PRODUCTION VALUES: Home Cooking with Cake

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Maureen Droney

Did you all engineer equally?

di Fiore: We did. Everybody learned Pro Tools on this record. Xan, our guitarist, was a little faster. He's also very impatient, so he ended up at the [computer] keyboard a lot. For the most part we all took turns, but it's hard to be at the keyboard with someone tapping his foot wishing you were going faster. So Xan ended up in the hot seat a lot of the time. Pro Tools is a great program, and once you learn to use it, it's a lot of fun. We just kept on sharing information with each other about new things we'd learned.

Did you use manuals?

di Fiore: Our bass player brought in this book, one of those red-and-gray ones you see in the bookstores for iMovie and Macintosh software. That was helpful. The learning curve wasn't that steep once we got going. We were able to track right away, and as we got better with it, we were able to do all the things that we needed to.

Did you find it interesting to be a total novice at something?

di Fiore: It's liberating, and it also keeps your mind on the [song] arrangement. Everybody had to keep really sharp. When you're recording by yourself and you have all the time in the world to come in late at night and track your parts, it's easy to pile things on. With us, everybody's got their head in the mix. You don't want to come in as an individual and pile on a bunch of ideas that everybody has to wade through to make sense of the song again. So I think [being novices on Pro Tools] did make us more aware of arrangement issues and of keeping space in the song. It was, “if you have something really good to add, track it. But if your ideas aren't developed, then maybe wait for later.”

How long did the project take?

di Fiore: About nine months. We got a two-bedroom house, and we got what we needed: the latest version of Pro Tools, the Digidesign interface, and a tube Universal Audio 6176 for preamping and compression (see Fig. 3). It's the remake of the 610B preamp and the 1176 LN limiting amplifier. We also had some Tannoy [Reveal series] speakers.

McCrea: There were a few months of learning curve, just recording things, which you can actually hear on the CD. A lot of bands now are meticulously working to sound a little bit roughly hewn. I call them wax-museum bands: they sound exactly like spring of 1968, or New York Bowery early summer 1973. I admire the craftsmanship that goes into being able to suss out exactly the right kind of mic to use and how much to compress it to re-create a sound. But we're not able to do that. Instead, we have unintentional distortion on things that shouldn't have it. We could have redone things, but we ended up liking the way it sounded. To me, it's not about having things sound perfect. It's about things sounding appropriate for the song.

Did you work on one song at a time?

McCrea: No. We recorded basic tracks on things, then we made editorial decisions, sometimes weeks later. Luckily, we had the luxury of working with a lot of songs. If we got stuck, we could just leave a song for a while.

What instruments are in the basic tracks?

McCrea: Drums, bass, guitar, and vocals.

The keyboards, especially the synth parts, are particularly cool on this album.

McCrea: You know why? When we recorded at conventional studios, we had to lug huge keyboards in the back of the station wagon everyday and then drag them into the studio, dinging up the doorways and dropping them on our feet. Out of laziness, on our earlier records, we had fewer keyboards set up.

Did you have tons of gear set up to experiment with?

McCrea: Not a lot, but enough so that we could whimsically decide to try something out. Having everything set up all the time made all the difference for us.

Were the keyboards running through a console?

McCrea: We tried to have everything running through a little Mackie mixing board.

The keyboard programming sounds pretty sophisticated.

McCrea: Actually, we're pretty much Luddites in disguise. For example, we didn't use MIDI at all. We tried, but it was a big hassle and it seemed easier to play things.

“No Phone,” the first single from the album, is about wanting to get away from constantly being in touch. It's kind of an electronically sophisticated presentation of a Luddite philosophy.

McCrea: It's really not a Luddite anthem; it's just sort of wanting to talk about it. The inability to disconnect is kind of the opposite of freedom.

Infinite choices don't equal freedom?

McCrea: Infinite choices are actually a prison. It's all energy expenditure. You don't get more energy because you have more choices. That's especially true in the studio.