PRODUCTION VALUES: Home Cooking with Cake

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

Did someone set up your studio for you?

McCrea: Somebody tried to help us, but they didn't really know what they were doing. So we ended up doing it, which was very empowering for us. We took the tools of production into our own hands. That's something that I think is also a greater societal trend. It's really a very salutary feeling to have made this record by hand. It's like a craft project we did that went too far; especially because we design our own CD covers and make our own videos.

Did you have Pro Tools knowledge before you started?

McCrea: Just barely. But it's not that hard. We went a little farther than the tape-machine level, but we didn't go all the way into it, certainly. We didn't want to or need to.

Did you overdub one by one or play together?

McCrea: We play together sometimes. It depends on what the song requires.

There are live drums on the songs.

McCrea: Yes. We used several live drummers, and Gabe Nelson, the bass player, played drums at times. There are some live drums on just about all the songs.

You can't really tell which drums are live, and which are programmed.

McCrea: We didn't want that to be the point. I think sometimes people get caught up in the form rather than the song. We're just trying to communicate musical ideas.

Most people think recording live drums requires some engineering expertise. How did you do it?

di Fiore: One thing we did was to use one mic above the snare and one below, kind of a tricky thing that our bass player showed us. You get a different sound from above and below, and you either choose one or mix the two. We also used overhead mics. We pretty much miked everything, so we ended up with about six tracks of drums.

What mics did you use?

di Fiore: To be honest, since we were engineering ourselves, it seemed like we were more successful if we didn't have a system that we stuck with. We just felt around in the different situations. We didn't have a regular drummer at the time, so we had different setups for two drummers. And a lot of the drum tracks were programmed, and we mixed live drums in with them. We really manipulated them a lot, bringing fills up, etcetera. It's hard to hear which are the programmed drums and which are the live ones, but on one of the tracks, at least, I can think of a fill that really does sound different from the rest of the track. But we were careful not to do that too much. We didn't want to bring attention to different timbres in the drum sound.

Did you use a click track?

di Fiore: We played to a hi-hat click. That's one of the first things we put down, which turned out to be a good reference for us when we'd go back and try to line things up.

How do you come up with your arrangements? The word cinematic comes to mind to describe them. Not wide-screen, but …

McCrea: [Laughs.] Certainly not wide-screen. Sort of like a Super-8 movie, maybe 16 mm. Again, the arrangements were a product of our feeling unencumbered by the traditional studio process. I think that sometimes studios can, inadvertently, slow things down. Maybe it's just that they're trying to be thorough and professional. Or maybe it's something else. But if you're on a creative jag and you need to move quickly to keep the idea from dying, to have to spend a half hour to set up is stultifying. Without the official studio rhythm, we found that, in our own clumsy way, we were able to move with more mercurial ease. It's not so much about saving time to save money; it's about saving energy. When you feel really creative and then everything you have to do takes a long time, you end up not wanting to try ideas because it takes too long to make them happen.

What microphones did you use the most?

McCrea: [Shure] SM57s. We tried fancy-pants microphones but we ended up liking the SM57s.

What about preamps?

McCrea: The one with the purple light. I forget its name.

In general, you used the same preamp and microphone on everything?

McCrea: Yeah. I'm not into the pornography of equipment.

Did you play with room acoustics?

McCrea: Yes, especially with the trumpet. We tried a lot of different rooms for the trumpet. We had lots of cables leading to different rooms and getting crushed in doors.

Let's talk about recording trumpet.

di Fiore: One of the reasons it's fun playing trumpet in this band is that I'm not part of a section. It's a guitar band and I'm the thing that sounds different. The trumpet is a good foil for the electric guitar. It gives it something different to react against.

We recorded trumpet mainly in a small bedroom where we'd put some carpet on the floor. There was a little bit of room sound, but not too much. The reverb wasn't washy, and for the most part, I played right up on the mic. We used an SM57 quite a bit. I tried other, more lush mics, like the Røde NTK. The Røde sounded really present, and we used it on about half the songs, but we got a tight sound on the SM57 that worked for a lot of the songs.