Inside the Tracking of Drowner’s Debut EP
After just a few weeks of work we’re now finished with the vocal tracking. Early on we had considered the possibility of doing it at one of the great studios here in Houston, but in the end we decided the budget was better spent elsewhere. In March, we set up in my barn studio, where I have been working for the past few months, after moving my studio three times in as many years. The new room works well and sounds balanced enough at the mix position with minimal treatment. I set up my Topaz 8 bus mixer in the center of the room to make patching around back a lot easier. The keyboards occupy the space against the walls, along with my DAW desk and monitoring. We decided to use the pres on the Topaz for vocals since they sound really nice and have a sweet top EQ. I knew that we would be shooting for a layered sound, and EQ would be important.
I really believe limitations inspire creativity, and so my set up for this project leaves out all of the fancy rack gear, all of my many synths except for my JP8080 for vocoding. I’m using one guitar, a USA Strat, and one keyboard, a ’68 Wurlitzer. I’m also using a single plugin organ for pads in a couple of the tracks. We’re using a Space Echo from the ’70′s for echo and reverb effects. I’m mixing it in Cubase 5.5 with stems from Ableton and listening through Mackie 864′s. I run my guitar through a rack mount amp that doesn’t have a name (but sounds fantastic), and the P bass tracks were DI’d through the same amp but set to “Clean.” On the software side, I’m using Ableton, Wavelab, Ozone 4, Vintage Warmer, Sir Reverb. The guitar set up is a long story, but a couple of years ago I was part owner of a vintage music store, and I spent a couple of years demoing guitar pedals looking for the sound I wanted. I could hear it in my head and knew that it was basically going to be fuzz, chorus, reverb and delay, with the occasional wah or phaser. I looked at everything: Boss, MXR, old Ross stuff, Digitech, DOD, even some cheap Behringer pedals. I looked at all manner of boutique fuzz pedals: Zivex, MJM, Peptone, all of it.
In the end, I found that the tone of this no-name amp (I think it says “GTR-something” on the front) sounded really good as a start. The Space Echo I already owned was great for delay and reverb. I loved using the Sherman Filterbank for extra growl and sweeping filter effects. For the rest, nothing beat the real-time control, flexibility and (above all) the sound of plugin chains I could design and build in Ableton. In the computer, I can combine plugins from Waves, Peavey, Sound Toys and Audio Damage with synth-style processors like Reaktor and MaxMSP. Using Reaktor and Max, I could build granular delays from the ground up and combine them with the nice hardware tone I was already getting — for something way beyond what I could get with a floor full of pedals. And what’s even better, I could control all of it from my MIDI pedal board. Purists might argue that sometimes plugins don’t sound real or that digital is too harsh, but any gear or technique is only as good as your skill at using it. The set up I have going works for this kind of music: soaring, epic, shoegazey stuff. If we were making a blues or jazz record, I would break out the Fender Twin, or something. So, back to the tracking of the vocals:
I recently built a vocal “booth” in the corner of the room with some deadening foam and a light. So, for the first session we spent a lot of time getting Anna used to the room, trying out a couple of mics and making a series of trial and error monitoring adjustments. We got all of the way through the first track, “Written,” in just a couple of hours, even with several harmony tracks and a lot of passes overall. Toward the end of the session, we just sat with the guitar and an SM58 and let another track we were working on run, while we improvised something.
In the second session, we got through “Chime” and spent some more time on the improvised song from the earlier session. The improvised track would eventually become “Wildflowers.” There’s a striking difference between the tracks we started out with and the two new ones we wrote in the studio. Way back in November, when we first talked about working on a music project together, I sent Anna a set of tracks that I had built up over the past couple of years, while I was figuring out the guitar sound I was after. Those songs have a very structured quality and were fairly complete before Anna ever heard them. Of course, it’s not ideal to write an entire track, fully produce it, and then hand it to a singer — at least not in this genre. But, I use Ableton Live to write and demo music, and luckily it makes it easy to restructure a song and completely rebuild it. So, that was our approach with the older songs. But, the new songs had a more organic sound (not surprisingly, I guess), and there was so much more opportunity to interplay, make mistakes, take chances and find a better song. The feedback between players is such a crucial element of our favorite music that I feel like most of the songs we do in the future will be written, at least partly, this way.
By the time we got to the third and fourth sessions, we had everything moving along at a good clip. We tackled “December” (now titled “Point Dume”) last as it had the most density in the vocals and will probably be our lead track. I was very excited to get to this part of the process, as I really had a good idea of what I wanted the song to sound like, and Anna had written really great lyrics for it. I wanted the vocals to be over the top, with more layers than anything I had done before — even to a ridiculous degree (see Roy Thomas Baker’s work with Queen). Not because I thought we would use all of the tracks, but because I wanted the see how many we could use — how far we could push it, and exactly where the line between not quite enough and too much is. Anna sang beautifully, again and again, and we ended up with something like 36 tracks of vocals after comping. That should be enough to compete with the guitars. It remains to be seen how many of the tracks will actually make it through the mix process.
The final session was a lot of fun because we worked on a cover that we hope to release separately from the EP. The song we’re covering is one of our longtime favorites: “Camera” by REM from the Reckoning album. The original has a very dark tone, and our version takes the song to a completely different place, while still respecting the original. Look for that sometime soon.
Kudos to Anna for singing so well and for humoring my experimentation. I think, overall, everything went very well.
Next, we mix the songs and make a video.
Written
Spring fever has hit me like a fistful of flowers. Suddenly, the darker days of winter kind of shrug off their heavy mantle of introspection, and I want to embrace everything. Joy wells up within me.
Darren sent me the most incredible guitar licks the other day. Another song, a bonus track. He asks me to give it a listen, and I’m kind of bowled over. Smitten by it. Darren’s handed it to me along with a notion, “an economy of lyrics,” which spawned much fruitful discussion, and I set to paring my words to an absolute minimum.
So, written emerges kind of like a spare house — four walls make a bar of music, four bars make a verse — lay a roof on top of it and we’re done. But, then after the frame — the windows, the doors, the rooms. There are nooks of safety and tranquility. “The rough slap of feet contacting the floor.” A living, breathing energy that redoubles and expands.
Those bare outer walls are the continual refrain, which sprang forth from the bass line like flowers from a handful of seeds, “Where is it written? Where is it written? Where is it written?…” And I scratch my head for the better part of a day, on the way to and from Mass, my own feet scraping the pavement as I walk along in the sun, in the breeze, drinking in the delicious scent of spring in a kind of reverential bliss, until I conclude: “…that this life is meant for sorrow?”
No, there is simply too much joy in the world, in living. Too much love, overflowing our senses. And even more Love beyond, somewhere. At least today, at least in these moments. I see four hands embracing, two taking two along. A man and a woman, un homme et une femme. This mental picture leaps forward out of a song that we’d let fall aside. The lyric was: “…where we are standing face to face…” and so I see, the standing and the hands, a kind of embracing of hearts in a neutral stance. Easy bliss. I’m running with it.
I wanted to write my own book of How This Is. I wanted to say that there is nothing written that says we have to grow anxious or to despair. Maybe there is nothing written at all, except what we ourselves are writing. And many of us, many of us want to believe in hope. And so we hope in it, we believe in it. Why not?
And the stranger that we are to recoil from in an existential sense — some of us have dared to embrace him (or her). Some of us are reading in bed as they sleep beside us. And why not?
The Beatles said it, “All you need is love.” It was counter-cultural then, and it’s counter-cultural now. And this band, I think it came together on a shared assumption that some moments, some images, some songs kind of haunt us in the most beautiful of ways. Haunt meaning hang around us. Become one with us. Meet us where we are.
I hope Written is one of those songs.
Plotting December
I went more deeply into plotting “December” today. Trying to figure out where the bars of music are, what the different sections of the song are. Trying to place my voice over each. I originally thought I’d sing the entire song in head voice, like Tori Amos does sometimes, but eventually the lower notes revealed themselves.
I could listen to these tracks all day. My immediate feeling for “December,” was one of a car speeding down a pulsing freeway. Maybe the 10 West at night? The 101 winding up the coast? And approaching a cliff overlooking Leo Carillo, or maybe Point Dume. It occurs to me that “Point Doom” is a hot name for a song.
But, over the last few days — maybe it’s the newness all around me, with this post-Christmas taste of spring (weather in the 70s here!) — I’ve seen Leo Carillo in the first blush of morning, golden and resplendent, and seen the sunlight in my friends’ hair. I am immediately happy. I feel a bliss set in that takes my edge away. I miss the glitz and parties of L.A., but I can also remember this aching loneliness that threatened to gnaw me away.
I smell of the Virgin Suicides. I taste American Beauty in my mouth.
I awoke the night before last — well, it was the early morning, pre-dawn — and I couldn’t go back to sleep. So I had this banged up little pea-green notebook I write lyrics in beside my bed, and I formed a stream of consciousness:
[something]
[something]
Gorgeous excess
I wanted this
I wanted this
The heavy canyons
that lead to Pt. Dume
An open fire pit
smoke follows beauty
a kind of
desperation
sets in
to know more?
I don’t want to feel
that I can just fall
and never hit
ground and
never hit ground
poolside parties
[I think Skybar]
I embraced everyone
no one
embraced me
or I embraced
everyone everyone
embraced me
our arms intertwined
our fingers touching
the tips of each
other’s hair
our looks are distant, our
fingers thin
our glasses full
they’re spilling over
they’re spilling over
wasn’t “forlorn” just
another word for pretty?
How the good life
kind of steals your soul
I’m driven by blindness
I stumble in
an office hallway my
shoe strap
breaks in a parking
garage
I notice I’m not alone
but, I’m
not afraid
The winds will blow the smog
right out of the sky
every day at
11 AM – clouds of fog
and by noon, the
splendor of sun
I’m empty inside
I’m clean
I have no guile
I’ll never leave
I’ll never change
I think I know
what eternity is now
I open up
drive
west to the cliffs
of Malibu
I look out into
an abyss of
ocean I think
I see eternity
now, I think I know it
I get back in the
car I turn
away the engine
coursing with
life my mind
empty, thinking
nothing ever happens here
I decide there’s a glimmer of brilliance here. I want to keep the lyrics free-form and loose, and I begin to get chills thinking, “I think this is my favorite song yet…”
