apologies, i’ve posted a couple of these tracks already. (guess i’m just excited.)
i helped a little with producing / adding sounds to my partner’s new LP, which is out now on Orindal.
(btw, there’s almost nothing electronic about this record except a touch of moog - played by the great shazhad ismaily, who also engineered - on the whole it is quite sparse and, hm, “traditional” in both production style and song structure. RIYL: words.)
claire and i will also be going out on a brief (11 shows) tour of the midwest and east coast, starting next week; dates and updates are here: http://clairecronin.com/#news. we’ll be supporting the brilliant owen ashworth performing as Advance Base.
right! process:
we made the record at shazhad’s figure 8 recording in brooklyn. this is a truly top-shelf studio with “indie-friendly” rates and i highly recommend it if you have a modest budget. in our case, the booking of studio time was my engagement present to claire (we got married last summer); i’ve wanted to see a set of her songs captured in this way for a very long time.
the record is mostly guitar, voice and viola. we tracked, edited and rough-mixed these parts in 3 days. then we did 2 days of overdubs (bass, drums, some additional guitar, stroh-violin, touch of piano, touch of moog) and mixing. tracked in protools with pretty minimal punch-ins / edits, final mix through figure8’s remarkable neve 5218 console.
the basic arrangements hew closely to how claire and i have been performing these songs as a duo over the last few years. it was tempting to make bigger arrangements, and an interesting line to walk between adding space and texture, and keeping lyrics foremost / preserving the starkness of the music. time limitations probably helped.
(this is in contrast to claire’s last record, Came Down a Storm, which was a collaboration with our friend john dietrich (of Deerhoof) - john wrote about half the music for that, and did all the arrangements / engineering / production (with additional engineering by jay pelluci.) it has tons of fascinating guitar and synth sounds / parts and goes in many directions; this one is a much sparser affair.)
here, the biggest mixing challenge was guitar -> vocal bleed on the harder-played songs; vox and guitar were always tracked together live. guitar was always recorded DI and then usually re-amped.
mastering and a touch of remixing was done by matt mehlan at his home studio in chicago. matt does good work at extremely reasonable rates, and does some engineering at chicago’s experimental sound studio.
