Crystal Palace

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

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

What's your opinion about the issue of the “loudness wars,” and how people are complaining about CDs being overcompressed?

Jordan: Yeah, that's a big discussion with us all the time. Because everything we've done has lots of peaks and valleys. We like how loud records are, so I don't know. We've been using Brian Gardner [for mastering]; we really like the sound he gets, and he doesn't really do that wall-to-wall limiting thing. But it's going to be interesting mastering [Divided By Night] because we do want it loud, and we're aware that if you play a track with a lot of dynamics next to another track that's just like totally pegged, if you're A/B'ing them, you might say about the one with more dynamics, “What's wrong with this one? It's not as loud.” That's going to be the discussion and we're going to deal with that. Because we do want it loud, but we do want dynamics, for sure.

Kirkland: The way we write, we're always aware of that. Our goal is to make an album that you can listen to from beginning to end and have that experience of listening to a piece of art that has those different emotions and that different dynamic sound to it. A lot of our tracks are big, bombastic tracks, but there are moments in each one where it does get down, it does get quiet, or the track is sort of stripped down to a sound that allows it to breathe a little bit.

Do you have signature effects techniques you like to use? Like for delays, for example?

Jordan: Delay-wise, overall, a dotted-eighth delay is generally available on every song.

Because a straight value is not as interesting sounding?

Jordan: Yeah, it's always a little funkier, a little cooler with a dotted-eighth. And it's not too long. I find quarter-note delays are a little too long, and eighth-notes are sometimes a little too short. We really like the tape-emulation delays. They're warmer, and you get that weird sound they have, especially adding wow and flutter, it's not quite as mechanical.

One last question: How would you say Divided By Night differs from your previous work, musically?

Jordan: Certainly, there are more vocals than we typically have on our albums. It's much more musical, it's more song oriented; it has more chord changes and more instrumentation than all of the other ones.

Kirkland: Like Ken said, it's much richer tapestry of musicality and warmth and the songs develop in different ways. A lot of people [ask], “Does it still sound like Crystal Method, that sort of distorted, edgy, big sound?” And I think a lot of the songs do have that. Some of the songs don't seem to have that, and then all of a sudden there will be a song that really rips into that and opens it up. I think it's just the natural development of where we've come from. We never want to sound like the last record.

((To see a video tour of Crystalwerks with Jordan and Kirkland, go to the Online Bonus material section at emusician.com)

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Mike Levine is EM's executive editor and senior media producer. He hosts the monthly Podcast, EM Cast (www.emusician.com/podcasts).

Crystal Synths

When you look around Crystalwerks, synthesizers are everywhere. They're mounted on the walls, sitting on the ground along the walls, on the table on the island in the middle of the control room, and even on shelves in the machine room. Vintage, modern, analog, digital — you name it, they've probably got it. And that's just the hardware synths. Jordan and Kirkland also use a large variety of software synths. When I asked them which they used more of on Divided By Night, Jordan said that it was “60-40 for the virtual synths. This is the first time it has broken the 50-percent barrier.”

And which virtual ones did they favor? “The ones we used a lot of on this record were the [Arturia] Jupiter 8V and [Arturia] CS-80V plug-ins,” Jordan says. “Also, a couple of the ARP 2600 things,” Kirkland adds. The G-Force Oddity and impOsCAR were used a lot, as well, as were Native Instruments' Absynth, Electrik Piano, FM-8, and Reaktor. “There's some great Reaktor stuff on this record,” Kirkland says. “Also, funny enough, [we used] the McDSP synth, Synth One. On the track called ‘Black Rainbows,’ there's this really beautiful, big, big synth. I was really surprised how good that one sounded. Also some of the Korg stuff has been really helpful. The Mono/Poly and the WaveStation [plug-ins] sound really great.”

When Jordan and Kirkland are tracking with one of their vintage hardware synths that predate MIDI, they'll obviously record live audio right to Pro Tools. When using more modern hardware synths, they'll sometimes record a MIDI track rather than audio, and work on a final sound later. “Well, if it's something with really good MIDI implementation, we'll go ahead and record MIDI,” says Jordan. “But, like with the Memorymoog [see Fig. A], even though it has limited MIDI, we're generally always recording audio with that.”

“On this record, we got into a lot of using some of the quantize features in Pro Tools,” adds Kirkland. “Stuff with more swing. We did more of that and sending it through some of the Nords or the [Alesis] Andromeda. But it's been a good combination.

“A lot of the stuff on this record was just me sitting in front of [the synth], hitting Record, and doing a bunch of takes,” Kirkland continues. “That's what we're sort of familiar with from not having great control over some of our analog synths, and having limited audio tracks to record to.” In the band's early days, Kirkland says, “We would record 20 or 30 minutes of DAT, left and right, drum signal on one side and synths on the other, and go in and cut it up and do a lot of sampling.”

With all the synths they have, both virtual and hardware-based, which one is their top choice? “If there was, God forbid, some sort of disaster when someone said, ‘Grab your favorite,’” says Kirkland, “definitely the [Roland] Jupiter 6 would be the first one out the door. It's always been the warmest, edgiest synth in our arsenal. It's all over this record.