Jon and I spent a lot of time recording together this summer despite his week long trip to North Carolina, month long trip to Italy, drive across the country, and an interruption from hurricane Irene. Somehow between all of that we were very productive — recording occasionally on weeknights and on weekends for most likely twelve to fourteen hours at a time. A lot of the recording we did this summer was very experimental. We did a lot of work outdoors, we used an old TEAC 4 track, Jon played wine glasses and his sister’s Cello, we used a lot of first takes, and recorded vocals on the couch amongst many other things.
It was damn muggy this summer but that didn't stop us from making music
We work fast. Well, I have to work fast or else Jon gets bored. But a lot of what we recorded has already been through years of finessing with some songs having been around even before recording the first Murder Over Madison album in 2008. So it doesn’t take much for Jon to put down a great recording especially when we do things as naturally as possible: no headphones, guitar in hand, sitting on a stool, microphones out of the way. This makes Jon comfortable and in return we can move fast. Everything we did focused on capturing the mood, the quiet, and the intense. But honestly a lot of it becomes a blur until we slow down at the end of the day and listen to what we have done.
Castle was no exception to this process other than involving no acoustic guitar. I can’t recall everything about recording this song but I do remember Jon sitting on the couch with a Telecaster and singing very softly. We found a wonderful addition to this song in the EVP88 Electric Piano from Logic. I brought up the darkest sounding cymbal I owned and we overdubbed that to raise the intensity. The bass line and the harmonies were already well sorted from Jon’s original recording of this song many years ago so those went in easily.
Jon returned to Montserrat late August so we tucked the unfinished album away to let it age. But I wasn’t ready to let go of Castle just yet. It’s a beautiful song and over Jon’s trip to Italy I spent some time mixing a few songs to get a better sense of what we had. Castle was one of these songs but I couldn’t get it right. I struggled with it for awhile before I had to let it go, convincing myself that it would be better to have Jon with me for this one. In October I brought up Castle again knowing that several months away from the song would give me a new perspective. I stripped the tracks bare and listened to what we had recorded with no artificial reverb or EQ or plug-ins to cover anything up. Listening with everything in its innocence and dead center, I began to understand and really listen to this song.
I first took the liberty of muting excessive parts. Jon and I have a habit of over-recording which I certainly don’t see as a bad thing; I would rather have more to work with, but it does warrant a decision making process. In this case, removing parts actually strengthened the song by creating contrast. That’s when it became apparent to me that this song was greatly about contrast. The fact of the matter is a lot of Jon’s music is about contrast so this will probably be a common trait throughout the rest of our work together.
Roland Space Echo
So from then on I knew what I wanted to expose and emphasize. The most important aspect of this song was in its extraordinary dynamic range. I wanted contrast, lots of contrast. I wanted ‘real’ reverb and I wanted things to sound raw and, of course, analogue. So my first thought was try a Space Echo on the EVP88 Electric Piano which sounds more like bells so it seems stupid to call it a piano. It sounded beautiful! And it set the tone for the rest of the song. I dug out an old Holy Grail guitar pedal and used it for an aux reverb. I sent guitars and vocals to it with varying degrees of intensity which helped to create this dense atmosphere over an ambient, vintage tape reverb. Wow. I loved how it sounded. The mood was just so dark and dense in the build-ups and I could pull it back in spots that needed to sound fragile and small. This was my contrast. It took awhile to make things sound big but not overwhelmingly wet. It also took awhile to wrestle the bass line into a comfortable spot and this proved essential to the song being the entire low end of the mix.
Another important discovery was rolling off the top end on vocals and the entire mix. It took away the digital and added this nice lo-fi quality (I’m sorry for abusing the term ‘lo-fi’ here). It really made the vocals, as they were sounding somewhat harsh having been intentionally recorded with a really cheap microphone that sounds nice with Jon’s voice but has some really crappy top end, unfortunately. It was a bit of a balancing act keeping the song from sounding too dull and giving enough presence to the vocals in the dense sections.
The Holy Grail reverb pedal set to "stun"
Anyways, it felt really good to have overcome my struggle with this song. I would love to post the entire song but the fact is this probably will not be the final mix. So why post it or even bother mixing it at all? Well, I am proud of it and want to share my work. And although Jon and I have talked about trying additional parts it won’t change the concept. Or maybe it will be the final mix. We won’t know until we get together again and resume our work.
Edit: I decided to upload the entire song.