, as with a lot of the records that I've made, there was that challenge again and again of juxtaposing these different kinds of space.

Within one song...

Yeah. Song-to-song or within one song.

How did you get the drum sounds for the record?

We had three drum "templates" for different kinds of tones because we were recording 40 songs. We split up each of the numbers into these different templates. One was based on [John] Bonham, one was based on Charlie Watts/Ringo, and the other was just a looser thing. Donato Paternostro, our drum engineer, got the multitracks for a Stevie Wonder song, so the third template was based on the Stevie vibe.

Was the third template the one used for "Gun Has No Trigger"?

Yeah. 

Love the drums on that one. So you have the aggressive one, the "Stevie" medium dynamic one, and then maybe a mono overhead setup for a song like "Impregnable Question"?

Actually that snare and kick is just a [Shure] SM57 pointed in the vicinity of the drums — it was the original loop from the demo. It had a nice kind of loping quality; a nice unevenness. One thing that was part of the discovery of the recording process was [deciding] when it feels good to have the naturalism of something that's truly played and when you want to push the artifice of a looped thing — an uneven loop, a shitty loop that has a cool groove on it. The drum loop on "Impregnable" totally has that for me. "Gun Has No Trigger" has it as well. It kind of cuts and lopes over itself. Another aspect of the "Gun" loop... I just love how the beats are put together in It Takes a Nation of Millions..., the Public Enemy record, and just how fucking messy and raw those grooves are. There will be like two or three different kick drums from all the samples he's layering, and each of the kicks has its own quality. He'll kind of stratify the kicks sonically; one will be like mostly sub, one will be kind of woody and higher, and maybe there's one even in the fucking middle. 

Filling out the whole spectrum...

Right. And so somehow, even though there are these three competing kicks and they even have different feels, there's a feeling of order within. The frequencies are stratified, separated out. That's something we did on "Gun Has No Trigger." 

You really got that sub thing working in there. It's amazing how well you can still hear the definition of the kick drum with the sub underneath it. Was it difficult when you were mixing to get that balance?

So hard, yeah, between those two kicks and also with the bass.

It's always a fight down there.

Yeah. But we just kind of sat with it until it did what we were trying to get it to do.

Was there a different mixing session at another studio or did you mix it all there too?

It took a while. It was a pretty organic process. I believe in mixing while you're recording. 

As much as possible... planning things out at least.

Yeah. We did some of that and then we mixed more in the basement of Donato's house. Again, there were so many songs that we were working on. We did a couple days at the Rare Book Room in December to throw down the strings and the winds with yMusic [a chamber group]. I did a bunch more mixing then as well. Some things were finished at the house, some at Rare Book Room, and some in Donato's basement. 

So it was mixed in different chunks as you went?

Totally. 

What monitors were you using at the house?

Adam A7s. I really like those and checking back with [Sony] 7506s [headphones]. One thing I got into when we were up there was that mid '60s super wide stereo panning. I've loved The Beatles since I was a little kid, and I got super into listening to the records just channel by channel. I know the songs and the recordings so well that it was just sort of a new way to listen at that point.

You would only listen to one side at a time?

Yeah. It's amazing how the recordings reveal in part how they were made. You can hear more detail that way than when it sums. I really think The Beatles' recordings are just perfect. I guess that one ideal of our album was that you'd get a sense of how it was made just by listening to it... and that you can hear every single thing that's happening — every single choice that was made and every single aspect of the orchestration.

The super wide stereo thing, meaning everything is pretty much left right or center?

Not a ton of movement or placement within the spectrum. The overheads are a stereo image, but other than that there are very few stereo sounds.

You consider the voice the be the most important instrument, which is very apparent in the mixing on SLM .

I think the trickiest thing about mixing vocals often times is getting the harmonies to balance. 

And not overtake the lead vocal...

That's true. The reason there are four singers in the band is that I'm obsessed with harmony. I love the colors of notes together, and I think that putting harmonies into voices has this effect of making those colors incredibly vivid and emotionally resonant. So I love the harmonies to be like right there [in the mix]. It was always such a thing mixing our album Bitte Orca with Nicolas Vernhes [ Tape Op #20 ] at the Rare Book Room, or any time we're doing a radio session and somebody else is mixing. The inclination is always to put the harmony vocals way under the lead and I'm just like, "Get them up there!" The tricky thing is reading when it's the foreground and when it's the background — it gets to this place where it's almost an antagonistic relationship between the two just because you're trying to push both so forward. 

At that point maybe you get into different reverbs and things to offset them. In "Impregnable Question" I noticed that — sometimes the backups will hit the reverb a little harder.

Yeah that's true in "Impregnable". The only reverb we used on the entire album was the classic Roland Space Echo. I love that thing.

To me it sounds like you're never slamming the vocal tracks. Are you doing more parallel compression?

I have no idea what that is. [laughs] 

Where you split the signal and blend the compressed with the original...

Yeah we do that sometimes. That's a cool thing. The vocal melodies tend to span an octave or an octave and a half; both Amber and I are super dynamic singers, so there's probably more compression and play on the microphone than hopefully you're conscious of when you're listening to it. 

You mainly used a [Neumann] U 47 and [Shure] SM7 for lead vocals and a [Neumann] U 67 or a Mojave for backups. What kind of pre's/compressors were you using?

We were using the Neve lunchbox pres a lot and we usually hit the [Chandler] Germanium compressor on the way in. I definitely have sort of an attitude... I like to stay dumb about a lot of this stuff so I'm just kind of hacking toward the sound I want without obsessing too much about technology or "tasteful analog gear." I want it to stay about the song and the feeling of it.