Before sitting down to talk with Chris Zane at Gigantic Studios in Chinatown, New York City, he gave me a quick tour of the place. Yes, it is the former Looking Glass Studios founded and built by Philip Glass and yes, it still has Glass's Bösendorfer concert grand piano, but no, Chris Zane has never met the guy. Far from minimalist or post-minimalist, Chris Zane is a relatively young producer, barely in his thirties, whose work often sounds very layered and big. While showing me a song from the then-unreleased Passion Pit debut album (which has since become one of the biggest albums of 2009), he explained that we were listening to no less than eight vocal tracks stacked on top of one another. As the chorus hit, he turned to me and said, "thirty-five." However, his projects are not all shiny synth-pop, as he has worked with a diverse array of artists including Calla, Les Savy Fav, Asobi Seksu, White Rabbits, Ambulance LTD and The Walkmen.
How did you get your start in the recording world?
I didn't even know what an SM57 was until I was 21 years old. I was a drummer my whole life. I went to music school and traveled the country and [was involved in] that whole music conservatory world. When I was about nineteen or twenty, my first year of music school, I called up the head of the school and said, "I'm not gonna come to class tomorrow because I hate this." My first semester's GPA was .10. I ended up washing dishes for a long time. I had a friend convince me to go to Berklee and at the last minute I decided not to go and opted for this much smaller two-year school in Boston — a recording school — and I went there [previously called Mass Comm, now called Art Institute of New England]. I'd say I learned the bulk of everything that I learned in the first semester. I just went fucking crazy and gobbled it all up. After one year of school I got a job at Supersonic, a recording studio in Cambridge [Massachusetts]. It's gone now. It was a real "indie rock heyday" kind of place right by the Middle East [Nightclub]. After about two years in Boston I told my friends I was movin' to New York and convinced a bunch of 'em to come. We moved here in the end of 1999 and I started all over. The second night here [in New York City] I had a friend recording at a smaller studio down the hall. When it was time to leave and I was walking back down the hallway, I heard [makes drum sounds]. I could tell that it was real drums, not a recording. I don't know where I got the balls to do this, 'cause I would never do this now, but I knocked on the door and poked my head in. "What's goin' on in here?" There were some guys in here recording and they owned the studio. It was far different than what you see right now. It had a tiny little Soundcraft [mixing console], and about that much gear [points to a small outboard rack]. A couple of weeks later I had my first band that I was gonna record, and I called these dudes up and said I wanted to do it here. I ended up coming to do a session here. I did more and more stuff here and honestly, I don't know what happened. It somehow just became my place.
Does it work out well that the label [Gigantic Music] is connected to and owns the studio?
The label gets their records made for free and when it's not on the label, the studio gets paid. Everybody's happy. I've been doing a lot more elsewhere this year and last year, but for the most part this is home.
On The Walkmen record [2008's You & Me], there's a very distinctive, bright guitar sound. Talk to me about that guitar.
Um...
Or the whole project, if you'd like.
I'll tell you about the whole project. It's more interesting. I get asked about guitar stuff constantly. People come up to me like, "How'd you do the guitars on Asobi Seksu?" I usually give some variance of a snarky answer like, "I just put a mic in front of the amp and he played." That's really about it! I mic the guitar amp with the same mic every time, a Royer [R-121], and I always try to record out of Fenders — that's it. With The Walkmen, Paul [Maroon] had this Rickenbacker that I'd never even seen before — there's only a couple of 'em, and that's just it. He's very particular about the amp that he has. The long and short of recording his guitar is to turn the amp up far louder than you're comfortable with, turn the tone on his amp far brighter than you're comfortable with and then (as if that's not enough) when you're mixing, keep adding more high end. I keep a short list of bands that I want to work with, and when I moved to New York I think [The Walkmen] were number one on the list. I had emailed their manager about doing Bows + Arrows and she scoffed at me, "Never in a million years." And then suddenly I was in this room, talking about doing the new record and I did it. I guess it was a breakthrough for them. They walked away singing my praises way more than they ever needed to or should have.
It's a great record.
Yeah, it was a really good experience. We did it all live to tape, and those are two things that a lot of indie bands (or any bands) aspire to do — kinds of things that I consider generally dumb, logistically nightmarish, fable-esque stuff — recording to tape, recording live. But it just happens to work for them. When we listened back to the very first song, I remember Alex [Aldi, engineer] looking at me and going, "Holy shit, man. It sounds done. It sounds mixed." I turned around [from the mixing console to face the band, also listening], and they were all, "Holy shit. This is it. Let's go do it." We just started putting songs down. [You & Me] has a real vibe to it. It's something that I've realized in the last year and a half, that I think the actual key to making a good record besides songwriting is having a consistent core that runs through the whole thing. You don't have to skip [songs] because it all has that same thing.
I've heard it called the "totalizing agent".
I like that. Yeah, it's something that I consciously made a point of implementing last year. The first day that the Harlem Shakes came in, we sat down and I made them listen to [Michael Jackson's] Thriller from front to back. We talked about Thriller all night. We didn't even set up an instrument. There's something about [Thriller] that runs all the way through. It's like a core, a set of guidelines or of rules. If I said, "Cook whatever you want, but you have to use apples and you have to use peanut butter," there would be a common thread through your whole meal. I've been focusing on that a lot more, and a lot less on where the bass knob is at on the guitar amp. So I think that's part of what tied The Walkmen record together — if you're in the mood to listen to it you listen to the whole thing, and then when it's done if you're still in the mood you'll listen to it again.
One thing about that record is that it seems to have less mids than a lot of records.
I'm sure that I destroyed something between 1 and 2.5 kHz on every channel because they're just such a harsh band to listen to, and I probably piled on 50 Hertz, and piled on something on top [of the frequency spectrum]. A lot of times I say, "50 Hertz" and people are like, "What?"
Do you think that's from being a drummer?
I think it's a combination of that and that there's this whole other side of me that just lives and breathes dance music. And when you're making that kind of a record you've just gotta move the bottom. I just recently started getting more into SSL [consoles], and specifically they have the E-series EQ. It was the one, the sound of hit records [in the 1980s]. A lot of times I think a good place to start is to take a famous EQ [module] and look at what the frequency bandwidths written out are, because they have 'em there for a reason. At some point in their head they thought somebody should know about it. 50 Hertz is staring at me, and I start crankin' on 50 Hertz on an SSL and [think], "Wow, that sounds fucking awesome." Ever since then I've added 50 Hertz to everything.
You mentioned live tracking. [Asobi Seksu's 2006 album] Citrus opens with an instrumental introduction called "Everything Is On". That leads me to ask whether a lot of that album was tracked live and what was on?
Definitely not tracked live — constructed in the studio one at a time, 40 guitars per song, which I love. "Everything Is On" I think was just some bullshit that James [Hanna] and Yuki [Chikudate] had made in the space. They would do stuff that is all over Citrus, and a little bit on the new album [2009's Hush], where they would take a record player or an old tape deck and put on, say, Brahms, and run it through delay pedals and reverbs and record it. Then we would manipulate it in the studio, time stretch it, layer it, edit it, add more and run more records through. On the new album we set up a whole thing with records and multiple space echoes and all kinds of crazy shit — basically throwing tons of stuff down on the canvas with the idea of picking up two or three cool ones.
A lot of experimenting in the studio.
Yeah. I think ["Everything Is On"] was probably done at the last minute as a, "Let's have the record start with this thing." But throughout the album in and out of the songs, there's Debussy stuff that fades in and out of Echoplexes. There's a lot of classical, really romantic stuff.
"A lot of times I think a good place to start is to take a famous EQ and look at what the frequency bandwidths written out are, because they have 'em there for a reason. At some point in their head they thought somebody should know about it."
