Okay, the first thing I have to know is what the hell is the end solo in "Voodoo Lady"?
If I remember correctly, [producer] Andrew Weiss did a lot of that. I think it's a [Yamaha] SPX90 or an old rack mount Effectron-type delay that has knobs you can turn and hold buttons. So you can go, "WAHH UNH EEH AHH!" and scroll through the programs while turning the knobs. A lot of the stuff we do, especially when we do things with Andrew, has tons and tons of tracks. And then when it comes time to mix, you just sort through it. It's sort of the P-Funk way, except white. [laughs] It's actually a huge part of our listening. Up against The Beatles, Parliament Funkadelic has been my favorite band since I was a teenager. I started buying the Funkadelic records when they were still a quarter. Andrew turned me onto them.
So you've known him for a long time?
Yeah. We've known Andrew and been working with him since around '85.
I was curious about what his role is exactly. Calling someone a producer can mean a myriad of things. How early does he get involved in the production?
We didn't work with Andrew on this last record actually.
White Pepper?
Yeah. But in the past, except the country record, he's had a huge, huge, huge role in all the records. And it's been different every time. For the first album, we went to his house, sat in his living room and made GodWeenSatan for about a year. We did tons and tons of songs starting with the first track. While we were doing that, we were also working at home. Aaron and I lived together then, and we were doing things on the 4-track. But the stuff at home was more who we were, because we did it every single day. So when it came time to do the second record, we decided to use the 4-track stuff rather than re-record everything at Andrew's. So we did the next two albums that way, except Andrew mixed all that stuff and made it sound a hell of a lot better. In my opinion, Pure Guava is one of the best-sounding records done on a 4-track-because of Andrew mostly.
So that's a cassette 4-track record?
That album and The Pod were done on a Tascam Porta-3, or Porta-4. It had these dial faders on it instead of knobs.
What were you using for mics?
Just a Realistic Highball. We used this one sucky mic that we got at Radio Shack on all that stuff. And it wasn't because we were trying to have a lo-fi aesthetic about it. Later on, everybody was, "Oooh lo-fi." But, to us, we always thought it was dog shit. It was just the mic that we had. We didn't even have a [Shure] Beta 57 or any other standard mic.
It's interesting — over the years Radio Shack has had some gems.
All my shit is Radio Shack at home, not my receivers. But my speakers have always been Radio Shack. I used to have this little mixing console that we used to do every thing on. It was for DJs. I would DJ school dances and parties with that. But in the early days, before we even had the 4-track, we would use that with two tape decks and bounce back and forth. We also have one of those cheese-dick reverbs that they made back then. It's a Realistic reverb unit with only one setting. And we got a Realistic "Moog". Have you ever seen one of those?
No! When did they come out?
I guess in the '70s. The Mollusk CD is done with that thing — a lot of the synths on it anyway. It was licensed by Moog to Realistic. It's really small.
Cool. I was wondering what you guys used for a synth. So going back to GodWeenSatan, you said you were working simultaneously at home and at Andrew's.
Yeah.
Were you re-recording things at Andrew's that you had come up with at home?
We brought in all of our 4-track tapes and re- recorded everything for GodWeenSatan in Andrew's living room. Except for a few songs at the end, like "Birthday Boy", [that] were from our home tapes. But then for the second record, The Pod, and the third record, Pure Guava, we decided, "Fuck that." And to this day, the concept of demos sucks to us. So, we decided to have Andrew just mix our 4-track stuff and we'd put that out. So, he was just mixing the stuff then. But he was doing so much to it as he was mixing that he got producer credits on those records. So the second and third records were done at home.
It's amazing how clean they are.
Yeah. Pure Guava especially for some reason. The thing was though, for us a 4-track was just 4 tracks. We very, very rarely would do bounces. Because then it would sound like shit. It's impossible to make it sound good when you start doing that.
Are you still using a cassette 4-track?
Yeah. We're not making our records that way. But I still have my 4-track. I have an ADAT, too. There's something about the 4-track. When you record something on it, it does something to the sound of it. It has an instant vibe. It's really, really weird. And then when the ADATs first came out, we were really excited about the cheap 8-track format, but they sounded like shit. I've heard that since then, they've made some improvements.
They've increased the recording resolution from 16-bit to 20-bit.
We bought the first batch of them and recorded Chocolate and Cheese on them. We spent more money trying to undo that record than we did making it.
What do you mean by "undo"?
Well, we bought three ADATs and rented a studio. And we — me, Aaron, and Andrew, started going out there every day to work on the record. And all along it was like, "Why does this sound so bad?" It sounded like glass or something. Nobody knew about ADATs at the time, and they were real buggy and they would break. So we took the whole record when we were done and threw it to tape. We ran it through tube mic preamps and stuff. There's the expression, "You can't polish a turd." Well, that's what we were dealing with at the time. So we got Howie Weinberg involved. He's a mastering engineer at Masterdisc. And he said people were coming in every day with the same complaint. When it was all done, we were so frustrated with it. We hated it. But now I like it a lot, now that I'm away from it. But we were really upset because we had worked really hard on the music for that for a long time. After we did that record, Howie, who's a Ween fan, said, "If you can get me involved in the process a little earlier on I'd like to help."
The country record was analog right?
Yeah. That was totally analog. They were amazed at the studio that we wanted to use the tape machine. I think because Nashville is such a music factory that everyone wants to do
everything digitally. But we didn't, and the engineer was like, "Great! I'm glad." The funny thing about that record is that they have such a system for doing things down there. They had all the gear in the studio already. Everyone uses the same shit. They have one of those little Ampeg — I forget what they're called — B-15? It's one of those fold- out cabinet amps and a [Fender] Twin and a piano and a drum kit. And these guys [the musicians] just walked in. The engineer spent about half an hour getting sounds and that was it! We just worked with what the engineer was comfortable with, and what the producer, Ben Vaughn, was happy with. We wanted to let them kind of dictate where it was going to go, so it wouldn't sound like a contemporary record but like a Nashville record.
For The Mollusk, I read that you guys rented a house on the East coast to record. What machines did you bring out there?
We bought a Tascam 16-track tape deck for that. We took some of the advance and invested in that because we knew we didn't want to use ADATs anymore. I guess it's an ATR60.
Is that a 1" machine?
Yeah. And we had bought a board to do Chocolate and Cheese - something we could afford. It's a CAD [Conneaut Audio Devices]. That record we did differently than the other ones. We went back to just Aaron and I during the recording. We holed up at the beach house. There wasn't a lot of gear. We just threw it down and gave it to Andrew to mix. But once he started mixing, he was, "Look, you gotta redo this. You gotta redo that ..."
Just because some of your engineering wasn't up to snuff?
Our engineering fuckin' sucks! [laughs] I can engineer on a 4-track but... I don't know. It's terrible — especially if it's just the two of us. Because if Aaron's doing a track, I have to engineer, and if I'm doing a track, he has to engineer. You have to do everything yourself. I think this is why we enjoyed making the country record so much. For the first time, we didn't do anything. We wrote the songs, and we sang. And I played guitar on a few songs. But that was about it. But on The Mollusk, Andrew threw a million synthesizers on it. It's our synthesizer record.
So he added a lot of analog synth after you guys?
