Youth Group

We landed back in Sydney early on Friday 5th and were back into Velvet Studios to re-mix the song “Underpass?? on Wednesday 10th. It was hardly time to clear our heads but I musn’t grumble – it’s not the speed of sound schedule set by Epstein for The Beatles in “Day-by-Day”.

Our re-mixing demand showed perhaps that we were finding hard to let go of our baby, the record, and finally say “it’s finished”. But we thought that that song could sound a little better. Maybe it’s neurotic behaviour though: the hearing of dog-whistles etc.

After a trip to Brisbane to play a couple of shows we began mastering at 10am on Monday 15th at 301 Studios at the old EMI offices at 301 Castleraegh Street – a very Beatles-like address. The boys were guided through this by the venerable Don Bartley, a silver-pony-tailed boffin. I’d never been to a Vines mastering session, held as they were at the remote and famous Sterling Sound in NYC. I was fascinated to listen in. The EMI equipment used seemed to be a combination of analog and digital. The analog desk looked fantastically old, like it dated from the beginning of broadcast technology. Mastering is a bit of a polish for the sound; adding compression, bringing up the sides, brightening the guitars and tightening the low end, taking out some 45Hz – all phrases commonly in use. A few songs (”Underpass” and “Sorry”) I was particularly happy with the results of. We took the record home to listen to and unfortunately discovered a few glitches (incl. several seconds of silence in the middle of “String”) so we took it back on Wednesday and got it fixed along with some more “tweaking of the hertz”. Then Cameron was entrusted alone to be present at the final sequencing session a day after we got back from Adelaide and Perth. And this is it. The sequence. A few songs missed out (“19th Century”, “Late Last Night” & “Christmas Windows”) but the rest of the songs I’ve been banging on about in this here blog are on the record.

1. Catching & Killing
2. On A String
3. Let It Go
4. Start Today Tomorrow
5. Dead Zoo
6. Under The Underpass
7. Daisychains
8. Sorry
9. TJ
10. The Destruction of Laurel Canyon
11. Sicily
12. Forever Young

Censured Osama

One of the great advantages of the journalistic office is that, if properly you are credited, you can directly enter the festival by the press accesses and thus to avoid the long tails and the exhaustive revision which they put under to you in the doors of general entrance. The treatment and the attention to the press, it is necessary to say it, it is so warm and efficient that it puts to you of the very good humor.

O’clock of two and the twenty I am with Héctor Martinez, promoter in head of the record seal Epitaph, that presents/displays to Toby Martin and Danny to me Allen, vocalista and drummer of the Australian band Youth Group. “Ok, Robert, you have 20 minutes to platicar with Danny”, loose Héctor.

At the beginning of April Youth Group it headed the lists of popularity of Australia and its disc, Skeleton Jar, has been sold very well in the United States. Of char it with Danny I emphasize a passage that seems to me amused well, although for the members of the band he has been somewhat uncomfortable.

It is that they take more of a month in Los Angeles preparing his new disc, Casino Twilight Dogs, which will leave this summer on sale. In the Myspace of the band, the bear Patrick Matthews wrote that already they had the 14 songs of the new disc and that they had decided to eliminate, for obvious reasons, a called piece “Osama”.

In theory, this information was not due to have published, but apparently to Matthews it was themselves the wave and it raised the data to him Internet without the other members of the group knew it. Still memory the face of astonishment of Allen when it asks to him for “Osama”. “ How you know that? “, perplex me reviró. “Simply I know it”. And I insisted “ What happened with Osama”. “What happens”, Danny explained, “is that to Toby (Martin) it seemed to him politically incorrect to include this song. It is a very sensible subject in this country, you know, and we do not want that it is misinterpreted to us”.

Moments later, while she took photos them, Danny commented something to him to the ear to Toby and this one directed to a flaming glance to Patrick Matthews. The thing was put tense when Toby demanded the imprudence to him to Matthews, who waned right away and she was limited to keep silence.

The best thing of everything is than that same night mysteriously disappeared the paragraph in which Matthews lamented itself by the decision to have discarded to “Osama” of the new disc. I ask myself if someday we will listen to it. According to Danny: “Yes, it is probable that we record it in the future, so that no”. According to Toby: “That song not even exists”.

This was the last day of recording. An opportunity for all to have a go at backing vocals (BVs). All except Danny who’s away in Vegas witnessing his friend's drive-thru wedding; Danny Tulen from Gersey's married Trudy.

This is the half-inch tape machine arriving from the rental company, signifying the start of mixing

We re-visited “Catching & Killing” today. We spent all day on it. We listened through Toby's drunken rave, all fifteen takes, found the bits we liked, played around with them on the computer, re-ordering etc. Toby sung doubles to some of these and also put down some new words.
Mark Wilson from Jet came over. They're all staying in the Hollywood Hills, near Cahuenga Pass on the Valley side, but he was the first of them back to LA after a break in recording so we kept him company. A well mannered Geelong boy he is.

So this is what Toby and I thought: as I said before, if Portland, Oregon is people serving coffee to each other, then NYC is people watching their friends DJ, and LA is people giving their business cards to each other. Where we live in LA is “The Valley??? as I'm sure I've mentioned. The San Fernando Valley – otherwise known as the San Pornando Valley since it’s the porn capital of the world. The porn industry is hidden and the place is extremely suburban; every nearby street could be used as a movie stand-in for small town America. And it's kind of well-off; in the last ten years median house prices here have apparently gone up something like five times, maybe closer to ten-times, to almost a million dollars. It's also got it's own weird climate from being hemmed in by mountains and filled with millions of cars. In summer, deprived of a sea-breeze, the temperature soars five or ten degrees celcius above that of the LA-basin. What else? There's nowhere to go for a drink, except Pat's Cocktails. I like a gin and tonic at that place.

Toby reading the LA Times – Valley Edition

These are the last days of recording. We’re running behind schedule at this stage; trying to add extra week after the first extra week that we added wasn’t enough. We need to start mixing soon so we complete the record over here in America, with Coachella Festival (29/30 April) looming as one deadline, closely followed by the absolute time-limit of Wayne’s flight back to Australia on 2 May.

We did Danny’s song “Late Last Night?? today with Danny on lead and Dan and Toby sharing the back ups. Danny did percussion at night on half a dozen songs. Atom thought his timing was so good he could be a session-percussionist. Nice compliment.

Also today, Cam worked out how to use Reason sampler/sequencer on the Mac to make use of a sample library that Justin Stanley gave us. Justin’s an Australian producer living in LA. Wayne and I know him separately but we got his number from Uncle Rico when we bumped into him at Burbank! I know Justin cause he produced “In The Jungle” on The Vines first record. He used to play in Noiseworks in the eighties but now he’s married to Nikka Costa and just finished playing on Beck’s latest record. Sounds impressive? Worth the digression? The library he kindly loaned us had samples of vibes, harpsichord and glockenspiel – all of which we used on our record. Thanks Justin.

This I found interesting: the first step in recording the vocal for Dead Zoo (the first keeper) was to copy the vocal Toby had sung on the 8-track cassette demo and transfer it to the newer Velvet backing track. Then Toby doubled the old Toby. We had had the idea to sing this song a la Aaron “Cocoa-Butter” Neville (it’s a Saturday Night Live sketch), in a high effected voice, but, perhaps not surprisingly that direction didn’t have legs.
Toby also did the Sicily vocal and the Daisychains vocal from yesterday was doubled. Then the yesterday’s original was discarded.
In the evening Andy Cassell (mgr.) had organised for us to have dinner with Alex Patsavas the music supervisor for the OC and her husband Brian, writer of books on serial killers. I suppose it depends on how cynical you are as to how you see this. It was great to meet her. She has a very interesting and influential job and a very broad musical-knowledge. The music on the OC is quite a feature.
On the way home we visited Sunset Sound Factory Studio to see Rob Schnapf and Doug Boehm and the Brooklyn-ite they were mixing called Kevin Devine. We drank a few Coronas with them got home at about 2am quite drunk. We got Toby on the mic doing 15 or so takes of Catching & Killing. Part of the lyrics he sung were place-holder lyrics that he’d been singing in the band-room (ie: compression sustain / impression remains) and part of the lyrics were a cut-up of Australian Shooter magazine prepared earlier. And then in front of the microphone this night the lyrics too became part drunken-rave (a man sits at his computer / and moves / infinitesimally). We kept every thing to listen back to the next day.

In the morning Dan and Toby went over the Hollwood Hills to the Channel 9 (Australia) studios to do a satellite interview with Richard Wilkins on the Today show in front of a green screen on which a hyper-real Hollywood sign is reproduced.
Back in The Valley, Cameron and Wayne worked on slide-guitar part for “Underpass??? that sounded like early-“Suede??? to me. Cam did at least 20 runs through and left the studio a shattered man. I saw him staggering around the garden later kicking at twigs. We'll end up using the part though.
In the afternoon Toby did a vocal for “Daisychains” that wasn’t too happy with itself; Toby finding it hard to lay-back on this strangely tempoed song.
Also, in the evening: Toby replaced guitar parts on “Underpass” and added some DI-guitar (straight into the desk) and some keyboard parts to “Daisychains”

Hello. It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything on Live Journal but I’m back and I’m going to finish off a back-dated Studio Diary.

This Tuesday the 11th of April was my day for re-taking the bass on three songs; some “delicious bass” as Toby would often pun.
Not to make YG appear like a board-meeting but we had a few recording “catch phrases” that we kept reaching for. For one, we wanted the new record to sound “hard and tough” as opposed to the “lusher” Skeleton Jar. I think eventually mine and Cam’s repetition of this company line during recording drove Wayne to complain: “what specifically do you mean?” because “they’re not exactly tough songs”. Yes I’ll admit hard & tough may have verged on being hollow vogue words … but … we used less vocal harmonies and less double-tracking on this record and fewer guitar parts: usually just the two original live takes, Cam in one speaker, Toby in the other. All along our vision had been to record the band live-to-tape and keep as much of this as we could. We’re particularly taken with great live-sounding sixties records and the modern results of LA producer Ethan Johns who did Gerling’s latest record and both Kings of Leon records and also Ryan Adams’ Gold – all live, all fantastic. Forever Young was a live band take, except for one four-bar drum-edit and the bass which I did over (letting the team down there). In the studio we also took to saying: ‘every time you take it over, you lose a little something’ which is some between-song conversation on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s record Will The Circle Be Unbroken?. As it turned out we got some songs quicker than others but never a first take, unfortunately. Let It Go may have been second take. Cameron could have won a trophy for “least overdubbed”. I would have finished last in that count which is why in LA I felt that we needed to re-record the bass on three songs: Sorry, Daisychains and a doubled bass part on On A String. The latter was inspired by Wayne Connolly saying how Brian Wilson would have the bass parts on Pet Sounds played, in unison, by a bass, a 6-string bass and a double-bass. We didn’t go that far, although we gave it a shot. For all the overdubs in LA I used a guitar belonging to Atom our engineer. It was a really cool 6-string bass, a custom-made copy of a Fender Bass VI (otherwise known as a baritone guitar; as played by Harrison and Lennon on The White Album and The Cure on Disintegration).
Despite Atom the engineer’s assurances that a 6-string bass is an octave higher than a normal bass I’m positive we did a straight double on On A String. Sounded great though. Then we straight out replaced the bass on the other two songs.

Day off from recording.
In the morning we listened back to what we’d done on “Underpass” in the last few days. Then in the evening we had a show at Spaceland over in Silver Lake. We played with a band from Nuremburg, Germany called The Robocop Kraus and an L.A. band called Army Navy.

We spent all today working on the tune of “Underpass???. Toby sang it every which way he could. Halfway through this epic task Toby mentioned that he had a “sore front of the neck”. Whether this was a superstitious way to refer to a hoarse throat, or a strange crick in his spine, we never found out. Speaking of superstitions, there's another one we follow: never ever say out loud “this is going to be easy” for it will not be.
And what is being in the studio like? I hear you ask. It's a very nice mid-budget studio apparently. Wayne is very taken with the API desk; bass is API's specialty. The Seedy Underbelly studio was relocated (desk, gear and name) from Minneapolis, Minnesota a couple of years ago. Wayne also informed me that with American studios, the most exclusive have the oldest and rarest analog gear. For example the holy grail of studio equipment (so-called on the internet) is a Fairchild 670 compressor which Ocean Way Studios would have. They are worth upwards of $30,000. A large sum. We had to hire a Fairchild 670 “emulator” for mixing because we are mid-budget.
And speaking of cool gear here, especially stuff that we've used frequently, there is; a sixties Ampeg B-15 N flip-top bass amp, a Sears Silvertone guitar amplifier (originally available on mail order in the fifties), a custom copy of a Fender-Six bass, 2 racks of seven Neve Pre-Amp thingoes, and a Neumann U-67 microphone. Very good stuff.
It's tight quarters in the control room. There’s only a limited space in front of the desk and only a small sweet spot where the mix sounds balanced. Plus if you are near the back wall there is the interesting (and sometimes confusing) phenomenon of the bass-less pocket, where the low-end disappears.
What else? There's a Mac computer which runs the program Pro-Tools. History lesson: Pro-Tools was released in 1987 as the first “tapeless recording studio” and these days it seems, to this non-expert, to be almost universal in professional recording studios. I say almost because I'm sure that people like Steve “Stupid Verb” Albini keep to analog recording. Our studio B in the house is Pro-Tools set up on Toby’s Mac using an M-Box which is sort of pre-amp/computer interface into which we (meaning Cameron) plug either microphone or a keyboard into. I obviously don't understand it at all. It's a credit to Cam that he can run it.

This is Toby taking care of the “front of is neck??? with a Model-Tea