Crystal Palace

Jun 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

THE CRYSTAL METHOD DITCH THE BOMB SHELTER FOR A GLEAMING NEW RECORDING SPACE

In what way do you manipulate them?

Kirkland: Some we'll just EQ or pitch up or pitch down. But for the most part, it's been a lot of stuff in [Ableton] Live and [Propellerhead] Reason — using Redrum in Reason.

Do you ReWire Live to Pro Tools?

Kirkland: We have, yeah, to dig deep into our loop library with all the various effects that exist inside Live, change the dynamics of the sound, the texture of some of the loops. But for the most part, we use our vast drum [sound] library that we have, creating drums from the start. Kick, snare, hat. And we're using the MIDI tools within both Reason and Pro Tools to get the different feel out of the loops and drums that we create.

You both play keyboards, right?

Jordan: Scott plays them well, though. [Laughs.]

Kirkland: A lot of stuff was played by me. But we both have the idea of what we want it to sound like and what we want to get out of the gear we have, and, like I said, things that are played in, rarely ever stay the same. We love cutting things up and sending things back out to some other programs. There's one that's called Effectrix [Sugar Bytes]. So we'll send these sounds through some of the programs that don't have the RTAS or the TDM license [so they can't be used in Pro Tools]. For example, we'll bring up Live first and then bring up Pro Tools so it's not synched, and then just get the tempo and transfer stuff over and listen to it. It's sort of like what we used to do when we would manipulate a lot of stuff within a sampler, the E-mu sampler. Send things over, dice it up, send it through different internal effects, and then feed it back through and find something great. Sometimes you'll have 15 or 20 different takes of a loop being manipulated, and then you'll send it back in and then you'd find slivers and pieces of those 15 different takes that would create a 4-bar loop. I mean it's that kind of stuff that is sort of the basic Crystal Method sound.

You previously used MOTU Digital Performer, but now you've switched over to Pro Tools. Was it a big change for you?

Kirkland: It wasn't, but it was a change because we had been using the TDM audio side so we were comfortable with the plug-ins.

Digital Performer and Pro Tools do have a lot of similarities.

Kirkland: They're very similar, so we adapted really well and we started to create from very early on when we got things set up.

Have you been happy with the MIDI editing in Pro Tools?

Jordan: Yeah, we have been. We use a lot of the real-time properties. We do still keep MIDI tracks running a lot, especially when we're using a lot of the plug-in synths. So those will stay MIDI almost until the end before we finally bounce them. There's still a lot of control over it. We are coming from the Digital Performer world, so that's really our only real comparison outside of Reason or something like that. So I don't know, apparently there is more stuff on others like [Apple] Logic and whatever but…

Kirkland: I'm not saying that Pro Tools is in any way simple. They've really made leaps and bounds from 5 to 6 to 7. And now that Version 8 is out, like I was saying earlier, we're really excited to finish this album so we can install 8 because you never want to install a new system in the middle of a project. But, yeah, the audio side of it is really where everything happens. Ninety-five percent of it is running audio that was recorded or manipulated in some way. To us it sounds superior to any system that we've used in the past.

With the new system that you have, with your new console and all your synths wired into the patchbay, have you been running a huge amount of tracks per song on this album, or are you starting to say, “Oh, we better pull it back a little”?

Jordan: We actually are used to running tons of tracks.

What's the highest track count you've had on a song?

Jordan: We're using every voice on a few of them. There are like 96 voices, but that's only 48 stereo tracks. But every time we introduce some thing or return or plug-in or something, it's getting used up.

Kirkland: We've had some vocals that have been recorded outside the studio, [such as] the tracks that we did with Emily Haines from Metric. She did the vocals in New York, with direction from us. And they sent us, it was probably 18 vocal tracks with layers. There are quite a few voices being consumed on most of the mixes on this.

Talk about how you got all those cool bass sounds, the kind of legato, distorted ones on the new CD.

Kirkland: On “Kling to the Wreckage,” that bass is from the Alesis Andromeda sent through various different plug-ins. On the track that's tentatively called “Cobalt” now, there's a 2600 plug-in from Arturia. And there's also the [Roland] Jupiter 6 that comes in with a bass sound.