Artist Blog: Parlour Steps

The Recording of Our Most Contemporary Humours,

Or How I Learned to Love the Most Blessed Language of Digital Discourse

We book three days in Vogville Recording, across the tracks in Port Coquitlam, cozily located near Riverview Hospital, with an intent to start in on our record. Nels, God Bless him, is there for our set-up to assist my indulgences. My first order of business, while Rob tunes his drums, is to find the whistling sound in the chamber, finally, after years of recording it, thinking it was the SSL computer fans. Nope, it was air getting sucked into the air conditioner. I tape a peice of cardboard in a bridge over it, diverting the air and creating a hushed drum chamber. Wicked.

Lyrics are gathered and embellished and whittled and starved and fattened up…Songs are deconstructed and trimmed and dieted. Brevity is considered.

Drums go so smoothly, Rob Linton filling greedily his 15 tracks of digital space. We go with the astronomical, file-size hungry resolution of 24 bit, 88.2 kHz. The air of our instruments, the ensuing acoustic flourishes of the rooms and chambers we used, are given a generous and open sound stage. Yum.

Minimal editing was done to Rob’s drum tracks. They didn't need it: masterful, human in their movement, groovy as hell. I decided early that we would allow the performances the space to breath and move a bit; there was no beat detector; there was no B Rock ProTools Extraveganza. As you will hear on the record, it sounds like a real man playing that DW trap set. The following is the signal flow for our set-up:

Kick: D112 in, Re20 in, NS10 cone out – each through API pre’s, with Distressors and Avalon compressors inserted.

Snare: sm57 over, AKG 451 under – each through API pre’s and dsitressors compressors.

Toms: Senn 421’s through Vintech 1073 pre’s and Summit Tube compressors.

HiHats: SM7 through the SSL

Ride: Octavia pencil through SSL

Overheads: Neumann KM184’s through SSL pre’s, Amek compressors

Mono Rooms: an sm57 taped to the floor, Rode K2 out front, each through Vintech 1073’s, squashed through UA 1176 compressors.

Chambers: Neumann TLM 103’s through API’s, Joe Meek SC1 inserted.

(Mono rooms sent through a MXR envelope filter at times)

After we have drum takes we are grooving on, as well as all the scratch guides of vocals and guitars, we move on to bass. Julie’s Squire short scale is surprisingly massive sounding.

Bass:Squire shortscale through Millenia STT solid-state pre (with transformer engaged), through UA LA-2A compressor set to limit. Huge!

Again, very little editing. Rob and Julie lock well, the bass lending a bouncy and flexible juice to the strident drum grooves. I fear there may be way too much low end building up, a challenge layed out for me and the mixing stages.

Guitars are next, staring at us from the corner of the control room, stood upright and set-up, new strings gleaming in the track lights, each offering their voices to Rees and I.

Guitars: Gretsch 6120 Nashville, Fender Telecaster (modded with double humbuckers), GnL Stratocaster, Epiphone SG.

Amps: Fender Twin 100 watt through Mesa 4x12, VHT Pitbull all-tube, Amplitube VST

Signal chain: a mixture of sm57, Senn 421, and sm7 through API, Vintech 1073 pres, with 1176’s and Amek compressors inserted.

Room sounds: Neumann TLM 103 through API and Joe Meek

The guitars are a blast, throwing enough acoustic energy into the live room to rattle the windows and scare the piss out of anyone unknowingly ambling through the rawk zone. We have the heads/amps in the control room for better communication with the player, with the amps feeding the Mesa Boogie 4x12 cab in the live room. We use the Gretsch and the modded Tele the most, favouring their ballsy, large sound.

That took us to the end of our weekend of play. About 40+ hours later, we had some definite songs emerging from the ether. I slept greedily and dream of tube squeal.

We take a few days off (went back to day jobs, husbands and lovers, jogging through the park) and then fired up our process in The K Lab, the den of inspiration that is my one-bedroom apartment. There I start to fill out our skeletal songs with some synths and organs and keyboards, moving between what analog models I could get my hands on, and digital replicas. Everything went through the Millennia STT tube pre. It was pricey so I try to use it a lot.

I cart my recording rig over to Mark Berube’s house and record him on his upright piano, hammering keys or plucking the strings like a monster banjo. We had him resuscitating his Accordian. We had our friend Aijineen come over to the K Lab and bow a little violin.

We decide to involve the illustrious past and rent the venerable Neumann U47 microphone off of Jonathan Fluevog, who bought it off of The Hit Factory in New York. This is the very mic that Ray Charles, Mick Jagger, and countless others sang through when they hit NYC for vocal recording. At least that is what I tell myself as I stare into it for a few days.

We lay down some Gretsch acoustic first, tracked through the Millennia STT solid-state pre, producing a wonderfully vibrant, almost harpsichord, sound. It cuts through everything like a chiming tickle of clarity.

After I amass the clutch of lose-leaf lyrics and over-worked notebooks, I start singing. Julie and I get to gaze out my bedroom window at the twinkling lights of Grouse and the North Shore range. Much tea and scotch is consumed while sending our voices through the U47 into the Millennia tube-pre. It was as warm as a desert sunset and satisfied my deepest audio gear fetishism. When we weren’t using the mic, it’s historical weight and considerable (!) cost motivated me to hide it under my bed when I slept.

So we now had most of the songs sounding nearly complete. I started ornamenting them with tambourine, shaker, and more synth flourishes. It is these trinkets and baubles of sound that make it sound all big-budgety, no?

Compared to the our previous albums and their glacial production schedules (Hours of Tremor took a year and a half to complete: Great Perhaps the better part of a year), this five weeks was fast and furious and huge.

Mixing over five days, again back at Vogville Studios, I was moved to glutony, using nearly every compressor, EQ, and effects processor in the rack, delighting in the expensive lights and flickering displays, twitching VU meters and LED’s…

Nels can testify that I eat far too many donairs during this time. I get OCD with the donair place down the street. Nels buys them for me, the helpful enabler.

Five days for mixing is a luxury not afforded every project I work on, so I take some time. I set up a PA system in the live room to feed various sounds into the chamber, bouncing a guitar here, a vocal there, around inside this room. The mics in the chamber pick up a bunch of unwanted noise as well - roadcrews digging deep into the ground, woodworkers next door cutting wood, and sometimes these mysterious snaps and crackles that our assistant Nels gets spooked by.

Then it was time to mix, amassing all the recorded elements and helping them find a home in the greater sonic city of the song (ah, urban planning as a metaphor). Pablo Picasso once said that a piece was done when you couldn’t take anything more away. Mixing was very much a process of peeling and trimming and fermenting into the song’s fittest self. Oh, alright, we left a few pleasure pounds hanging around the middle.

So, I ‘ve just sent the mixes off to Boulder, Colorado to Airshow Mastering and our man there, Dominick Maita. UPS screwed me over a desk under some seriously bright and unsexy lighting. But they will get there. Boulder. The mountain air creates especially talented mastering engineers, with lots of red blood cells.