The EM Poll

Metalocalypse Now

Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Gino Robair

           

Metalocalypse co-creator Brendon Small creates all of the music of the fictional band Dethklok in his home studio. In this interview, he talks about scoring the show.

Read the online-only supplement to this Brendon Small article here.

WEB CLIPS
Extended interview: learn about Small's inspiration for music, character voices, underscoring, and more

FIG. 1: Brendon Small in the voice-over room at Titmouse studios, where he can track and edit dialog directly to picture using Pro Tools LE.

Do you change guitars when you do your overdubs for the different players, or do you keep the same guitar and the same setting?

I'll change pickups sometimes, but for the most part I'll try to change the way I play more than I change the guitar. In my mind, if I'm doing a Skwisgaar lead, it's very technical and it's got a lot of overacting in it: a lot of vibrato, a lot of drama to it. If I'm doing what I think is a Toki lead, it's a little bit more straightforward, more pentatonic. He's more of an Iron Maiden kind of guitar player to an Yngwie Malmsteen, who is the Skwisgaar character.

For authenticity in the animation, you've greenscreened some of the guitar playing, right?

I've done some stuff where I've gone into the greenscreen room because the lighting's really good. I'll say, “Here's what I'm doing,” and I'll play with the song. “And the rhythm guitar player is doing this other thing.” It ends up looking cool when you see them side by side lining up rhythmically.

But we also decided that everything in this world is a little bit extreme. This is the kind of band where, when they watch TV, they change the channels with a stompbox on the ground. Everything is music driven.

It's interesting that you have endorsement deals for the show. Is that something you asked for, or did they come after you?

It's something Tommy and I asked for from the beginning. I'm a guitar geek: I grew up knowing who played what instrument, like Slash played Gibson. I've played Gibsons for years, too [see Fig. 2]. My first guitar was an Epiphone. [Small describes how he uses the Gibson HD.6X-Pro Digital Les Paul in Web Clip 3.]

We had a connection at Gibson who knew about Adult Swim and knew about my other show, Home Movies, so he kind of knew who I was. I told him I wanted to animate guitars and have them played accurately. That this would be a show for guitar geeks and metalheads, and people who like music.

He got it, and they sent us the CAD files, the 3-D blueprints. We traced a bunch of the guitars themselves, because guitars are hard to draw, especially the asymmetrical ones like the Explorers. For example, we made sure the Thunderbird bass looked right and was played the way a bass player would play it. We would stand there with the bass and say to the artists, “This is Murderface. He has the lowest strap in the world. He can hardly reach his strings, but this is how he does it and it looks cool.”

We emailed other companies and said, “We have an Adult Swim TV show. Call me back.” Some people did and some people didn't. But Line 6 got it. Krank Amps got it. Digidesign got it. I wanted to show actual Pro Tools sessions on the screen. It makes everything a little bit more authentic. And I actually use this stuff when creating the music for the show. It's stuff we like, and the manufacturers we work with are really cool.

It legitimizes the musical aspect of the show.

Yeah, it does. I haven't seen a show do it before. I don't think the creators of Josie and the Pussycats or Jem! and the Holograms paid a great deal of attention to the musical instruments on those shows. And they'd just put in a loop, so the hands don't match the action.

How do you process your voice to get Nathan's tone?

After years of doing a Louis Armstrong impression, it's not that difficult.

You don't have to pitch-shift your voice?

No. My voice sounds like it's a lot lower, but I'm only giving the illusion of a lower voice. The tone of my voice is actually the same as my speaking voice. I just put gravelly, grumbly sound underneath it.

I use that awesome Universal Audio 6176: I just brighten my voice like crazy and it brings out the raspy lower qualities. For the TV show, I may put a little bit of chorus on it. On the record, Ulrich layered fuzzier sounds than I would normally use.

We also did some stuff where we made it sound like Nathan's underwater for the album. Basically, I recorded all the vocals in my apartment with an Audio-Technica 4040 and the 6176. Then I'd go through the [IK Multimedia] AmpliTube plug-in: I'd take all the effects off, bring in a slow chorus, slow down the rate, and raise the density of the chorus. And I would give that as a temp track to Ulrich and tell him that this is what I usually like — see what you can do with it.

So whatever you create in your personal studio goes into the episodes, and then you rerecorded the longer versions for the album separately?

I took each song and added new bridges and new parts. There's a song called “Murmaider” on the record. The only thing that existed on the song in the show was the loop of Nathan singing, “Murmaider. Murmaider. Murmaider.” It was something like a 7-second clip. Online, that was the most requested song of the entire first season [laughs]. So I built a whole song around it about mermaid murder and vengeance, with this stupid checklist of killing instruments and stuff like that. I had to figure out what that song was about.

How difficult was it to extend the songs?

I was cram writing the entire thing. But I had the blueprints for each song from the original versions for the show. I had tons of songs to consider, because I wrote one for every episode. Some episodes had two songs. It was hard to decide which songs would end up on the record.

So we spent 21 days in the studio tracking drums, bass, and rhythm guitar parts. Then Ulrich gave me all the sessions with beat and bar maps of everything on a hard drive. That gave me an easy way to record all the leads and do all the vocals at home. I hadn't written any of the lyrics at that point, either. And I didn't know what half the songs were about.

What did you study at Berklee — guitar, composition, arrangement?

I was a professional-music major with a concentration in composition, which meant that I studied performance and compositional things. In some cases, I studied stuff I simply wasn't ready for, like arranging for horns. Now it makes a lot more sense to me than it did at the time, because you learn at such a fast rate. I learned beyond what I could apply at that school. I wish somebody had grabbed me and shook me and told me, “Don't forget what you liked when you came in here. Don't forget the stuff that you really care about, because that's why you're here.”