Beau Sorenson cares about coffee. One of my clearest, earliest pictures of him is in the tiny upstairs kitchen of Smart Studios, Madison, WI, circa 2006. He used the pour-over method and was exacting in his movements. Not surprisingly, Beau makes a good cup of coffee. At age 30, Beau has already moved through one musical lifetime and now finds himself living another. A native of Wisconsin's north woods, he cut his teeth at the aforementioned, tragically defunct Smart Studios. When Smart closed its doors in 2009, Beau headed to Portland, OR, a town he knew through his work with Death Cab for Cutie and his friendship with that band's guitarist, Chris Walla [Tape Op #19]. Having recently completed that band's forthcoming record, Beau finds himself between projects. It's a good time for a cup of coffee.
You worked on the new Death Cab for Cutie album, Codes and Keys. Guitarist/producer Chris Walla is an accomplished engineer in his own right. Why did he want you on the project?
Codes and Keys was to be a much less guitar-centric record — it relies on synthesizers and vintage keyboards more than any of their previous albums. I've got a pretty strong background in modular synthesis and sequencing. As producer, Chris also wanted someone to help with what we called the "construction project" songs on the album, and wanted an extra brain to handle recording and troubleshooting duties if he was playing guitar on the floor. Also, this was the first record that was tracked in Logic, and I've spent a lot of time working in a DAW format, dealing with file management, that sort of thing.
This isn't the first thing you've done with the band. How did you start working with them?
Chris and I first worked together at Smart, on the mix of Plans. He had tracked the album on a [Trident] A Range [at Long View Farm Studio], and sought out Smart because of our A Range and control room. For some reason, we ended up working together well, and can be productive without stepping on each other's toes. We have different backgrounds, but we're on the same page with a lot of things. We both prefer weird, half broken junk like the Eventide H949 instead of modern gear or plug-ins. And we're big believers in the process, systems and workflow of making a record (and how these ultimately influence the resulting music). For example, there's a million different ways to make a delay, but the [Lexicon] PCM 41 is a specific delay we both love — partially for sonic reasons, but also for the layout and interface of working with it. It's a beautiful device, perfectly designed, that inspires creativity and experimentation every time you use it.
Codes and Keys was tracked in a number of different studios. Why?
I think the band wanted to break the recording process up a bit, find rooms that were inspiring for different processes, and keep things fresh and interesting. Studios are like instruments: they lend themselves to particular things nicely, but can make certain parts more difficult. Also, by working in different cities, it meant at least one person wasn't on the road for that stretch. So, we ended up at six studios in four cities: Sound City in L.A.; Tiny Telephone in San Francisco; Avast!, Two Sticks and London Bridge in Seattle; and the Warehouse in Vancouver, BC.
How does this record differ from their previous albums?
Sonically, there are fewer guitars. It's not a synth-pop record or anything like that — the guitar simply has a different presence and intent on this record than their previous albums. Many of the parts that were originally written on guitar got moved to other instruments, and a lot of the guitar that remains does decidedly un-guitar like things. Also, I believe a lot of the last record was tracked live, while this one was a little more multitracked and assembled. The performances and takes have all remained intact. Chris is a real stickler about preserving performances, especially when it comes to vocals. But a lot of the supporting information was constructed over a number of days in a number of studios. So it's not really fair to say that this is a Lego brick computer record, either, because there are a lot of complete live takes on it, too. It ended up being a mix of techniques and approaches, which is part of what we set out to do: chase the songs wherever they went, explore different avenues, follow the music where it led us. A studio has so much to do with workflow and how a record comes together and how you work — we tried to be really sensitive to what was working, and what wasn't. Sound City has such an amazing drum room — it was so fast and exciting to do a lot of the drum tracking there, and The Warehouse has a really big, beautiful two-story live room that we could stretch out and take advantage of. When we needed strings, we went to Tiny Telephone to work with the incredible Minna Choi and Magik Magik Orchestra. When we needed to do some smaller 'checklist' recording and plug in a bunch of synthesizers, we went to (drummer) Jason McGerr's studio, Two Sticks.
It's clear you're a big fan of synthesizers. What do you use them for, and which ones do you like?
Synthesizers have never been scary or weird or fake or complicated for me. They've always felt more like Legos for sound, or logic problems or something. The promise of synthesizers as a completely open palette for making sounds has always been exciting and optimistic for me — I was born just after the time that they were abused and despised. The idea of doubling a part with a synthesizer, or triggering a sub-bass part beneath the kick, or filtering a guitar with one is a very natural part of the mixing process for me. I mixed a record at Soma Studios last year, and they've got tie lines that integrate an entire wall of synthesizers into their patchbay. I was so excited to see it, because I had literally dreamed of a studio like this for years — complete integration of synthesizers as outboard equipment. I grew up staring at pictures of the studios of [Karlheinz] Stockhausen and Raymond Scott, and have always loved the way electronic music studios of the 1940s and 1950s had a technical, scientific edge to them. All of the home studios I've ever had have been closer to this: oscillators and white noise generators and lab filters all live in the patchbay with reverbs and delays and compressors. Tape machines should be always ready for use as a recording device or a delay or a processing tool or as a compositional tool — the medium is the instrument. Going back to the Death Cab record, Chris is a huge fan of playing with tape machines, and we spent several afternoons making tape loops out of bits of songs. These would get put in a shoebox, shaken up, and put together in random order, and ended up as the ambient bed underneath a couple songs. Chris plays the [Ampex] ATR-102 like an instrument. It's really spectacular.
Describe how you like to use synthesizers in a mix.
A lot of times I'm emulating other effects: building a tremolo with an LFO and a VCA is more unique (and offers more control) than using a plug-in or a guitar pedal. I recorded a band that was obsessed with the Boss SG-1 (the 'Slow Gear' pedal), but couldn't afford one, so I rigged up a patch using the MS-50 that would do the essentially same thing with more control. It made me a hero for the rest of the session! Or, triggering an envelope that opens a filter on the way to reverb send, so the reverb opens up and gets brighter on cue. Because you can get a synthesizer to track and respond to changes in volume, you can get a lot of motion in a mix that feels a little stagnant by using different parts to modulate external processing. Enhancing existing parts is another thing I love synthesizers for: doubling a guitar part, or thickening a vocal harmony, or making a piano stronger — synths are great for all of this. The external in jack on my [Korg] MS-20 gets a ton of use, because once something is in there you can twist it into all sorts of crazy territory really easily. A lot of the applications I use synthesizers for are fairly subtle, like triggering a low sine wave to reinforce a kick or some white noise to thicken a snare. It depends on the goal, and whether the outcome should be realistic or fantastic. It's way too easy for synthesizers to get cloying, so you have to have a lot of self-control and always ask yourself, "Is this cooler, or less cool? Am I helping the song, or hurting it?" Objectivity is the key.
You worked at Smart Studios (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage) before it closed last year.
It was amazing! The first record I assisted on was the Garbage album, Bleed Like Me. I was running around, getting coffee, cleaning toilets — all the classic studio intern duties. I was so nervous and scared, but really excited at the same time. And I really loved that place, too: I'd find any excuse to stay late, to hang out, whatever I could just to be there. Smart had an incredibly welcoming vibe and presence — mainly due to Mike Zirkel, the studio manager. I pretty much owe my whole career and life to Mike for giving me the chance to work there. I feel like I grew up there, and I certainly got my education there. Eventually, I started working on my own projects, but I'd still assist on bigger projects that came through. This was a great way to learn how to (and how not to) make a record, and I avoided a lot of pitfalls by watching and helping other people struggle through them. I've always felt that recording is paralleled by the service industry, in a lot of ways: running a studio has always felt a little like running a hotel or something to me. You have to always remember how to make clients feel happy and comfortable, show them that you're on their team, and that you're going to do everything in your power to make their music awesome. This could be as simple as not forgetting to restock the toilet paper, or staying up all night looking for drum loops, or not freaking out when the tape machine breaks down.
