The Same Only Better

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Go to Paul's Page on the Antenna Farm Records Website

It's interesting to note that as lush as this album is, it's pretty much a verbatim copy of the demo he did for the album before he came to me. The only real differences are maybe fidelity, "tones", and stereo mix stuff. He's really the master of track maximization when he works at home on his tape four-track machine.



If you solo out the tracks you'll hear a lot of him switching between instruments on the same track—using a blank space between vocal choruses to add a tambourine to the verse and so on. That combined with a lot of bouncing down from three tracks to one as he went took him pretty damn far.

So, I had a pretty awesome blueprint to go from you might say.

Vocal Magnetude

Go to Great Magnet Recording's Official Website
Check Out a Sample of Paul's Music
Go to Paul's MySpace Page
Go to Paul's Page on the Antenna Farm Records Website

As if Paul needed any help in the vocal department...

That notwithstanding he had a very clear vision on how to construct vocal tracks in the studio beyond the performance itself:





1.) Any time a vocal is doubled (with a few exceptions) both tracks are centered in the stereo field...he almost never wants to spread the vocals out over the stereo field the way I personally would on my own stuff. I think this comes from his attachment to the works of Sir Paul and Brian Wilson as they existed in the original mono mixes of those amazing albums. Almost in defiance of that, his vocals just about never sounded "phasey"...he's just that good. The pitch and timing variations between the original and the physical double is just soooo slight! The really nutty thing about the way he does this is that he also just about never wants to sing along with his first take...he always has me mute it before he re-records the double. You'd think this would result in a mis-match, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, his timing seems to "lag" less because he's not "following" something. Very cool!


2.) All harmonies are doubled! Even if it's a three-part harmony, each part is doubled, resulting in six parts. And sometimes it's more like eight if the three-part vocal harmony forms some kind of alternate poly-rythm under the main vocal (which is also doubled!). These vocals can sound really huge!


2.) Gimme that crappy micPaul has asked for this one stupid litle microphone to do vocals on the last three albums, regardless of whatever fancy mics I've had around. It's a five-year old, falling apart, cheapass Chinese mic called a "Silicon Entourage". Actually, it's a really good mic and I use it all the time. Not hyped on the high end like other Chinese mics. They've since upped their build quality, tacked about $50 to the price, and given the look of it a big facelift. I bought one and luckily it pretty much still sounds the same so now I have two!

Drums and Percussion

Go to Great Magnet Recording's Official Website
Check Out a Sample of Paul's Music
Go to Paul's MySpace Page
Go to Paul's Page on the Antenna Farm Records Website

By request from Paul the drum mic'ing for Inner Soundtrack was pretty minimal: two overhead mics and one in front of the kit. Done and done.



Here you can see the "live" setup where there's no baffles or gobos or carpeting around the kit. And there's that cheap Chinese mic out in front doing a fine job once again!



I have large rockets on my ceiling and you don't.



...and her we have the "stuffy" setup!

Paul did all the drums his bad self. He's a really incredible rock drummer. Of interest is the fact that if you listen to the tracks you can occasionally hear two distinct drum sounds...sometimes even within the same song! We did two drum passes for most songs: one with more ambient room micing for a more live, epic rock sound with a bit of room reverb, and another with closer micing and a lot of baffles everywhere for that dry sound you might hear from a Stelly Dan/Fleetwood Mac/Eagles kinda track.


Great Magnet ain't nothin' ta fuck wit'

Guest Musicians

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Check Out a Sample of Paul's Music
Go to Paul's MySpace Page
Go to Paul's Page on the Antenna Farm Records Website

One of the great things about recording this record was working with all these guest musicians who did stuff beyond the usual rock combo.

The Amazing Paul Bonanos lends his cornet skills to "lost and Found on King Street". Paul was a blast because he was really quite knowledgeable about the whole "Burt Bacharach School" that we were shooting for and even suggested some fantastic changes to our horn scores that really brought some "period authenticity" to the proceedings!

Paul Bonanos again blowing his horn on "I Will Answer"

Here you might be able to make out the mighty Royer SF-1 ribbon mic we used to do a lot of the horn recordings. It was a cool mic, and I've since acquired a few more diverse types of ribbon mics that I only WISH I'd had for Paul's record!

I think this was posed...I do NOT appear on Paul's record rockin' the cowbell. Sadly.

Paul's bandmate Pascal can play just about any instrument including cello (shown here) and skinflute. The man is a perfectionist and really was awesome about doing take after take until everything was just amazing. He also laid down some great guitar parts, keyboards, and surprised us all with his bass playing which was a secret weapon of immense magnitude!

I wish I had some pics of Tony DeLaValle, ho played sax and flute on this album. We found the guy on CraigsList and he came up and did the parts for chicken scratch. We had no idea what to expect from the guy and he just came in and blew the fucking doors off. We were floored!

The Ass-Pain that is Called "Bouncing"

Go to Great Magnet Recording's Official Website
Check Out a Sample of Paul's Music
Go to Paul's MySpace Page
Go to Paul's Page on the Antenna Farm Records Website

Me and Paul in the control room chewing on a delicious mix. We were both adamant about doing this whole album on analog tape, and the fact that I only had eight tracks available meant a lot of back-and-forth maneuvering between the digital realm and the analog realm. Especially considering how heavily-layered this album was.

Basically, what we would do was fill up all eight tracks, then drop all that to digital multitrack. From the digital files, I'd create a mono master, and then "fly" that back to the analog machine so it was occupying ONE track of tape, thus leaving me seven more to work with. We'd fill up all seven again and then once again master them back to digital, INCLUDING the bounced mono master. On the computer I would put the waveform for the mono master back off the tape machine alongside the original waveform of the mono master track from the digital realm, and looking at them enlarged side-by-side I could align them perfectly so that the timing would match. The great mindfuck of the whole process was that the timing of the tape machine would DRIFT a bit between bounces, so invariably I'd have to snip each new batch of eight tracks into six or so even pieces once they were in the computer and shove things around until they matched all the way through. There was a serious method to the madness that I won't get into here, but suffice to say that I got reallly fucking good (and FAST) at it!

Inner Soundtrack in Retro-spect

So here I am six months after the completion of one of the largest and most far-reaching projects of my pseudo-career as a pseudo-engineer—trying to recreate as a blog everything that went into the creation of this amazing album with all of it's rich and intricate layers. Good friggin' luck.


Pascal adding some electric guitar in the control room

I may ask Paul to help me out on this, so for now to start with here's some session photos to chew on, intermixed with random thoughts...