Making "That's Right!"
Page 4 of 5
Has Roomful always recorded to tape?
No. They had recorded it straight to digital, I think using maybe Digital Performer in the past. Chris was never really satisfied with that. And I am a Pro Tools convert, but I am a firm believer, especially with that kind of music, in tracking it to tape. [an error occurred while processing this directive]Then you take it to Pro Tools and edit it.
Yeah, just transfer it into Pro Tools and I do editing and mixing. I did do some editing, even though we didn’t do much in the way of overdubs, to correct very little things, because I knew I was going to be able to. Rather than spending the time trying to replace an entire take because of one little thing, or punching in on the note, I thought, you know, I can fix this in 20 seconds. Let’s not worry about it now.
If there’s a riff that happens on the 12th bar every time and it’s a four-and-a-half minute song, I can grab that from somewhere else rather than spend the time to punch it in.
It’s interesting that even though their last couple of albums have been digitally recorded that they chose tape this time.
Yeah, I think Chris is pretty much sold on tape now. Have you heard “That’s Right!”?
Yeah, I have. I liked it, it’s really happening.
Thank you. The performances are so exuberant. There’s so much energy there and honesty, and God, what great players.
Yeah, and Mark DuFresne is a great singer, too.
Oh, God. Mark DuFresne is amazing. Especially when you consider that 90 percent of that was live with the band.
Yeah, how many times does that happen?
These days, not very often. And a lot of times, his harmonica parts were on the same track as the vocals. It was just tracked, you know?
So were there any issues with that?
Yeah, he used a crystal mic, and there was an amp actually in the room with him, which I had to periodically kick to keep it from humming during the vocal track. I actually found that I had to put some bricks on it to keep the tube from humming, with the vibrations from the drums.
There’s a tip for you kids out there!
Yeah, if the amp is humming, put a cinderblock on top of it! So there were issues, because Mark was just used to getting the all-dirty tone and I kind of talked him into letting me blend in some of the cleaner sound along with it on a number of cuts. And basically, I won’t say I was given free reign with the mix, but pretty damn close.
Did they sit in while you were mixing?
Chris, the producer did. The group was not around, but Chris was with me the whole time, so that I was staying true to what their intentions were. Short of that, it was just do it. It was a lot of fun to mix, because even though the arrangements were similar and that kind of thing, each song really had its own individual kind of ambience to it, because they’re all from different eras. So it was kind of fun to match tone and ambience with very slight adjustments.
How did you do that?
A lot of it was with ambient room reverb, and delays. Also tone. I mean, a big part of that recording was trying not to make it sound too new. A big part of that was making sure that the recording didn’t supersede the song or performances. Everything needed to fit the individual song. We weren’t really going for a sound that was really consistent across the record, we were going for a sound that was really consistent within each individual song. On the more swingin' jazzier cuts, it’s a little bit smoother sounding, a little bit more round. On the more rockin' blues things, there’s more bite and edge to the horns, a little more of an edge on the guitars. On the really old-sounding ones, the guitar is very dark, it’s got that chukka-chukka sound, the old kind of thing. And changing the size of the rooms that the drums would be in. When this song that first appeared, would you have heard this in a dance hall? Would you have heard it as a live radio broadcast, would you have heard the recording? At least, that’s what was going through my mind when I was doing it.
Did you do that with gobos?
And processing afterwards. Most of the ambience was artificially induced, because of the isolation that I had to do to make it work in the size room we have, we don’t have a really giant room.
You couldn’t be switching around the gobos for each song.
No, and that wouldn’t have worked with the number of songs we tracked – 14, 15 songs, I think there are 14 on the album.
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