EVERCLEAR - Art Alexakis & Co. Record Two "Movies"

EVERCLEAR
Art Alexakis & Co. Record Two “Movies”

Back to Rec Notes

PHOTO: FRANK OCKENFELS

The recording could have all been a simple affair had Alexakis not asked his Everclear mates—drummer Greg Eklund and bassist Craig Montoya—to join in on the fun nearly at the last minute, after many of the bass and drum tracks had already been recorded. Suddenly, Alexakis’ solo project became a band effort.

“It was kind of like building a house, taking it off its original foundation and putting it onto a new one,” explains co-producer and Pro Tools engineer Fox. “We were trying to preserve all of the work we had done with the guitars and Art’s vocals and then have Craig and Greg come in there and have their playing and style fit underneath all of the stuff that had gone down with the other players. You want the rhythmic lilt of the whole thing to be identical, but to have the unique thing that these performers bring still be there. So, the tempo had to be the same, the kick pattern had to be the same, where the two and four had to be the same, but to have it not be exactly the same part.”

That’s where Pro Tools came in handy. “It was absolutely indispensable,” Fox continues. “There was no way it could have been done without Pro Tools. I had laid out the songs pretty rigidly, rhythmically, locking everybody down to a tempo. So getting the new performances in there wasn’t that difficult; it was just making sure the feel for Craig and Greg, as opposed to the other players, was right. We wanted to make sure their individual styles were able to shine through, even though they had to fit.”

Within Pro Tools, there were a number of plug-ins that were useful to the team, including VocALign, Filterbank, Amp Farm, Digidesign’s own UltraTools, AutoTune, D-Fi and Sound Blender. According to Fox, the team was somewhat experimental with their plug-in applications. “VocALign was used on the newer bass lines to make sure they really got in there and phase-locked with what was going on in the original bass,” he explains. “The bulk of the plug-in use was for a utilitarian sound thing or as an effect, rather than a performance.”

There was no trickery or gadgetry. If we wanted a chorus on the guitar, it was either recorded in chorus or I mixed it that way.
—Neal Avron

Avron, who was the co-producer, recording engineer and mixing engineer on Vol. 1, concurs: “In the recording process, I tend to stay more natural, and if we want to funk things up, we tend to do it either in the mix or before Pro Tools, like guitar pedals or other outboard effects. There was no trickery or gadgetry. A lot of those kinds of things were generated at the sound source. If we wanted a chorus on the guitar, it was either recorded in chorus or I mixed it that way. Or, if we wanted to distort the vocals or the bass, a lot of times that was outboard gear more than plug-ins.”

The mixing process for Vol. 1 was akin to the Afterglow mixing sessions, in that the team had an analog 24-track slaving to a Sony 48-track digital machine. “We decided coming in to this record we were going to keep it to a 48-track machine with no slave,” explains Avron. So they submixed everything in Pro Tools and then transferred it to the 48-track machine. If there were changes along the way, they had to go back into Pro Tools to make the adjustments and then retransfer the tracks to tape. That’s an issue they opted to avoid while mixing Songs From an American Movie, Vol. 2/Good Time for a Bad Attitude, explains Avron, by mixing right out of Pro Tools. It saved both time (by avoiding the change and transfer issue) and money, because they didn’t rent another machine.

Avron, Fox and Alexakis point to the acquisition of an Apogee AD-8000 as one of the turning points midway through the recording of Vol. 1. “That was a sweet development,” says Fox. “They sound beautiful. The high ends are a little more crystal-clear, and the low ends have a little more of a tight bottom.”

BACK | REC NOTES | NEXT

[an error occurred while processing this directive]