Crystal Palace

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

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

So you don't have a particular synth that you use to go for that kind of sound usually.

Kirkland: No, it's more the saturation and the processing that we put it through that gets us to a sound that we're comfortable with. But like on “Slipstream,” that's the [G-Force] Oddity that has that sort of long, modulated bass sound. Like I said, we used lots of live bass on this record.

And then you process the heck out of it.

Kirkland: Yeah. And it goes between live bass and synth bass. For us, it's a perfect marriage of analog and digital.

Let's talk about your mixing procedures. Do you mix as you go and then just tweak it, or do you pull everything down and start over?

Jordan: We always mix as we go. So we never just say, “Okay, today is mix day on this song,” bring it up from scratch and mix it. So it's always mixing on the go, trying to get it better and better all the time.

So your mixing process isn't a separate entity.

Jordan: It hasn't ever been like that.

Kirkland: Because most of the time, on the early records, what we sort of got used to was just Ken and I working on everything from sound development to song structure to writing to playing to producing to engineering. It was just the two of us in that little Bomb Shelter, without any sort of recall system. When we first started, it was eight tracks of audio with maybe some ADATs coming in. So you would never pull all the faders down [and start over]. Especially with all the sends and returns that we had. We did it a few times, and it was like, “Uhh, it doesn't sound as good.”

So you had to work on one song at a time from tracking through mixing?

Kirkland: In the early days.

Jordan: One at a time, yeah. [Laughs.]

Kirkland: The first album that's how we worked, one song at a time.

So how long would it take you to do a complete song?

Jordan: Sometimes it was quick, sometimes really long. [Laughs.]

Kirkland: It's weird having to think about doing that now.

Jordan: Yeah, recall is such a gift.

I did notice that when you were showing me how you got that bass sound on the Memorymoog [see Web Clip 1], your assistant had digital pictures of the knobs. Are those what you use for recall sheets now?

Jordan: Yes.

Kirkland: You can never trust some of the old gear to save properly or maintain its memory. You never know when that battery is going to die or something's going to happen to it.

How do you make your drums sound so big? Do you use parallel compression?

Jordan: Generally, when everything is in the box, and this is usually how we're mixing now, generally all the drums get bused to one drum bus, and then we do some lighter stereo-bus compression on that drum bus. We always try to do that so they're kind of always in the same room. Instead of things just jumping out of left-field, level wise and stereo-field wise, [it's more cohesive] if everything sort of gets the same treatment. Like, if you're using any verb, kind of have a general send from your drum tracks going to the same verb or verbs, and then everything gets the same sounds. We probably will do some soft compression and then some hard limiting. But the hard limiting is always a very little bit of gain reduction, just to try to even it all out and keep it loud.

So when you're compressing them, are you typically using a hardware outboard compressor?

Jordan: We haven't done that on this album. But we used to do that a lot. One tip is always get your compression in early and mix from that. A lot of people I talk to still wonder, “Okay, when do you put the compressor in?” At the very beginning. If you add a compressor or a limiter, then your levels, your dynamic range, and your frequency all change kind of radically. Always EQ and mix with compression on, because you can't just add it like some magic plug-in that's going to fix your track later. You have to be mixing with it the whole time.

But if you notice a track is jumping out in spots, later you could throw something on it, no?

Jordan: I'm talking about stereo-bus compression. Either on auxes for groups or your overall stereo bus.