Day Two – Drum Sounds

After picking up our rental car and grabbing a quick breakfast in West Hollywood, we headed to Burbank to see the studio and meet the producers for the first time. Production duo Wired All Wrong - Jeff Turzo (God Lives Underwater) and Matt Mahaffey (Self) - are doing the record, having most recently produced Hellogoodbye’s Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!, a great sounding record currently burning up the charts. We were all excited and I was quite a bit nervous – though they had our demos and a list of our favorite recordings, I had only briefly spoken to Jeff a couple of times on the phone. We weren’t entirely sure what to expect.

Any trepidation I had was alleviated when we arrived at 2pm. The studio is large and gorgeous, with tons of great vintage and modern gear and a relaxed creative vibe. We have access to classic guitars, basses, and synths, a Steinway piano, preamps and consoles, everything we need. Jeff and Matt are friendly, cool, and super competent, and we got along with them immediately. Chris the engineer and Lee the intern were also on hand to help out. Spinal Tap-esque fake British accents peppered the conversation as abstract music descriptors were thrown about.

The task for our first studio day was to get a good drum sound and run through all the songs live for some light pre-production. Most of our day was spent lounging around being useless will Chris and Jeff lovingly positioned microphones and sound barricades in countless configurations until the drums sounded sufficiently “magical”. It was great to see so much care and diligence being but into the process – several complicated setups were built and later dismantled. There were some technical issues to work out in the studio, but we eventually got through it all with a tight, powerful, and rich disco drum sound that we can turn into whatever we want in post.

Sample dialogue: “I'm not vibing that sweet magical punch. Why don’t we throw up some 4410s up top and place Matt’s 67 and the sub near the Ludwig, try the Matt’s Eagles snare with Jeff’s wallet taped down. Yeah, channel 1’s tweaky and the 480Q-10s are honking kinda bad, lets re-route and try some mid range scooped compression and I can sweeten the Toms with some shammalamma ding dong hooka jook nada surf N87 Bs.” Jigga what?

Finally, at 9:30pm, the band set up in separate compartments to record all 14 tracks live. My voice was totally shot, but we got through it. Jeff and Matt gave us some great feedback, and everyone seemed to get excited about the prospects for the material and making this record white shit hot. A&R Peter Torres was there the entire day helping out, and label owner Ricardo stopped in later during the live tracking. He was so excited by our progress that he doubled our production budget. Yeah right!

Matt