The Sonic Alchemy
Welcome to Sonic Alchemy, the ultimate podcast for creatives looking to elevate their craft and gain insider insights into the world of artistry. Hosted by Justin Webster and Kevin Crouch of the band The Silver Echo, this engaging show provides a dynamic platform to showcase artists and delve into the myriad skills and layers that contribute to a successful creative career.
Each episode of Sonic Alchemy offers a blend of captivating interviews and insightful discussions. Our interviews feature a diverse array of artists who share their unique journeys, techniques, and sources of inspiration. These conversations provide listeners with a rare glimpse into the personal and professional experiences that shape creative success.
In addition to interviews, Justin and Kevin host thought-provoking discussions on various topics relevant to creatives. These episodes explore everything from honing specific skills and overcoming creative blocks to navigating the business side of art and staying inspired in a rapidly changing world.
Discover how successful artists overcome challenges and find their voice.
Gain practical advice on developing skills, managing a creative career, and staying motivated.
Connect with a community of passionate creatives who are dedicated to their craft.
Sonic Alchemy is more than a podcast; it's a journey into the heart of creativity. Join Justin and Kevin as they uncover the alchemical process that turns passion into artistry and artistry into success. Whether you're an aspiring artist or an established creator, Sonic Alchemy offers the insights and inspiration you need to thrive.
Tune in and transform your creative potential into gold with Sonic Alchemy!
The Sonic Alchemy
"Truth Of Instinct" Part 2: Production
Peek behind the curtain as we reveal the meticulous sonic craftsmanship that shaped our upcoming album. After six years of relentless experimentation, we've finally captured the sound that's been living in our heads all along.
Our journey began with a fundamental shift in approach—moving from the purely analog methods of our first record to embracing the boundless possibilities of digital production. This wasn't about abandoning our roots, but expanding our palette to create something that honors our influences while carving out our own unique space.
One magical discovery came when we incorporated a vintage Solina synthesizer, whose distinctive string sounds became a signature element throughout the album. We found ourselves chasing specific tones from artists we admire—the War on Drugs' atmospheric textures, Ghost's layered instrumentation, and the punchy synth elements hiding in classic Def Leppard records. These explorations led us to one of our favorite production techniques: doubling guitars with keyboards to create parts that cut through a mix like nothing else.
The Fractal Axe Effects system revolutionized our guitar approach, offering thousands of amp and cabinet combinations while maintaining the warmth and character we craved. For drums, we finally found our sweet spot with Superior Drummer after years of tweaking—creating custom kits that deliver the chunky, impactful sound we'd been searching for all along.
What we've learned through this process transcends the technical details. Great production isn't about perfect isolation or the most realistic sounds—it's about how everything works together in context. Sometimes the sound that's most interesting on its own disappears completely when placed in a full arrangement. The true art lies in making thoughtful choices about which frequencies each instrument should occupy and how they complement each other.
Ready to hear what six years of sonic exploration sounds like? Connect with us at thesilverecho.com or thesonicalchemy.com and join us for the next step in our musical evolution.
Learn more about The Silver Echo at thesilverecho.com
all right, what's up, what's up? We're live. What's up, what's up.
Speaker 2:We're live From the power of Grayskull. It seems like every time we try and do this, some kind of internet or some kind of technical catastrophe. I'm just going to call it Gremlins. There's two references that throw back, references for you.
Speaker 1:He-Man Like the movie Gremlins. Yeah, the movie Gremlins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, going back to the 80s. Yeah, we're just going back. Yeah, my mom she was watching like I guess they had some kind of throwback or something, because it's not actually on mtv but she was watching all these old, like 80s mtv videos this morning. Just so you don't have to, you know, uh want to hurt yourself by watching the news. Um, she, she, she, she's opted for you know what? I'm just going to put this on cause it sounded good and it's so great to watch some of those videos.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just it's funny to me, cause I keep joking about the eighties production. It's like, um, how they were. I feel like music video directors back then. They, the, the studios probably didn't know just exactly how much money it would cost to do a video, because it's in the early days so you have all these like coked out directors that are like it's gonna be a million dollars.
Speaker 2:It's a million dollars, you know, it's gonna take like a hundred grand to shoot. Yeah, the other nine hundred thousand dollars is gonna go up their nose, yeah, um, yeah, because I was just watching, like, uh, simply irresistible, the robert palmer video with all the supermodels and all that. It's like you just watch a video and go, okay, here's what I need for the set, guys, any place will be fine. Um, I need 12 supermodel women. Uh, one microphone stand. I don't even need a cable, just a microphone. Robert in a suit um, that's the budget, guys. What should we build the studio? A million dollars, yeah, it's probably going to take 50 grand to shoot that video. The girls probably did it for next to nothing because they probably didn't get paid enough and, uh, everyone probably had a big coke fuel party after it.
Speaker 1:So I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, never mind, I have no agency to know anything I'm talking about. I'm literally talking out my butt, but it just was funny to me to think about but those were the early videos you know, yeah, those were the early days.
Speaker 1:That was like reading, uh, alex van halen's book brothers brothers and them talking about those early music videos that they did um and how weird of an experience it was, because it was a totally new art form.
Speaker 1:There weren't really expectations yet now, of course they're talking late 70s, but you know, yeah, roll that into the 80s. You know, things kind of get more formalized, probably mid to late 80s, but uh, there was a lot of freedom there and a lot of uh, a lot of characters and crazy ideas. That should never have been videos, um oh yeah, here we are what are you?
Speaker 2:gonna do. Yeah, it was just really fun like to go back and see some of that, because I'm not watching those in forever and I was like, oh my god, this was. There wasn't a time in which that was the art form and of course, now it's. You know social media and you have Instagram and TikTok and all these different places where you can share media more frequently. And the mom asked the question. She's like do they still make music videos? I'm like, well, yeah, we've done music videos. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've done a couple, you know, but the platforms we're going to do a couple more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but the platforms changed to go to it's more YouTube and Vivo and places that will stream those videos. So you can kind of watch them without the need to have an MTV, if you will, and on YouTube you can build channels that just have video after video after video like playlists.
Speaker 1:So the media has changed a bit, but it's still very much a necessary art form. Yeah, the way that people consume it is different too, so things have become a little more. I don't know transient is the right word, but like okay, so if, if it's 1984, you spend a bunch of money to make a video, that's going to be on repeat repeat yeah, I think about the jump video I mean yeah, just constant play so it's going to get played a bunch of times for as long as that song is relevant, and if it's a hit song, it's going to be relevant a long time.
Speaker 1:You know, nowadays things move so fast that budget is smaller. You're not going to spend so much money making something that's going to be consumed a lot. You're going to make lots of little things that's right, you know, and occasionally you know you're going to splurge and there are people who check out music videos. Honestly, I haven't really watched music videos for most bands in a long time. I get surprised occasionally when I see a music video, I'm like oh yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I know that we've done ours, and so they're a really cool way to commemorate a song and to do something different and have something to share with people. I think things are so visual these days, um, but I don't keep up with them like I did on the days when you would just put it on TV and and see it all the time. You know it was just normal. Yeah, vh1 or MTV or whatever.
Speaker 2:There's something nostalgic, obviously for the, for us, for me certainly and I know, for you too, because you still have. You're still in the era of mtv. You know you're coming up when you're growing up.
Speaker 2:You're still in that era, and you got the tail end of some of that. That was still there before everything really shifted. But again, it's just. It's remarkable to see well a the evolution of it but also just how people are. They still find the medium of music video important, but with technology and things and you can shoot videos now for your phone, you know, right off your phone you can make something that's really pretty good quality and presentable. And if, if you have good creativity, there's so many different plugins and things now to enhance or make your videos look better, to add those little special elements, that if you go back to the 80s they were just starting to figure those things out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know some of those overlays and things that you see in some of those classic 80 videos. Now you can just literally do that on a filter in instagram. Now, if you wanted that look, and some people go back, it's like they want to have that vintage look or they'll go back to like 70s looking film or 80s film or something. All these different aesthetics, that technology have allowed us to make more in your pocket. Yeah, so the ability for people to do videos or short form, long form, whatever your choice uh, is a little bit easier, I imagine, because you're not really having to go and get the big giant studio cameras and a lot of stuff that those videos were done on you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean the process of editing. I mean if you're in the 80s and you're trying to edit off of whatever cameras they're using, back then I couldn't even tell you what they were using in studios.
Speaker 2:That process is not accessible compared to now you can, you know you do it on your phone, cap cut, imovie, final Cut, davinci, whatever.
Speaker 1:You've got a full suite or you know, know, there's AI editing now. Yeah, so you can just let it auto chop your stuff up and just call it a day. You know yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm not quite there, you know, maybe I'll get there in time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we'll see, I don't know.
Speaker 2:There's a place for that.
Speaker 1:Like you know, I let AI edit these podcasts, but it's because the important thing is the, the conversation, it's not the visuals I would feel weird giving away all the visual, uh creative decision making to ai, but yeah, that's a different conversation yeah, that's the whole thing.
Speaker 2:But you, actually, it's kind of a good transition to what we're talking about today, which is really about the recording of the record as well and some of the technology and stuff that we did, or at least what we were exploring on some of this, uh, some of these new songs like we talked a little bit about that last week, you know and just the writing of the record. But there's always a journey kind of separate from that. When you have good ideas, you're also looking, or at least for me, maybe in parallel you you're always going oh, I want another set of sounds. I'm really craving and we often do this, for lack of a better word, because we both collect vinyl. It's like crate digging, except looking for tones or sounds to enhance or create something, or it creates a new idea. There's a song we have, of course, on this record that will hopefully be our first single.
Speaker 2:That literally came.
Speaker 2:I borrowed a synthesizer from a friend of mine who was so eager to want to show me this synth that he got and I was playing around on there and one of the first sounds that I pulled up was like this arpeggiated sound, and I only had borrowed this synth for a couple of weeks and I promised him I would give it back because I just wanted to road test it a little bit and see what was on there and that initial sound I don't even know if you remember this, but that initial sound was on that synth that I got from Orlando and I had no idea that that was the case and I had found that and then I realized like, oh, this is really cool and I was kind of writing some stuff with it.
Speaker 2:But then I was like, shoot, I need to give it back to him. And then I went back to those sounds and I'm like, oh man, this is really great. Well, dang it, I don't have that synth anymore and I really wanted to write a song with that arpeggiated sound that I found. So that's when I went on a quest to find that sound again and that led me to Arturia, which is the some of the synth you know, software, synth stuff that I started getting into on this record and that I was able to find something that was a pretty close proximity to what I initially had recorded and that ended up being the kind of key synth element that is driving that song.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, yeah, okay. So just to give some parameters to the conversation and a little context, if you didn't listen to the episode before this, we talked about the writing process or creating the songs. We kind of wanted to split up the conversations into a few different directions. So we, you know, we talked about the writing process. I guess today we're going to talk about more of the production, the sounds, how we put it all together. I'd like to do a third conversation that's more about the actual recording process. So, you know, getting takes, getting good performances, you know, I think we both learned a lot about just how to get better at that through this process recording 12, 13
Speaker 1:songs, uh, and slamming your head against the wall, uh, on a few of them for a while to make you level up, um. But you know, we had touched on this in the last episode. But our first record was we took sort of a old school approach, or at least a version of an old school approach, which was, uh, if we don't have the real thing, we don't use it, um, so it was, you know, miking up a deluxe reverb, it was pedals in front of an amp, getting the sounds that way. It was synthesizer into a, you know a preamp, uh, whatever sounds you could get out of that particular keyboard, a physical keyboard, that sort of mentality, and that was great, um.
Speaker 1:But I think this, this go around, we wanted to explore quite a bit further, and so I think we took that limitation off and said, okay, well, anything goes now If you've got the real deal, and that's what works, great. And I think we have a bit of mix and matching, like one thing that I want to get into one of our well, I mean, I guess I'll speak for me, but I know I speak for both of us Favorite band is the War on Drugs.
Speaker 1:We love that band and in trying to understand, because we had one song in particular that I feel like takes quite a lot of influence from them. It doesn't sound like them at all. So if I didn't tell you what it was, you probably wouldn't connect that dot uh. But there's a. There's a song on the record called away from us, um, that we wanted to do something that felt like it belonged in that world, you know, and that it was sort of spaced out a little bit and never urgent, not written in a pop structure, to where it's you know, just get to the point.
Speaker 1:It has interludes and it has texture and atmosphere, and so I know that you had did a whole lot of sort of research on how do? They put these records together Because, I mean're, they're pretty. Their records sound amazing. A deeper understanding is like an all-time amazing that's a masterpiece, record top to bottom but you ended up finding out that they use this kind of obscure piece of gear that I had never heard of before. Um, and now I'm blanking on the title of it the Selena. The Selena yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I know you got a hardware version of that and then you also found a software version of that.
Speaker 2:Um, both distinctly different really, but I think, uh, here's a cool thing. So we were looking at, we wanted string arrangements in some of these songs like um, and there's such a hodgepodge of things for me that get influenced and go into the soup of that. Like one of my favorite records is urban hymns from the verve, and the verve took an approach on those songs where they had a lot of violins or orchestrations behind it. It's sort of queuing underneath the band and I thought, oh, this is great war on drugs.
Speaker 2:Of course they have these really high piercing sort of strings that cut through anything in a mix yeah and I'm going man, a lot of times when you're trying to find that in a synth pad or even in a software synth, it just doesn't seem to want to cut through the guitar and drums of a rock band and I'm, what is it that they're using? So I would go and watch rig rundowns from these guys on War on Drugs and just kind of see what's some of the gear that they used. And I see that they have a vintage Solina that they bring out on stage, which is crazy to me because these things are like old, vintage 70s gear that are just perfect condition. But when I saw that I was like I have to figure out how to get one, because it was really the thing that I've been craving and the sort of clarity of those high registered strings are so good and it uses like tape loop style.
Speaker 2:So I thought, man, I can find one and Behringer makes one kind of like a hard run right, a melatron yeah, very similar, same sort of concept same kind of concept, I believe, and some different things you can do, but it basically is a tape loop synth version of um, an orchestra five piece, whatever, so you have violins and violas and all this stuff that you can kind of mix together. Anyway, I got the hardware version of that was blown away and that was something I think when, when I introduced that to us, it was like it's like one of those light bulb moments when you bring a new piece of gear in, you go, oh yeah, this is definitely going to make it across the record, and it got ended up getting used in a couple different spots on the record for us quite a few, I feel like pretty much almost anywhere that needed strings yeah, it was a signature piece of the record for us was just using that in both versions.
Speaker 2:Like the software version has some really cool things that weren't obviously not available in the hardware or the the real version of that. You know some cool delays and things that you could do with it. They were really neat. So there's some really great sounds that come from the software version, but the hardware version as well. Um, I can't say enough good things about it. It was, it's just one of those pieces of gear. When you find it, you're like, okay, I could write a whole record with this um and find some really good use for it and it ends up being a utility instrument and we can kind of talk about some of those things too. Like there's utility sounds that we use. That kind of show up like a signature bass sound that I would use for a synth bass or something like that. We find these things that have worked for us in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'll continue to find you use some of those things to punctuate a sound. But then there's just, you know, unique instruments like the Selena that were very prevalent across this record, that that we were just excited by it, like, wow, this is a really cool thing. Let's put it on a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, what I think is cool about that particular piece of gear, the Selena, is that there's a million sample libraries that aim to emulate with the most realistic detail you know, strings, horns, whatever, yeah, and not that there's anything wrong with that. I think. A couple of things, though, that are interesting is it's all really context dependent, and so if you think about about, like, if you go see an orchestra in an orchestra hall, it's very different than recording right up close on an instrument. For example and I think a lot in pop music you're not recording something in a hall. Uh, you know, you maybe have a quartet or something like that. You're going to close, mic them in a smaller room, or even if it's a decent sized room, you're not necessarily micing it to get all that extra ambience.
Speaker 1:And so if you have a production, a song that you know the guitar is kind of in your face, the drums are big, bass is rocking all that stuff, vocal right here. Bass is rocking all that stuff, vocal right here. And then you have this big, soupy string sound. In order for you to get that up high enough in the mix to be heard, it starts to wash everything out, it makes everything feel flubby, and so it ends up just not being the right mix of context often times and if you were to have that sound on its own, you go, oh, this sounds like you know a sound stage where they'd record a movie, or it sounds like I'm in you know a great concert hall or theater.
Speaker 1:But you kind of quickly find, when you start using those sounds, it doesn't always work that way, like Like, even though it sounds really cool, it doesn't work in the context of a more modern production or something like that. And so then what's interesting is that, uh, there are also, like there are things that sound hyper realistic, and then there are things that don't sound as realistic, but they still sound good.
Speaker 1:And I would say the Selena doesn doesn't really sound. I mean it sounds like strings, but it's like it's not the most realistic version of that sound, but there's something about it that makes it stand out and I think, yeah, you kind of want to be on one end or the other. You don't want something that sounds pretty close, because then it's just not interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so sometimes getting something that sounds a little less realistic actually ends up becoming more of a character piece and has a better vibe for what it is that you're trying to do. And that's something that I don't often think about because I get pretty fixated with how do I achieve a really realistic sound, whether that's you know, the Axe effects and trying to get something that sounds maybe like an amp in a room, or trying to recreate a favorite tone or whatever it might be, a drum sound, anything like that, and really craving that sort of realism. But sometimes getting less realistic is an advantage.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it's about just paying close attention to what you're hearing and then making a decision not getting too caught up in your preconceived notion of maybe what you're hearing, and then making a decision not getting too uh, not getting too caught up in your preconceived notion of maybe what you think you want to get something to sound like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't. I think, um, I don't know. I've always kind of in chasing sounds for as long as I have, and you know how you'll get and I'm sure everyone does this, especially in the software synth world too Like you're just going, preset after preset after preset after preset.
Speaker 1:It's exhausting.
Speaker 2:And it is exhausting. So when you, when you feel like you've discovered one, you sort of stop and go oh wait, this might it's almost I don't know what it is, but it's something in my brain. It's like this might be an idea. Let me pause here for a minute and just explore the sound a little bit more, and sometimes I'll do that and go well, it's not really cutting the thing that I wanted to do or it's not really maybe achieving the thing that I was hoping it would. But the sound itself is interesting, so maybe I'll come back to it. So I'll hard it or favorite it or whatever, or create a preset for it in an actual synth.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I'll tweak a little things. I don't do a ton of that. I do a little bit when I feel like it's necessary, like maybe I'll want to bring the resonance up on something or presence of something or the attack of a sound, and I'll change a little things here and there. But honestly, I just look for good sounds, because there's so many people out there that have spent their career building really unique sounds for any and everything. But the process of doing that you really have to be in the mood to do it and oftentimes it can't be on a day in which you're really thinking you're going to write because you know, just in the long process of trying to dial that in it takes a while. Something else I was going to ask you because you know you mentioned on the first record we did we you know it was isolation cabinets and micing a cabinet in the garage and but we were using all real stuff I say real but but you know what I mean Like more analog type things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a traditional setup as opposed to, like a digital kind of thing.
Speaker 2:In the EP stuff, when we were going a little more metal than we've gone in the past, we started switching over a little bit and I think by this record, if I'm not mistaken, we're fully into using fractal for you in the guitar world. So can you talk a little bit about that shift like what that was like for you in finding tones that were appropriate to still evoke what we're trying to get to, which is still very much like an analog aesthetic?
Speaker 2:yeah but we're using a lot of things that are a little bit more convenient because we can't go and buy five different amps to plug in. We need one thing that could sort of emulate a lot of that, and so talk a little bit about what that process was like for you and the discovery maybe in tones, through the fractal, the axe.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm trying to remember when we got that thing, um, but it's been quite a while now 2022, maybe 2021 2022 that sounds about right.
Speaker 1:So we'll say, you know, three years, maybe three or four years, something like that I played, I played it a lot. It does so many amazing things, um, but it's been for me anyway. It's been really hard to really get to the level of familiarity that I've needed to get with it and ironically you know I was I was talking to you about this the other day is I feel like now that we wrapped up the record, I feel like, uh, I have the Midas touch all of a sudden and I'm finally able to really really get it to do exactly what I want it to do, cause it's like any any bit of amazing tech these days is that the breadth of capabilities and the depth of detail that they go into to make these things is so incredible.
Speaker 1:And it's what makes them really good. But the downside of that is that the learning curve is astounding. But the downside of that is is that the learning curve is astounding and not just the learning curve. But also, you have to spend a lot of time with it to really develop your taste. Uh, experience using digital modeling was whenever the pod line six, pod X three came out.
Speaker 1:I had one of those and I really liked that thing. Um, it was so convenient, I toured it all over the place, um, but it was kind of like a toy compared to like the fractal fractal or some of the other things that are out there.
Speaker 1:You know, I haven't used all of those products and frankly, I don't have the time to try to learn a whole other platform just for fun. But I remember getting the fractal and thinking, okay, this is going to be good, I kind of know what these things are about. It gives more flexibility and that's that. And then you get in there and you look at the list of just even cabinets and you're like there's literally like thousands of these things.
Speaker 1:All different eras, different times, different configurations different micing combinations, different speakers, different, you know, manufacturers, different, I mean. And so you're going through and you're going, man, I could spend months just clicking through cabinets let alone amps, let alone the deeper settings on those amps.
Speaker 1:so all that's to say that, um, what I think, what I think has been helpful for me, has been there isn't really a substitute for putting in time, exploring it and trying to just build your taste so that you really understand.
Speaker 1:Because what I would do a lot is like I would build a preset and I would think this is really cool, I like this, and it would be really cool and I would like it. But then you kind of quickly realize like, oh okay, well, maybe in the context of this song or this other song, this doesn't work as well. You know, maybe it's, uh, it cuts too hard, um, or it's flubbier than I thought it was going to be, or maybe the mid range of that particular amp just isn't quite right, um, like, I have this weird way in my head of describing amp mid ranges now and, uh, I don't think I'm not even going to share it, cause I don't think it would make sense to anybody. But there, but there's a certain kind of like mid-range that I've learned that I really like in an amp and so, but it's taken a long time to get there and it's been doing. You know, I don't even know how many different demos of a lot of these songs and how many?
Speaker 1:different guitar tones have been on a lot of these things. So this is a long-winded way of saying that the process of using that equipment, um, I mean it's incredible because the results are great and I'm happy with what we ended up with. I basically what we used on most of the record for the like main rhythm guitar tone is a combo of a marshall like jtm 45 style amp, uh, with a dual rectifier a pretty classic combination. So the the dual rectifier is set, really scooped um, and then the marshall has more of the natural kind of mid-range in it and then just blending those to taste, the blend changes a little bit, you know, song to song, but in general the marshall is, you know, set kind of is like the main level of tone, and then you just kind of slide up the dual rectifier until it kind of fills out and gives it a little bit more modern. I say modern as if that is a really like hip modern amp, but more, yeah, I mean it's been around.
Speaker 2:It's been around for a long time the 90s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know what I mean. Right, it just gives it a little bit more of a distinct kind of quality where it's not just one sound. And one thing that really helps also that I would recommend that people do even if you're probably doing demos but recording your DI signal with whatever amp you use, because they make it so easy to reamp things. And so if you get into the process and you realize you know this amp sound really isn't working for me or you find something better that really excites you, like maybe you found something good and you're like, okay, in the interest of time, we need to work on this, but then you find something that just blows you away. You can just reamp it. It takes as long as it takes to just play through the song, Um, and so that's really great. So that's like I, I would go through and record everything with the Marshall and then, when everything was tracked and I was happy with the takes, I would just run the DIs back through, through and it was the equivalent kind of a having split.
Speaker 1:You know if you're in a studio you would maybe split your signal um, and they go to two different amps in two different rooms and you record them at the same time. So it's not quite as efficient as that and you could set up the fractal to do two amps at once. But you know, based on processing power and getting it all right, you don't feel quite as uh like you need to get it right at the right in the preset. You can kind of tweak things.
Speaker 2:If you need to get, it's more about the performance and the articulation of the performance, but knowing that you still have the freedom to be able to go explore, post the recording to be able to go oh definitely maybe this isn't what, or I want to tweak that amp a little bit more and you're not completely locked in.
Speaker 2:I think some of that is really the beauty of the digital space that we're in, and I think being able to embrace it look, I don't think you're going to. I love analog don't get me wrong at all but I know I think this really the umbrella of this, and what we're talking about is we're doing all of it. So, from the engineering, producing the recording, all of those things, we're really taking all of that on. So, when you really unpack what that means, you're musicians, of course, and you're creative and you love to be in that creative space, but you're also have to be really skilled in the exploration of your software and things that you're using, and that's a journey in and of itself, and so you have to. I mean, I think we're both gone to school for master's degree in YouTube.
Speaker 1:Youtube, you know you have to learn your gear. I mean, if you're, if you're going to probably anybody, but I think, especially if you're in a situation where you don't have an engineer yeah, we can't afford to pay one yeah, yeah, like well in the, in the time invested as well. It's like I don't know anybody who would want to spend the amount of hours working on this.
Speaker 2:You know, uh as us, even if they're getting paid.
Speaker 1:but that's true, um no, but I I think it's really, really important to learn how the stuff works and really like take it too far and have to reel it back in and all of that and really listen critically.
Speaker 1:It develops your ear a lot to be able to understand. Is this enough gain? Is it too much gain? You know like, am I losing the chords because it's compressing too hard, or does it not have that? Uh, I don't know the the quality it needs to have, because maybe it needs a little more compression in the amp or whatever that might be.
Speaker 1:Being able to even tweak it song to song a little bit and not just go. I have this one preset. I'm going to use exactly this every time being able to use the, you know, even the. I guess what I want to say is there. But then being willing to commit to sounds, being willing to print stuff and just say that's going to be. You spend a lot of time exploring, as you should, because you're trying to figure out.
Speaker 1:Like, what are the bones of this thing going to be like? There are so many options available and that is kind of one of the problems of working in an all-digital world is that the preset list does not get smaller. It grows and grows and grows and grows, and so you can spend all of your time just clicking through and eventually you lose context. You, you lose the ability to really even understand like what you're hearing anymore yeah, like what was the difference between preset 139 and 202?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and 634.
Speaker 1:And you're going. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, they're all good sounds you know, and so it requires being able to really understand what it is that you want to go for and then very quickly being able to. I think another thing that probably would help people is not trying to find your sounds isolated, so like if you have drums and you have guitars and you're trying to find a keyboard sound. Well, probably don't just listen to keyboards on their own right, because you're not getting a sense of whether it's going to cut through in the right way or blend in the right way, or whether the frequencies are going to complement each other or whether they're going to double up too much with what's already there. So trying to do those things as a whole, I think, is really important, because your ear will very quickly tell you if it works or not. Like if you're playing it and it's turned up and you can't even hear the keyboard, it's not the right sound.
Speaker 2:It's not the right sound.
Speaker 1:It's not that it needs to be turned up more.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's that it's not blending and cutting through with what's there. It's just completely getting washed out. So it's the wrong sound, even if you love that sound on its own. So it means one of two things you need a different sound, or every other sound has to change to accommodate that keyboard sound.
Speaker 1:So maybe if it's a keyboard forward song, then maybe that's what you choose to do, and that's where you're, you know you have to make decisions about, about what what things are going to sound like, but those are a couple of kind of boneheaded obvious things that I feel like the best of us can get caught up in forgetting when you're in the heat of battle and you're going through a list of a thousand presets or whatever yeah, there was a.
Speaker 2:I think there was a lot of um trying to think when I went, when I mentioned earlier about utility sounds. You know you're you're going to be looking for something that's just a really great amp that really evokes sounds that you've enjoyed from other artists, other bands, and you're you're looking for that and going what about this can can is my identity and being able to sort of find your identity or a thing that's really works for you for a majority of the things we do. And of course, there's like tricks of the trade to punch up something in a guitar, make it sound unique for a certain part or certain thing. But ultimately what we're talking about is like you, you need some meat and potatoes sound, yeah, and a big part of that decision, too, is how vintage or how modern you're gonna want it to sound yeah, it's interesting because we kind of go back and forth, you know yeah, we're, we're torn because we really love classic music, as a lot of people do.
Speaker 1:We really love classic music and there are so many great guitar sounds and I think you and I speak this way a lot, and probably most musicians do where, uh, you know, our head is like this uh, index of all these great sounds from all these different artists. And so you go, oh, what if we did that? You know that could sound like ACDC. Or what if we had this Black Album drum sound? Or what if we had this Pyromania guitar tone or we stack vocals like you know, eagles or whatever?
Speaker 1:right, you know, so you sort of have all of these reference points to be able to communicate to the other person what your idea sort of is. But then, when it comes down to execution, you have to decide are you really going to chase replicating that thing or are you going to figure out your own version of it, and how do you ultimately want it to come across? So you might record your song in a demo and then go, okay, this sounds too old school, you know which. It's a cool sound, but maybe it doesn't really sound like us right. And so I, from a guitar standpoint I don't know if that resonates with you on a, on a keyboard, it does well you mentioned.
Speaker 2:You mentioned something was really interesting and I will say you know some things I think about our sounds. We obviously want to keep secret and just for the mystique of what we're trying to craft and build, but other things I think were very obvious and okay to share. You know, pyromania brought up a really interesting thing. I don't think a lot of people really think about the fact that there's synthesizer across that entire record, because you hear it and it's so iconic with the guitars and things that are on that record and, of course, and vocals and Mutt Lang producing and all of this incredible work. But if you go back and listen to that record, and especially if you're in headphones, on a good set of headphones, you're going to hear this really lovely synth bass sounds and things in there that I mentioned are like utilitary sounds or utility sounds, excuse me, um, that really help to punch up the whole overall sound quality of that record.
Speaker 2:You listen to that record now 40 years later it still punches, it still sounds great. So I was chasing that kind of thing A lot of times in rock songs. I don't want the synth to be forward, I really want it just to accentuate the guitars. But you got to find the frequency range of where the guitars maybe aren't cutting and finding that space at least in the in the eq of it all to go okay, the guitars maybe they're sitting in the mids here. I want the synth maybe to sit somewhere over here in the low ends or maybe in the high end, like we talked about with selena, so you get a nice spectrum of sound across, or a wall of sound, if you will, yeah, and it really helps to push and make something sound really big. So a lot of those classic records that I talk with foreigner that's another one.
Speaker 2:I go back to the first record when we did the song heartbreaker. The bridge is feels like the first time, like yeah, yeah, hand on the heart, that's. I was literally chasing the scent sound for that song and I was like I want foreigner in the bridge, yeah. So I'm looking for something that felt like that kind of bridge and stumbled across it in um, in a dave smith, uh, prophet that I have and thought this is great. This evokes that kind of feeling to me and oftentimes that's what I'm looking for. If it's going to be something in a bridge or in a section where you're going to feature it, I do go and listen and think about what kind of mood is this song? What does it evoke for me? What are we trying to get to? And I'll go and look for those unique sounds. But piano.
Speaker 1:What might be an interesting spice to add into the mix?
Speaker 2:that's it. It's like you're building a chili, so you want to maybe put your own little little bam bam in there. You know, yeah, uh, to make it, make it yours. But it's still cayenne, it's still coming back and and um to those core things like pianos need to be able to find a way to get through in a mix and sometimes I often grapple with this. I love like upright sounds for pianos it's.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you're bringing this up yeah, because we're getting into some of our our specific tastes, which we're developing more of as we go.
Speaker 2:So a darker upright sound for me in a piano is my favorite when I'm writing. I love that sound because I find it to be a very singular mood for me. I'm in the room by myself with an old upright and I'm playing in that space. That's kind of the headspace that I get into.
Speaker 1:There's a cloudy, murky sort of quality that comes with especially the mid-range on a piano like that. Yeah, it doesn't have the clarity and the distinct sort of like Of a baby grand or a full grand piano.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So a lot of times my instincts are to go to that. Well, guess what? When you're trying to put that into a rock song, yeah, it doesn't cut through.
Speaker 2:So you, your instincts are going shoot. This was such a great writing tool and I loved it so much, but now that we got to go and record it for real post demo, it's just not cutting it. So I had to go back and get used to things which are much brighter in the piano space. That is not my taste, like pop grands or you know, these big program pianos have a little bit more clarity bright, spanky uh, clear kind of sounds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would never in a thousand years?
Speaker 2:go chase that. If I was looking to write, you know I'm always going to go with an upright sound. I want something that sounds like a. You bought that piano and it's not quite in tune, but it's good enough, like yeah because, it was kind of what I grew up with. I didn't have in your living room piano.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, like an old church piano.
Speaker 2:Yes, those things that have dust all over it and you're just like I just found this relic, but it's a couple broken keys yeah, for some reason.
Speaker 1:The top register, yeah, for whatever reason they don't work. Yeah, there's always a bass note that doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah the sort of clankiness of the pedal and when you're hitting those yeah those are all things that I really love but, like I said, they need to emulate the the creak that you get on those old piano benches.
Speaker 1:You know, like my piano growing up. Uh had one of the piano benches that flipped up and you'd have like your music books and stuff in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have one of those wooden legs.
Speaker 1:It's like you sit down and you're playing and it's just. Yeah, it's a whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but all of that stuff is to say that it's like sometimes sounds that you find that your love, that really helped create the genesis for the song that you're writing, don't end up working when it comes to production and the actual recording of the song that you're going to put out. So I had to get comfortable in that space, just as you mentioned earlier. Sometimes you found the greatest thing in the world. You're like no, that's the sound, man, that's the sound. It's like it can't be the sound if we're going to add all this other instrumentation, because it just doesn't cut through. You're not going to hear it, it's not going to even matter in the spectrum, um at all. It just gets buried underneath the bass, underneath the lower frequencies that are kind of in that space with it.
Speaker 1:So well, that's really true. And you know, that makes me think of something else as well, Like when comparing this record, the new record, with the last one we did, you know, we talked about how we we tried to do it as analog as possible and, as you know, quote unquote real as possible, but one of the other things is that, and, as you know, quote unquote real as possible, but one of the other things is that and I kind of forget about this, but there was a battle within us to try to pull back as much as we could to not overdub too many things.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Because we wanted it to sound as close to you. Know four guys. You know guys. You know drums, bass, keys, guitar, vocal right in a room playing those parts. Right, it's like, yeah, there there are multiple guitar parts on those songs, um, and that was kind of a battle for me of going. I think it makes the song better, but also how are we going to do this?
Speaker 2:How does it translate?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and we play live. We're going to have to pick and choose and sort of rearrange these things a little bit, so let's try to keep it as close to just what it's going to be. That mentality changed a lot on this, where it was more about okay, what if we just completely abandoned that rule and we just try to do anything and everything that we feel like makes this song better, and so one of the the production tricks that, um, uh, this is used a lot so they don't get sole credit. But another band that we really love, uh, that uses this particular trick I'm going to talk about is ghost. So we're huge fans of ghost. If you haven't listened to ghost, I don't know where you've been hiding, what, what rock you've been hiding under, but go listen to ghosts, they're amazing they've just been around for 20 years, even though it doesn't feel like that at all, but they have been, they still feel like a newish band, but they're not at all right, um, but ghosts, you know they.
Speaker 1:They do a something pretty commonly with their production where if they have a and I don't know which part gets written first, I assume the guitar parts get written first, because I know Tobias plays guitar, maybe he plays keys as well.
Speaker 1:But let's just say that there's an important motif in the song and you really want that motif to shine through in a big, dense production where there's lots of things happening.
Speaker 1:If you have only, it's kind of like the old school thing of doubling a vocal. It's like if you take a vocal and it's just one vocal, it might kind of not stand up that well against a couple of amps and all the stuff that's happening in the production. A couple of amps and all this stuff that's happening in the production, even though live it would sound great in the context of trying to get everything to sound bigger and bolder and, you know, more awesome. That vocal might sound a little thin on its own, even if it's recorded well, and so you might double it or triple it or whatever stack harmonies that help it sort of stand up against the big sounds that it has to stand up against. And so if you have a musical motif, doubling it with other instruments is a really great way to go about that. Miss you by the Stones is another good example of this.
Speaker 1:I think that song is genius for a number of reasons, but one is because that motif that basically every time you hear that roll around throughout that song, it is a different instrument or a different combination of instruments playing that same motif, and so an example that comes to mind because it's like the only keyboard thing I get to take credit for on this record is there's a song called the Wheel, and I had written the main rhythm guitar parts way before this, but when we were recording the tracks for real, I felt like it kind of needed an extra guitar thing, and so I wrote this kind of what I thought was kind of a cool line over the chorus, but it didn't quite poke out enough.
Speaker 1:It needed to sound thicker, but it's played on one string and, yeah, I could have recorded it a few different times, but I was like, you know, I feel like this would be something that and this is what ghost does a lot is they'll double a guitar line or a motif with a keyboard.
Speaker 1:Um, so I went and I found a cool dx7 sort of patch and went and like transcribed the guitar part onto keyboard and then blended that together with the guitar, and now you have something that doesn't quite sound like a keyboard, it doesn't quite sound like a guitar, it just sounds like this cool line that's happening through that chorus, and so, uh, playing with that as well, like trying to understand okay, we have these parts, you know guitar and keys. They overlap so much and so, depending on the song and what one is doing, you may need to either do a complimentary part to fill out that space that way, or if a piece is a really important piece to the song, what you might actually need to do is double that and both players play that same thing. And that's hard sometimes when you're used to one or the other is to recognize when you need to switch to that other style of recording. If that makes sense.
Speaker 2:I'm smiling about this, this is going to date me a bit, but, um, when I first started wanting to play keyboards, like in a rock band and I've talked to you about this, but for our listeners, you know, I've always fashioned myself as I know and I'm very proud and being in the skin of being a keyboard player, that's my main instrument and but there are moments and times where you feel like, okay, that's not. You know, in the era of hairband music and all that, keyboards were just not prevalent. It just looked a little cheese ball, believe it or not, um to see. So I was like, how am I? I'm not a great guitar player, I can play guitar, I can play bass, but these were things that I was kind of struggling with. Well, hearing what? When I first heard yngwie malmsteen's?
Speaker 2:alcatraz and I'm well, yeah, okay, alcatraz, post alcatraz, probably rising force era, um, I think it was, uh, a johansson, I can't think of his first name, but he was one of the synth players or keyboard players there also, classically it sounded like he had classic classical chops, but a lot of those licks that that Yngwie would play would be doubled by the synth player, yeah, and so I would try to learn all that stuff, like you know, like all this crazy classical kind of thing, and I would be so excited that I was like cool, I'm kidding, I could kind of play a guitar, lick like that, a solo, yeah, and play along with him, and that, of course, was one of my chops, were really great. But all of those kind of things still carry with me. And Ghost does this a lot. Of course we cover Square Hammer. If anyone's looking for an example of what we're talking about, go listen to the cover of that song or the original one.
Speaker 2:But you're hearing that both in the keyboard and the guitars, the main motif of that. You hear it done quite a bit. A lot of bands do it, even bands that you wouldn't even think of. But Sonic Youth is another one where you hear a vocal line match with the guitar and the melody of what the guitars play and matches their vocals, and that's been a signature thing for Sonic Youth to do in their music for a long time. Not to kind of take away the magic of it, it's not, it's just a unique way that they recorded stuff that really helped punctuate things in the song. So I love that you brought that up because it is something kind of signature for us that we really explored here. War on Drugs. Going back to them, that's another one where they hammer a motif.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with guitar and keyboard a lot to really sell the poetry or the thing, the aesthetic of what they're trying to get across.
Speaker 1:Well, it's like if you've got a melody line that's really great, then you should milk it for all it's worth. You know, and sometimes those things feel so much more impactful when, as a collective, you're all rallied behind this one beautiful thing. You know, it's like sometimes you got to create the bed for that motif to happen and other times you have to lean harder on the motif. There's just no getting around that, like everyone being sold out on one musical idea. Sometimes that is the the most powerful thing that you can do and you know, like gives you the hair on the arms. You know sticking up kind of feeling.
Speaker 2:We both saw Coldplay many years ago and one of the biggest songs. I don't know if this was a translator for you too, but the song Charlie Brown is another song that has this like dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. That whole thing it's a whole band, yeah, Kind of doing that motif together and it's so. Even now I get it's such a cathartic feeling to remember that space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but those are moments where it's like man they're. You know, obviously that band is pushing to the rafters with a lot of their music, but that song in particular not one that you would imagine me talking about in their discography, but definitely one that that does that very well, um, and it just creates this really joyous, joyous moment, um, and it certainly helps for the thing to stick. You know it's like a choir, you know it's like there's a different feeling for one person singing a melody.
Speaker 1:If it's really great, that's going to be important. There's a choir. Yeah, it's like there's a different feeling for one person singing a melody. If it's really great, that's going to be important. There's a place for that. So maybe you have, like, the solo vocalist and then the choir comes in behind, really reinforcing that. It's hard not to feel an energy from that, and so it's the same concept applied to really any combination of of elements that you want. We happen to use on this record quite a bit of guitar and keys doing that, but there are times where, um, you know, like there's a guitar doing a vocal melody or, um, you know any of those other combinations. I think that's a, if you're an artist and you're trying to, you know you're going man, anything that I, I maybe this is a good way to think about it, cause sometimes, when we're writing and we're going, man, I don't, I don't know what to play, cause it feels like anything else, like it doesn't sound like this needs anything, because I don't know it.
Speaker 1:Just it already sounds good, um, and I've, I don't want to take away from what's in there. That might be a clue that maybe what you need to do is just use your instrument to reinforce what's already there. So it might be like okay, well, maybe I need to reinforce the vocal or the guitar part, or you know, whatever the bass line, you know the bass line's. Another one is that we started doing. You've alluded to this already, but on our first record we picked up a trick that we've been using ever since, which is just to use a synth bass to uh, to mimic. I get mimic's not the right word, but just double, double. I suppose what the bass guitar is doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it covers both low end but also pulls into the low mid frequencies a little bit with some of the sawtoothiness of the bass.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you get more brightness in a synth usually than what you're going to get in a traditional bass sound. They sustain differently. So you know, as much as we might compress a bass guitar down to where it sustains pretty evenly, you know you have that initial plunk and it's going to slowly be dying off, whereas a synth is just going to be, you know, especially like a sawtooth sound is. It just goes infinitely at the same sort of you know level of impact. But also something about you. You know bass guitar is going to be recorded in mono most of the time, at least we do. But you know your synth sound probably has some kind of modulation on it and so it probably goes more out here. So you end up creating the sound or bass is right here and it's holding most of your foundation, but then you have this kind of even thing that balances out with it, that goes more left and right, and so you create this sort of sound field with the bass that is much stronger than either one of those on their own, you know.
Speaker 2:That was trial and error for us too, like really figuring out, like a lot of these things that we're talking about now. It feels like we've gotten a degree in it and I promise you, neither one of us have. We it's youtube, university and a lot of research, but also a lot of trial and error, like yeah, we didn't know this thing was gonna work until we did it and we're like, damn, that sounds really great in the mix.
Speaker 2:We have to do that. And then we go to write another song and we go, oh, what was that thing we did with the bass? Oh, it was a synth bass. Okay, cool, let me go get that sound again. And it just ended up being a thing that really worked well for us to really punch up that, that part of the stereo field, um, in a really great way. We think you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. And all those little things you know, as you not. Not everything that you come up with is going to always work, but you are going to start to pick up things I think that you use often enough that they start to become just like parts of your vocabulary. You know, I think any artist is trying to go through a period of trying to figure out, like what's my thing, or who am I, or what, what do we, we sound like, or what do we sound like in this context versus another context, what's our palette that we're going to paint from. And I think the more experimentation you do, the more you start to pick up those things that find themselves showing up more frequently.
Speaker 1:You know, like, when I think about foo fighters, I think about double vocals you know, that's something that, um, that dave grohl does so well, um, or if I think about, you know we we talked about def leppard. I'm thinking about, um, those stacked vocals you know, as being, you know, an obvious thing if I think about it for them guns and roses. I'm thinking about how those left and right guitars really play off each other in such a great way you know they're never really playing the same thing, acdc too. But acdc I don't think of it quite as much, and maybe because the music is a little simpler.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um also you know just that GNR thing, talking about the Izzy and slasher thing, but also the semi hollow body to less Paul and sort of the differences in those guitars and how they really informed their sound in a way you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also trying to replicate some of that too, yeah, I mean, those things start to become parts of the dna of that particular artist. You know, and it's like acdc I wouldn't want to hear keyboards in that band.
Speaker 2:No right, I wouldn't, I would just want van halen. Well, who knew that. We know you know what you know. It turned out to be really great.
Speaker 1:You know it turned out to be great, and so that's all. Just to say try everything, and maybe that's partly why this record took six years to make.
Speaker 2:It shouldn't have, by the way we didn't even talk about the crafting of the drums for this too. Well, let's talk about that, for a minute To punctuate on that for a minute. You know we had some help in that space again and you know a very dear person to both of us you know really did help us in that space to really get some drums and get the ideas across. Both of us, you know, really did help us in that space to really get some drums and get the ideas across.
Speaker 1:But, as I mentioned before, yeah, michael, who had recorded the first album with us, most of the songs on that, recorded most of the songs on on this new one as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what's been interesting for us and we kind of alluded to this a little bit, so I'll share the short story about that. I'll share the short story about that. But I've always wanted to play drums since I was a kid. And, no surprise, with playing percussive instruments like piano and organ and synth and all that kind of stuff, that I would be attracted to drums. So it's always been something I've loved and while I'm not a great, great drummer in the way that I would fashion a great drummer, I can play enough to get an idea across. And throughout the last 10 years of us doing music together, yes, it's definitely helped. You said it in the last podcast it's amazing what six years will do for you as a drummer or as any musician. Really, if you're still playing your instrument six years you're going to learn and grow and be a little bit better and more efficient in that space.
Speaker 2:But each and every time, more endurance, yeah, oh, definitely more, that's for sure I might make a verse with some of the stuff we do and they're like, oh god, I'm gassed but so getting, yeah, getting better endurance and all that space. But there's also a thing, like I might not be what I would classify myself as a drummer in the same way that we're talking about our friend Michael. However, I do feel like I have an understanding of what I'm looking for in a drum sound, and this has been a long, sometimes painful process for us to really get sounds that we feel like both sound like a real drum sound, um, knowing that we use midi drum kits, uh, to be able. So you're still playing, you're still playing drums, but we're same as the acts are, same as some of the software sense. We're still trying to make it work in a space where it's a little bit harder in a garage to go and record live drums when you're with neighbors who may not appreciate that at 12 o'clock at night.
Speaker 2:So there's been a big thing about figuring out, you know, hi-hats and do they sound as natural as the real thing, and the transient properties of snares and toms and do they punctuate in the song the same way. So it's been a long process to get there. It's one that I enjoy somewhat, but you know, oftentimes we'll go back and hear it and I'm like man, it just doesn't sound as good as the drums we hear on X record and we really tried for the better part of this whole time to keep looking for those things and we've tried different, you know preset packs or whatever. Initially we did not use Superior, but we did relent on this record and go and use Superior Drummer, which again is very similar to the Axe. It's an infinite item on how much you can explore in that space. Mike changes all the different sounds, snares, all this different stuff to kind of craft a thing that sounds good.
Speaker 1:It's deep, yeah, it's deep, it's deep, yeah, it's very deep, we it's. It's important to me too that, like you know, it's funny now that I'm thinking about it because I wouldn't feel this way about a keyboard, right, like you would if you went and bought a, a specific, like classic keyboard. Let's say, you're doing it for the sounds that are built in those presets, right, like, oh, this does a thing that's really cool. But when it comes to guitar or drums and something like Superior, I think, because they're such popular instruments and they're such a predominant part of our band, it's important to me that I'm using something that feels somewhat unique, right, like, um, I'm sure there are a million bands who have put out a million records with the same preset sound in superior drummer. Right, it's like and not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm not trying to throw shade at anybody, it's just you want to create this uh, feeling that your tastes are imprinted on everything that you're doing and that you're not just like grabbing the first thing you have access to and using that, and so it's not using the you know a default preset in in, you know fractal or not using, you know the first good rock sounding preset in superior drummer and trying to marry together a few different influences across you, you know, trying to make everybody who's who's got a say in the final production happy.
Speaker 1:You know, since I do more of the engineering, it's also me trying to interpret what it is that you're hearing. You know you might send me a reference and I might hear it one way and there's a quality of it that you're hearing a different way, and so you know there's that too is everything has got to get sort of funneled through all these different perspectives to to try to get to something that makes sense for everybody, um, but uh, so yeah, we, we spent a lot of time building drum presets and trying different snares and kicks and amounts of room sound or amounts of compression, or how natural does it sound versus how processed does it sound, things. You know how much. Uh like, parallel compression is something that I like a lot. If you want a really explosive sounding drum sound, um, you're gonna need a decent amount of that, trying to make sure that you know the snare drum doesn't get lost in the chorus, you know, maybe it all sounds great in the verse and then everything kicks up a notch and you're going man, I'm kind of losing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all of those things being considerations, and so you know, I built a lot of different kits over the course of the last couple of years, and even really more recently in the recording of this, and it was kind of there at the very end that we sort of settled on. You know, there's probably three unique kits they all share similar qualities, yeah but I think it's three different kits.
Speaker 1:Um, most songs use one kit, I think. Uh, take the flame has its own kit, toxic heroes has its own thing, going on, um. And then most of the other songs are kind of using more or less the same kit and then of course, just a different amount of ambience or blends on, you know, snare, reverb and that sort of thing kind of changes to fit the song. But at least the court sounds are the same yeah, it gives it.
Speaker 2:It gives a chance for like away from us.
Speaker 1:That has, oh yeah, it's its own sound but we do.
Speaker 2:We we've done some really interesting things with program drums or drum machine type sounds for certain things that we want to have feel that way. That feels very metronomically precise or it has its own thing. It's a really nice sub bass sound or an 808 or a shaker or something might have its own sort of affected thing, but the drum space, especially in the hi-hat, especially in the snare, for me those are big things that were like god, it doesn't. Brendan O'Brien, we could talk about for days, but that was something. I would tell you that from his style of engineering and production on a lot of the records that I love those drums sound great.
Speaker 2:Steve Albany also RIP, but also an incredible drum sounds that he would get on his records and those are things that were really influential to me and at least from a production standpoint, regardless of who played the drums it was, it was basically the opposite, though, because also I know another one that you really love is royal blood, oh royal blood, yeah, which is, it seemed like, highly compressed, or even nine inch nails highly compressed drums.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of compression, but also chunkier.
Speaker 1:Sounds like brendan o'brien uses that high-pitched piccolo snare a lot. Yeah, piccolo snare which cuts through? Yeah, like that's. That's a a very legitimate solution to a problem of a snare drum getting lost in a rock band context. But then, you know, you kind of have to ask yourself well, is that the sound that I want, though? Like do you, you know, do you want that sound or not? We didn't go that direction.
Speaker 2:We went chunkier snare for the most part Um yeah, not full St Anger, though we didn't get to quite to the St Anger.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, not, not clanky, crazy ringing overtones, but but yeah, like just deeper, thicker sounding drums, you know, drums that hit you in the chest a little bit more yeah, and it definitely cut through.
Speaker 2:Like I know, like I said, we we hadn't talked at all about the, the drum and sort of the journey of that, but I think it's an important piece because it was very similar to guitar and the synth and the bass. We were on an explorative journey to get something that really worked for us and and really worked out well in the sounds. And it's been a process like from the first record through the ep stuff to now. They have changed and evolved, but I do feel the best about the drums that I felt, you know, knowing that and again I have, we have an acoustic kit. We could go through the process of micing it and doing it right and doing the acoustic thing.
Speaker 2:But the freedom of being able to kind of really have different snares, different toms, different things that you could swap out which is what a studio would do if you were recording in some cases, depending on the song and the need, has really allowed us to be a little bit more um, explore a little bit more of the territory that we can pull off with that as well. Um, I think personally to me, when everyone hears this record, they are some of the my favorite parts of the album is some of the drum sounds that you got. They sound really great in the mixes so I'm hoping that fans and people that listen to record will feel the same. I think they sound really good.
Speaker 1:And credit to Michael. I mean really really great performances on these songs as well. Yeah, absolutely it.
Speaker 1:to michael, I mean really really great performances on these songs as well, yeah, absolutely, and so you know the drums I, I've always felt that, um, I'm sure I probably didn't come up with this, or at least I'm sure I didn't but, um, a way to think about. Like the drum sound creates the sense of the space that the recording happens in, so how much room there is, what that room sounds like in the drums really gives your ear and your brain the impression of where the whole band is playing. You don't really get that from the guitar or from the vocal or anything like that, especially in a close-mic kind of modern context. You might on some old classic records where things were a little more live and mics were backed up a little bit more, and so that getting all of that right really sets the tone for what the entire record is going to sound like. Um, so, yeah, credit where it's due on that for sure. Yeah, I guess the only other thing we haven't really talked about and maybe we roll this into performance, uh, and and the next episode but would be, you know, vocal production yeah and I don't really know what I would share on that from an actual production standpoint, because the um, I mean like the gear that we use is pretty straightforward you
Speaker 1:know like I'm in a well-treated room here. This is where I tracked vocals on the. On the record there's a little bit of natural ambience but it it doesn't flutter or have any of those nasty sounds, so it sounds natural. It doesn't sound suffocated like you know. You're in a box, but I recorded into. I have a modded warm audio WA-47, and it sounds really good, you know. So it's a large diaphragm tube condenser mic what 99% of the the album was recorded on. I also have their sort of Neve recreation that I recorded into.
Speaker 1:I have a couple of outboard compressors. They got used sometimes, but all of it was really gentle, normal things, because most of the real production happened, you know, in yeah, I use Logic but happened in the computer, in the DAW, and so the process of recording really had a lot more to do for me with just getting a good performance than it did getting the gear right, whereas I think with the other instruments you spend a lot of time focused on the gear itself. You know, is the guitar set up right? Is there the right amount of gain? Is the EQ set properly? You know, does it, does it need this, that or the other? And, yeah, the performance matters, of course it does, but there's more elements in between your hands and the speakers. With something like a guitar or even a keyboard With the vocal, it's like if it's not sounding pretty close to how you want it to sound, just singing into the microphone, then you probably need to adjust how you're singing to make it all work.
Speaker 2:And so there was a lot of that for me yeah, I think I love that too, because there's so you can go down the rabbit hole, and we've certainly done that with a little bit of the stuff we talked about today. But in vocals there's so many different mics, there's so many different things out there. But again, for anyone who's really looking to achieve even a little bit of what we're talking about, a computer with a DAW, some good software sounds, a modeler. If you, if you really cannot go and buy amps and all that stuff and you're trying to do home recording, I think any one of the ranges of those would work to get started.
Speaker 1:That's the way of the world now. That's just how it is. I don't think it's going back A MIDI drum kit, you know.
Speaker 2:They give you the freedom to really explore a lot of things. That could really be great, and you don't have to have the top-of-the-line stuff these days. Don't have to have the top of the line stuff these days. If you're really just looking to capture a great performance. I think you can pull a lot of those things off in the digital space and do some really incredible stuff. Billy eilish with her, with phineas, sitting on their bed in a bedroom and writes you know a lot of their songs and a lot of the record gets done from that space and they sound incredible and it's not like you had to go. Of course they have the ability to go now to professional studios, but they didn't have to. Um, and people still absorb that music for what if they did?
Speaker 2:it would be different it would be different, right, exactly.
Speaker 1:So there's no matters, vibe totally matters.
Speaker 2:I guess, in the vein of right or wrong, to put a bow tie on it. What works for you, what sounds good to you, that's what really matters. The exploration is a fun process if you have the time to do it and really looking for the things that are going to be utility sounds for the sound that you're going for. And the rest can be explorative, just as long as they serve the song and what you're trying to craft and all those things. Like we talked about 10 years of writing together, we learned what fits in the stereo field of the Silver Echoes ethos of production and so we use some of those tricks and things that we've learned.
Speaker 2:But this is still a very much in the infancy of our looking and exploring what we're trying to do. And the next thing we write, next thing we record and put out, will not sound like what we just finished. So we're already in that space of thinking about it. This record's done, we're getting it mastered, we're, we're, we're excited to get it out and so everyone could hear it and uh. But who knows what the next journey is going to be? Maybe we'll write a dance record, who knows? You know wherever the road takes us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely not going to say no. I'm definitely not going to say no. I think that'd be really cool. It could be really cool.
Speaker 2:We still haven't explored our organ metal.
Speaker 1:I know we talked about writing organ metal. I almost sent you a video the other day because I found an old video of us playing some of that stuff back at your place.
Speaker 2:Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1:And it was such a blast from the past I had completely forgotten about that until I saw that video. I need to find it again and send it to you.
Speaker 2:Yes, please, so I can see it.
Speaker 1:I want to see that for sure, because the other thing that I did the other day, as I was procrastinating on something I that was more important is I went through all of my voice memos oh yeah going back to, I think the oldest one that I had in there wasn't as old as I thought it would be, but was 2015, I think. Oh yeah, somewhere around.
Speaker 1:That's about right, so deleted a bunch of you know duplicates and and things that are no longer needed, uh, but there's quite a few good new song ideas in there, uh, that I've completely forgotten about, and so that's something else that I'll probably be sending your way soon is like hey, let's circle back to this 10-year-old idea. That is still a good idea that we just lost track of.
Speaker 2:That's it. There's so many things. The best advice I'd give anybody just keep writing. That's it. There's so many things. The best advice I give anybody just keep writing. Keep writing the exploratory journeys that we've talked about in this podcast. They're up for you and your own journey. Take it and do with it what you wish, but just keep writing. And if it's a new sound that sparks an idea, or putting new strings on your guitar and it made it sound better than it did before, um, all those things are great ways that you can just explore something and and create, and don't be afraid of it, you know. Just keep chasing it and going after it.
Speaker 1:I love that, and I would only add an ironic statement from a band that took six years to put an album together. But that's finished projects, because once you've wrapped up something, it gives you the freedom to move on to something that is different. That's right. Try different things and after a while like you know, I shared this with you I'm very ready.
Speaker 2:Well, it's done now, but I was very ready to finish this album Like I need it out of my life.
Speaker 1:I need to not be thinking about this particular set of songs, this particular type of production. I love it, I think it's so great, but I'm ready to move on and do something different now, totally. And so you give yourself that freedom by finishing things and putting it out and learning and just recognizing that, by the time you get to the end of a project, you're always going to be better than you were when you started it, which puts you in a weird place, certainly wiser. It's a really good thing, because you're getting better, and the hard part about it, though, is that if you're a perfectionist, like I am, is that you immediately go. Well, I can't put this out now, because if I were to start over again today, it would be, you know, three times better, or whatever you know arbitrary amount better, but finish things, put them out, move on to the next thing and leverage what you gain from what you finish to. You know, just make your future work better and recognize it's all a moment in time.
Speaker 1:You know and ultimately, what matters is the art. You know the production is important. It totally is, and nerds like us really get into that stuff and really focus on that stuff. Most people don't, you know they they care if it's loud enough that they can hear it on their phone, that the vocal is clear, is clear, that there's a cool element to it that sticks in their brain. That's about it for most people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but you can go in thousands of punk records that didn't use any of what we're talking about today, that sound absolutely fantastic for what they were and what they are. I'm still going to play Iggy and the Stooges every day because it sounds awesome and it didn't sound. I mean, if you're talking about production, it's not got all the bells and whistles of stuff right now, but the raw, immediate, the raw power of it is what stands out. So, yeah, make art power of it.
Speaker 1:Um, is what stands out, so yeah make yeah I'll give you a a fun and we can sign off after this. But I'll give you a fun little experiment to run if you're feeling bad about your production capabilities or you feel stuck in a rut or anything like that is go pull up a bunch of your favorite songs from when you were like in high school or middle school or whenever, like when you were younger, before you got super into like being a musician or recording or any of that and pull those things up and play a bunch of them and really ask yourself does it sound as good as you remember it sounding?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Some of those things, yes, will stand up, yeah, but a lot of them won't. And you'll be surprised sometimes, especially if you haven't heard something in a while. You know, maybe you have a good fond memory of this album or this other thing. You'll play it back and go man, this sounds like not good at all. Actually, this is not how it holds up in my mind. Yeah, but you're going, I love the song, and so that's what stuck with you. Is that the? The song really made a mark that it needed to make, and so the production was secondary you know, yeah, and it didn't make a difference because they got what they you know they got what they needed to say, and that was that, and it didn't have to be anything that was crazy.
Speaker 2:So totally go explore, make art. We hope you enjoyed this a little bit. We know we nerded out a lot, but that's who we are. So yeah, um, so yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, if you, if you made it this far. Thank you for listening. Uh, again, this is the Sonic Alchemy podcast. I'm Justin, this is Kevin. We are, uh, in a band called the Silver Echo. We should have said all this stuff up front, but here we go. Um, so, yeah, what we've been covering is, uh, is the production process of our new record coming out, and so we'll be doing a follow-up to this, talking about the, the actual tracking process and getting takes and all that. But, uh, you can find us at thesilverechocom or thesonicalchemycom and we'd love to hear from you. So, thanks for listening hit us up.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, until the next one.