I have a ton of equipment [can one really have TOO much?] but sometimes, as in the case of making Easy Listening For Difficult People, I find it helpful to limit variables. There's two ideas behind that rationale: 1) with fewer decisions to make about equipment I find I'm more likely to remain in a flowstate, rather than get distracted and spend time auditioning gear, 2) settling on a small collection of equipment allows me to more easily cultivate a unified sound with a given project; specific equipment equals continuity.
There are two main instrument signal paths for the leads on the record. At a certain point I almost began thinking of them as characters. The primary lead chain was my Reverend HCB into an old Peavey T.G. Raxx tube preamp. The T.G. Raxx units were made in the early 90's and most people would have used them as a pre in conjunction with a power amp of some sort; in my case I take the output of the pre directly into a line input on my Universal Audio Apollo. With the right amount of gain dialed in I find you get an incredible, highly-touch-sensitive, experience out of the unit. Truth be told, I set the T.G. Raxx unit at the beginning of the album process and I never touched it until the end. I treated it as a static element and manipulated other variables on either side of it in order to get the results I was after. The Reverend HCB is equipped with Railhammer's noiseless P90s, which have become some of my favorite pickups. They're super dynamic and have a lot more top end clarity than you'd get out of a conventional humbucker; there's an uncompressed openness to them that I love. A great example of controlling a variable on either side of the T.G. Raxx is utilizing the high-pass filter on the Reverend. Most of the time I would have the filter all the way open but if I was looking for a single-coil-esque timbre, or just wanted to hit the preamp a little less aggressively, I would roll off some of the lows on the guitar itself.
All the slide work on the album was also done through the T.G. Raxx unit. I have a Partscaster that I put together over a decade ago that's become my slide-specific guitar. I had received a Mighty Mite Strat neck from my parents as a Christmas present and the wood had been really green [needless to say I would never order from Mighty Mite again]. A few months went by, the seasons changed, and soon enough there was intense fret-sprout going on. Being the DIY-inclined person that I am, instead of taking it to a luthier I decided to file the fret ends myself. Well, I had no idea what I was doing and I totally botched the neck. I went way too round with the fingerboard edges and it became unplayable; one would inevitably fall off the neck while playing single note lines on either 'E' string. Despite irrevocably screwing up I was adamant in finding a use for the guitar so I jacked the action, threw 12's on it and it became my slide guitar. On all but one of my Strats I've removed the second tone pot and scooted the remaining two pots away from the strings, leaving an empty hole in the pickguard where the master volume knob would normally be. I find, with how I play and the size of my hands, that I inadvertently end up hitting the volume knob with a standard Strat control configuration. Beyond that, while I do mess with pickup selectors constantly, I almost never touch volume knobs or tone knobs on guitars themselves so there’s no need for the knobs to be as close as they normally are. The pickups in the Strat are a motley crue of orphans. I honestly don't remember where I snagged the neck and middle pickups from; I think the neck might be a Lollar and the middle pickup might be a Mexican Fender ceramic. The only pickup I end up using on the guitar is the bridge pickup which is quite possibly my favorite pickup I've ever played. My buddy Mike Everett, who's artwork graces the cover of the record, had an old Japanese Epiphone EA-255 that he bought from Burlington Guitar & Amp [RIP] while we were at UVM. The neck pocket on that guitar smashed when the guitar took a bad fall and he gave it to me to use as wall decor. Eventually I pulled the pickups out of it; the bridge went to the Strat and the neck went to the baritone Tele that I just finished building. On the Strat I routed out the bridge position of a standard 3-single-coil Strat pickguard with a Dremel and mounted the humbucker pickup-ring directly into the wood, rather than mounting it to the pickguard as it would normally be. I think the pickup itself happens to sound amazing but I also think the fact that it's firmly mounted into the body has a lot to do with the character I get out of it.
The other lead chain on the record, for the cleaner tones you hear, is my 2016 SG into a small chain of pedals, the Tone-Master version of a Princeton Reverb and an Empirical Labs Mike-E preamp. The SG is my old XA touring guitar but it was retired from the road after a couple neck breaks. The only things original on the guitar is the wood itself and the fretwire; everything else has been swapped out. The pickups are Seymour Duncan 59s, I have a roller-bridge installed, the tuning machines have been upgraded to Kluson Revolutions, the wiring has been completely redone and one tone knob has been removed (the jack has been moved to what would normally be the second tone knob; I find I can better accommodate running patch cables through my strap this way. On Easy Listening For Difficult People I only used the neck pickup of the guitar.
All three pedals I used, a SolidGoldFX BC239 boost, a MXR Carbon Copy and a Walrus Monument V2, were always on. SolidGoldFX released a series of very simple, one-knob, boost pedals with a variety of transistors years ago and I happened to order the BC239 version; I love it and on the record I used it as a preamp, typically around halfway up on the knob. The Carbon Copy was always set as a single-repeat slap around 100ms with the modulation engaged. The Monument was set to the harmonic trem mode and I tapped in the tempo of each tune with the subdivision set to quarter-note triplet. The harmonic trem setting on that pedal has such a great vibe to it; it adds a subtle saturation and really helps give a lead voice authority in a mix. In my opinion it immediately channels a Bill Frisell vibe.
With the Princeton I only used it with the cab/mic sim and never actually mic'd the amp. Come to think of it, I'm realizing not a single electric guitar sound on the record involved micing an amp. I often work at odd hours and using the amp without having the speaker active allowed me to have a consistent sound, day or night, without driving my neighbors crazy. I used the ribbon (presumably a 121) emulation on the amp exclusively. From the amp I ran directly into the Mike-E with a fair amount of saturation dialed in and a touch of parallel compression with relatively slow attack and quick release.
I'm not much of an acoustic player. Quite honestly, I dread being asked to play acoustic because it just doesn't excite me as an instrument. I suppose I'm drawn to electric guitar because of the endless possibilities with sonic manipulation. As a kid, it was hearing The Edge's work on Achtung Baby, Peter Buck's sonic exploration on Monster and Billy Corgan & Jame Iha's tones on Melancholy And The Infinite Sadness that really drew me to guitar playing. I don’t think I heard acoustic playing that did much for much until I heard Friday Night in San Francisco when I was in college, and even then it’s didn’t necessarily inspire me to spend too much time with an acoustic guitar. To me, the wonderful thing about playing electric guitar is that playing the instrument never involves simply the instrument itself; it's the about the guitar but it's also just as much about the pedals, the amp, the outboard gear, etc. All these elements work in concert with one another. But I digress, as acoustic-guitar-adverse as I am, I thought blending some acoustic with the highly processed electric tones on the record would be an interesting juxtaposition. And, if I'm gonna play acoustic, I prefer playing nylon string classical over steel string. I have a dilapidated old West German made laminate-top classical that I bought off a guy on Craigslist on the south shore of Long Island many years ago. It's turned into my around-the-house beater when I feel like messing around with an idea but feel too lazy to set up an amp. I generally recorded that guitar with either a EV RE11 or 635a through the UAD 1073 or UAD 610b. Both of those mics are several decades old and I couldn't tell you where I got either one of them. They're both pretty lo-fi and I find using them to be a great way to instantly give something a gritty vintage vibe. It's those two mics that I also used for the trumpet and trombone tracking on the record. It's worth noting that one go-to technique for layering horn parts on a track, if you're gonna be working in the same room with one player (in this case me), is swapping the mic and moving the mic position slightly with each subsequent layer. I find it makes a huge difference in preventing horns from getting phasey and sounding sterile.
I did record some steel string "acoustic", in this case my D'Angelico Excel 63. I put "acoustic" in quotes here because that guitar is more of a jazz box than it is a conventional acoustic. That said, I do have acoustic strings on it and, as far as I'm concerned, it hangs with any traditional acoustic guitar just fine. In tracking that guitar I used either the RE11 or the 635a with a UAD 1073 coupled with an amp'ed line via the Princeton signal chain that I used for the SG, including the same pedals. The pickup I have on the Excel is a cheap Johnny Smith-style humbucker that I got off Amazon. I mounted it directly to the fingerboard and mounted a volume pot to the pickguard. The guitar had come equipped with the most god awful sounding Piezo which I ripped out a while back. The humbucker now runs to the volume pot and then through the body to the factory-installed 1/4" jack on the side of the lower bout. In the box typically panned the acoustic mic and amp signal wide, compressed and saturated them both separately and then ran them through some buss compression. You can most clearly hear the sound of that guitar on its own on 'All This Is Remembered', where it serves as the primary accompaniment throughout the bulk of the song. The modulation from the Walrus Monument being on the amp sound really helps to give the impression that the part is double-tracked, when in reality it's one performance. I took some inspiration from learning about how they treated the acoustic guitar on 'Hotel California', not only micing the guitar but also running the DI line through an Echoplex and a Leslie.
My primary bass chain was my Fender Elite 5-string Jazz, in passive mode, into the UAD SVT-Classic with a touch of compression via a LA-2A in Console being printed on the way in. My strings were ancient and my tone knob was set about 50%. My chain in Logic was some subtractive EQ, Waves DBX160, another LA-2A and Klevgrand Reamp. From melodic bass gestures I used my fretless Jazz, which I put together from parts a few years back. The plugin chain for those bass parts was the same but with the addition of Valhalla Ubermod providing some chorus. For the few spots where I recorded upright on the record I treated the DI signal, via a David Gage Realist, the same way I treated the primary electric bass, "amped" with the UAD SVT Classic, etc. That was blended with an RE-20 mic'd, soundpost-side, a few inches away from the F-hole into a UAD 1073 in Console.
Most tracks have at least one pedal steel track on them, which is my Fessenden SD-10. I'm not much of a pedal steel player, I certainly don't have any of the traditional country repertoire under my hands, but I get by; I think of my playing as coming out of the Daniel Lanois school of thought. My setup is a stock Emmons copedent and I use a big ol' Dunlop 921 bar. I ran the steel into my old Morley combo volume/wah and then direct into my Apollo relying on the UAD '55 Deluxe for an amp sound. In the box I almost always ran it through Native Instruments Phasis with some degree of ambience from Valhalla Supermassive.
The majority of the drum sounds came from the 'Mega Drum Machine Collection for Kontakt' by Autodafe. I've had that on my computer for well over a decade and I find it's an awesome resource for a plethora of vintage drum machine sounds. My default drum machine for most of the songs, in terms of kick and snare, was a Roland TR-707. As songs evolved I would swap other drum sounds in and out though. Most of the cymbal sounds were from more acoustic drum sample packs that I have, rather than emulations or samples of drum machines. I personally love the vibe of combining acoustic drum sounds with electronic ones.
All the horns on the album are real. I grew up as a brass player (my first instrument was trombone) and I regularly played trumpet, trombone and tuba through the end of undergrad. Since then I've picked up the horns periodically but I'll easily go 6 months without touching one of them. I've always loved how much personality and expression brass/woodwind instruments have the ability to convey. The connection these instruments have to one's breath goes such a long way in influencing how they're performed and the way a player phrases. Sometimes I wish I had put more time into those instruments; I never took them very seriously when I was a kid.
In extrapolating on the idea of limitations, I not only limited what gear I used but also what plugins I used on the box. Like so many of us, I have hundreds of plugins but really only use about 30 of them regularly. I wasn't especially militant about it but I pretty much only used native Logic Channel EQ, Logic Compressor, Waves DBX-160, Waves Puigchild, Waves L2, Native Instruments LA-2, Native Instruments Transient Master, Native Instruments Phasis, Valhalla FutureVerb, Valhalla Delay, Valhalla Supermassive, Valhalla Ubermod, Klevgrand Reamp, Klevgrand Haaze II, Nudist Audio Nudistort, Soundtoys Decapitator and Aberrant DSP SketchCassette II. 17 plugins; that's it! Every channel got at least the DBX160 and Reamp and, as always, my compression was only ever done in parallel (usually 50/50) and never with an individual compressor plugin doing more than 5db of gain reduction at any given time. Every session had SketchCassette and L2 on the master buss from the beginning.
Regarding song titles, because music like this is instrumental, more often than not song titles end up revealing themselves over time. When I was younger I would often start with a song title and use it as a springboard but I found, with many tunes inevitably being abandoned [I probably toss 90% of what I do], that was a little silly to do. It would get especially confusing if I want to scrap a song but save a great song title; I would end up with multiple sessions on my computer with the same name. I know in some cultures children won't be named at birth, but rather after a few months or even a year down the line. I think more often than not that's a practice in societies with very high infant mortality rates as a means of avoiding attachment when uncertainty is high. Likewise, when I'm working on a new piece of music and there's a very good chance it will be scrapped, my default operation is to save files based on date of conception alone. Down the line, when it comes time to give songs proper names, I have a running list of song titles in a text doc on my phone that I'll scroll through. So often my song titles are literary references; in the case of Easy Listening For Difficult People four out of thirteen song titles are lifted from particularly meaningful passages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I appreciate all the positive feedback folks have given the record so far! I appreciate you all listening!
