The EM Poll

OK Recorder

Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Matt Gallagher

           

The Silent Kids' debut album, Tomorrow Waits (Two Sheds Music, 2003), unleashes the Atlanta-based quartet's supercharged, psychedelic brand of indie pop-rock. The band consists of Jeff Holt (bass); Beth Kargel (keyboards and samples); Michael Oakley (vocals, guitars, keyboards, and samples); and Scott Rowe (drums). Holt, Oakley, and Rowe tracked the album in their homes and in the band's rehearsal space.

Oakley recorded everything on his 8-track Tascam Portastudio 488 mkII cassette recorder. He used room acoustics to his advantage and relied on a minimal amount of gear, accurately capturing the Silent Kids' raw, garage-band aesthetics. “Recording magazines always say you have to have a nice preamp and outboard effects to get a good vocal sound,” says Oakley. “I think you can do just fine with a couple of guitar pedals as long as you set it up correctly.”

Production began in Oakley's house. “We set up the drums in a spare room and ran the guitar and bass through a 4-track and just listened on headphones,” Oakley says. “We wanted to use all four inputs on my 8-track for the drums. We experimented with mic placement.” Oakley uses three Shure SM57s, two SM58s, and a Sony ECM-MS907 stereo condenser mic.

“For a different sound, we'd record at our drummer's house — which has carpet, whereas mine has wood floors.” Oakley used his laundry room as a reverb chamber. “It has a nice tile floor,” he says. “Sometimes I'd put the guitar amp in a bathroom and mic it from far away. But most guitar tracks were done with an SM57 right on the speaker.

“After we did the drums, the bass player would lay down a scratch track, then I'd do the guitar and vocal tracks, and then he'd do the bass parts last,” Oakley says. “I had only two tracks for guitars, so I had to have all of my effects ready and everything mapped out. I did most of that stuff live through trial and error. A lot of these textures had to go on part of a vocal track. I had to make sure I wasn't accidentally taping over a vocal or a guitar. We didn't bounce anything down.”

The band augmented its basic power-trio sound with homemade samples and loops. “I have a Sony MiniDisc that I use for field recordings,” Oakley says, “and I have [Sonic Foundry] Acid software. For ‘Lost in the Petrified Forest,’ I recorded a drum pattern with just one mic, threw it in Acid, looped it, slowed it down, and used that as the basis for the track. I used some oregano from our spice rack as a maraca, and recorded the guitars direct.” At times, he triggered drum samples from a laptop. The band's thrift-shop keyboards include a late- 1970s model Realistic Concertmate MG-1.

Tomorrow Waits was mixed and mastered at Atlanta's Glow in the Dark Studios. “I know you're not supposed to have the same guy mix and master [your album], but we did it anyway,” Oakley says. “We had to do some creative equalizing because I had to track everything through a set of bass-heavy headphones.

“The engineer was amazed when I told him we didn't use any preamps,” Oakley adds. “You don't need a ton of money to throw away to make something sound decent. If you're into recording, you can get caught up in buying new stuff all the time, because you can never have the perfect setup. I'm just trying not to fall into that trap.”

For more information, contact Two Sheds Music; P.O. Box 5455, Atlanta, Georgia 31107-0455; e-mail info@2sheds.com; Web www.2sheds.com or www.silentkids.com.