Morning Jitters
Apr 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Robert Hanson
If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Los Angeles might be the city that doesn't sleep very well. Anyone who has ever partied a little too hard in Hollywood can attest to the helpless feeling that befalls someone who is struggling to squeeze in a few minutes of sleep before the serene predawn haze gives way to the relentless morning sun. Although this scene isn't necessarily unique, there is something special or even strangely romantic about the wee hours in L.A. Maybe it's the warm ocean air. Maybe it's unexplainable 4 a.m. traffic at the 101/405 interchange. Or maybe it's the countless sleep-deprived musicians who keep the city buzzing long into the morning. For producer/musician Chris Vrenna (aka Tweaker), these are the golden hours. “After staying up all night for two months,” he confesses, “I started to think, ‘Why do all of my songs sound like they were written at four in the morning?’ Because they were.”
Although his Tweaker moniker and penchant for keeping odd hours may conjure thoughts of certain illicit substances, Vrenna's stimulant of choice seems to be a constant stream of demanding projects. With gigs ranging from remix and production work to movie scores and video games, Vrenna is flush with work while many in the industry are busy closing up shop. But don't get confused: Vrenna is very much an artist, and with his second Tweaker album, 2 a.m. Wakeup Call (Waxploitation/iMusic, 2004), the distinction between producer and artist is made even more clear.
“I'm lucky to get to do so much stuff, producing other people or remixing or doing game scores or stuff for television,” Vrenna says. “All of those types of projects have, I don't want to say rules, but you're working with other people and for a specific thing. And always in the back of your head, you're thinking, ‘If I didn't have to worry about this, I could do that.’ When you're working for television or something like that, you don't have that option sometimes. So for Tweaker, it was kind of like no rules — whatever you want to do. And I could just follow any idea. I was just kind of free.”
But despite his newfound autonomy, Vrenna self-imposed some rules on 2 a.m. Wakeup Call. “Unlike the first record, there were definitely a few things that I wanted to accomplish on this record,” he says. “The first record was all about programming and using weird noises to make beats out of and things of that sort. I had wanted to do mostly instrumentals, and I had a couple of vocals. On this record, I wanted to focus more on songs, like having more guest vocals and more solid songs and not just instrumental pieces.”
IGNITING A NEW FLAME
Many know Vrenna as an adept sonic architect whose productions often feature layers of undulating synths, noise loops and uneasy bits of digital percussion. For this latest release, however, Vrenna wanted to work in a decidedly different direction. Teaming up with partner Clint Walsh, the pair started the writing process with a purposely low-tech approach. The duo's writing process often began with a simple guitar or keyboard line that they would later build on. And after several periods of close collaboration, Vrenna and Walsh created the basic framework for the 12 songs that would eventually comprise the album.
“I didn't want to get bogged down in production,” Vrenna explains. “So we had one synth-bass patch; we had one sample bank of drum sounds; we had one pad sound and one piano sound on different modules. And it was like, ‘Okay, we're going to write the entire record with this palette.’ We were kind of following that old concept of, if you can stand up and play the song on a piano or an acoustic guitar and it works — the chords work and the emotions work — then the song will work no matter how weird you make it. You can always make that piano into some weird synth later. But you'll know that the emotional quality and your chords will work.
“One of us would usually have an idea,” Vrenna continues. “I had this little acoustic guitar riff that I had been playing. And we would just start with that. That led Clint to have, like, a B part for it or whatever. And then one day, he was sitting at home, and he has a piano in his living room, and he was just playing these two sad piano chords, and he said, ‘I have these two piano chords today.’ And I said, ‘We need three chords at least.’ So we punked around a bit and found a third chord that matched the first two, and, boom, there was another song. It was a real back-and-forth thing. You have to have that trust and openness to do something that you know may absolutely suck. And if the other person says it absolutely sucks, you have to just go, ‘Okay,’ and not worry too much more about it.”
KEEPING IT ALIVE
Earlier in his career, Vrenna gained a great deal of notoriety working with Nine Inch Nails as the band's live drummer and studio programmer. Naturally, Vrenna's talent as a drummer is an important aspect of his production process. “For a while, I kind of got burned out playing drums,” he admits. “That's why I was so into the programming thing. And then I really missed playing drums. So I went out and bought a new drum set. I got a little Yamaha jazz recording kit, and I have it in my overdub room. I got it all miked up and kind of left it there. I could always just jam on it, and I wanted to focus the rhythms more on live drums rather than just crazy weird noises and stuff like that.”
This time around, Vrenna definitely got his money's worth out of that jazz kit. “Most of the beats on the record were made from the live drum kit,” he says. “I would sample them up, and I'd record, like, 14 tracks into Pro Tools and keep every track separate. And then I could go in, and I'd do that NS-10 speaker trick where you put a mic in front of the woofer. The main thing was, I was always trying to keep a performance. There is very little looping on this record. It wasn't like I'd just play a beat and then find the one good bar. I played the entire eight-bar chorus until I got an eight-bar chorus. And then if I wanted to add a loop to that, I'd chop that up against my real drums. So the loop was fluctuating with my feel rather than what most people would do, which is print a loop and then chop the drummer to a grid to get them to match a loop or whatever.”
Vrenna's recording setup is centered around a Mac-based Digidesign Pro Tools Mix system. His studio occupies two separate rooms in his house, with one functioning as a control room and the other as a live/overdub room. And with the exception of the guest vocals and some errant drum tracks, the entirety of 2 a.m. Wakeup Call was recorded and mixed in Vrenna's home studio. To overcome the somewhat less-than-ideal acoustics of an average residential home, Vrenna simply looked for some creative ways to get around those limitations when tracking live instruments.
“For Tweaker, the good thing is, I don't have to have any particular sound,” Vrenna says. “We got some pretty good sounds on this record — I'm actually kind of shocked. There is this engineer [Rich Mouser] I work with a lot who has a studio in Pasadena called the Mouse House, and I did go there to do two songs. I went there just for an afternoon and did drums because I wanted it to just be ridiculous. [But when recording], I'll put mics down the hall because I can close off different areas of the hall. I'll just stick a mic down the hall in the bathroom, down low on the floor, and leave the door open. And I'll run that through an 1176 on the way into Pro Tools, kind of blowing it up, creating false rooms and stuff. And then every once and a while, I'll go in with Sound Replacer and not replace sounds, but I'll actually augment the kick mic and layer in a sample on top of the performance.
“I used every trick in the book, really,” he continues. “An engineer friend of mine, Bill Kennedy, came over for a couple of days; we go all the way back to the Broken era, when I met him with Nails, and he just kind of helped me when I was getting going. We were taping microphones to the ceiling and in the kitchen. And we spent two days just trying stuff everywhere in the house. We came up with a couple of interesting and doable mic configurations. When you work at home, you don't have the money for the big rooms, and it really comes down to experimentation, and there are ways around all that kind of stuff. And it's more fun because your time is free when you're at home.”
RISE OF THE MACHINES
Live instrumentation aside, a Tweaker record isn't a Tweaker record without some serious synthesizer indulgence. And for 2 a.m. Wakeup Call, Vrenna used everything in his arsenal. On the software front, some of his favorites included Native Instruments Battery and B4 Organ, Arturia Moog Modular V and Spectrasonics Atmosphere. “I do all of my MIDI in Pro Tools,” he says. “It's my sequencer and my recorder. One nice thing that happened in the last year or so is that … there were no good software synths or anything for Pro Tools people; it was all VST stuff. And, finally, there is a lot of really good stuff. Everyone started porting their stuff over, at least to RTAS.”
But even though Vrenna is excited about the many new possibilities with software synths, he has by no means abandoned his hardware. “I don't choke my machine down too much,” he says. “I don't need a lot of software synths; I'm still kind of a hardware guy. I like looking at 'em. But if it ever gets to the point where you're using software synths and you're using some of the new filters like Kantos or Filter — which are both insane — and you get a couple of those things going, all of a sudden, it's CPU overload. I'll just get going and bounce it and save all of the settings and turn the voice off. Sometimes, you have to just print. That was my other thing: to just commit! Half the time, your first instinct was right. Sometimes, you just go around for hours and realize that the first or second thing you did was right.”
Having worked as a producer on a number of more rock-oriented projects, Vrenna was anxious to put his impressive stash of hardware synths back to work. “I got really back into hardware synths,” he confesses. “The new V-Synth by Roland is awesome, as is the Alesis Andromeda. Opposite of those but equally cool is, and in someway actually cooler, the microKorg, which is one of my new favorite pieces of gear. I still have my JP-8000. I still have my Nord Lead 2 and my Virus and my MicrowaveXT. I think every keyboard I mentioned is somewhere on the record. In doing so much other production work, there wasn't so much opportunity to do a lot of synth work. So I kind of forgot how unique each of these synths are. The Microwave is beautiful for pads and for pretty support tones and stuff. The Nord is gnarly. They each have their own little niche.”
THE GLUE THAT BINDS
An integral part of Vrenna's framework for this album was to incorporate a collection of guest vocalists. The majority of the 12 tracks include contributions from a wide range of individuals, including Will Oldham (Palace), Robert Smith (The Cure), David Sylvian (Japan) and others. With such a diverse crew of collaborators, it would have been impossible to assemble each of them together in one studio. Luckily, with Pro Tools and a sizable FedEx bill, Vrenna was able to have all of the vocalists work remotely from their own studios.
“I would send them a CD of just instrumental tracks for them to pick from,” Vrenna says. “And we'd go through the concept and stuff like that. And then I would just burn off a multitrack Pro Tools session and FedEx that to them. When they were done, they would just FedEx a session back to me on CD. I could then just grab their vocal tracks and drop it right back into the Pro Tools session, and there it was. With MP3s and e-mail now, some of the people wanted feedback, like Nick Young [A.I.]. He was like, ‘Here are some ideas I've got going. Which one do you like?’ And I could respond via e-mail. The only vocal that was done in person was Will Oldham. He was on tour opening for Björk all summer, so he was in L.A. for three days, playing at the Hollywood Bowl. He just practiced all of his stuff, and we had a day here at the studio.”
With such a variety of artists working from a collection of different studios, Vrenna was left with vocal tracks that each reflected their unique recording environments. “Some vocals you get back and they're, like, perfect — the tone, everything,” he says. “And you're like, ‘Wow, I don't even have to touch it.’ Then, there was Hamilton from The Walkmen. They own their own studio in New York, but they've never even seen Pro Tools; they do everything on analog. So we bought a reel of 2-inch and dumped the stereo song over to 2-inch, and he just tracked everything to tracks on the 2-inch and sent it back, which I had to transfer over to Pro Tools. And because of that, there wasn't a lot of sync or lock anywhere. So then, I'd have to go through, using the stereo mix off the 2-inch as my guide, and chop and retime everything back into my Pro Tools session. Most people are using Pro Tools now, so it's pretty easy. But everything was totally different, and that's just what you do: You clean them up. And no two songs on the Tweaker record musically sound the same anyway.”
LAST GASP
With an album that is as all-over-the-map as 2 a.m., Vrenna often found himself with some complicated mixing chores. The closing track, “Crude Sunshine,” presented a number of interesting challenges. The seven-minute track, which features vocals by Jennifer Charles (Elysian Fields), moves through several distinct sections that each required special care. Many of the sounds were treated with various AM-radio-modeled effects to give it an older, decayed sort of sound.
“That one starts with a lot of vinyl pops and scratches and hisses, and I sampled all these little sounds,” Vrenna says. “And those little pops and hisses actually make the beat. Then, when the drums fade up out of it, you realize that the noise was the beat of drums the whole time. I wanted to make the whole thing sound old, which meant a lot of processing and Mellotron samples. And I put everything through some effects boxes that do AM-radio simulations and found different ones for each thing, so it wasn't like the whole song was coming out of one thing. It was like everything was coming out of a different radio from 50 years ago.
“‘Crude Sunlight’ is, like, a seven-minute epic,” Vrenna concludes. “The album not only has a concept of being a nighttime record, and all of the lyrics are about dreams or what keeps you up at night, but in addition to that, the album is kind of chronologically one night in the way it's arranged. I wanted that last song to kind of wind you down and actually finally give the listener the payoff of the story, which is rest.”
STUDIO TWEAKERY
Access Virus synth
Alesis Andromeda A6 synth
Anthony DeMaria Labs ADL-1000 compressor
Apple Mac G4/933MHz w/1.5 GB of RAM
Arturia Moog Modular V soft synth
Avalon U5 direct boxes (2)
Clavia Nord Lead 2 synth
dbx 160 (2), 160x (2) compressors
Digidesign 888|24 I/Os (4)
Digidesign ProTools|24 Mix
Digidesign Universal Slave Driver
Electrix EQ Killer kill box
Electrix Filter Factory filter
Electrix Mo-FX effects unit
Empirical Labs Distressor
E-mu Audity2000 synth
E-mu E4 Ultra sampler
Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer
IK Multimedia Sampletank soft sampler
Korg MicroKorg synth/vocoder
Kurzweil K2000R sampler
Line 6 DelayPro, FilterPro effects units
MOTU Mach 5 soft sampler
Native Instruments Absynth, B4, Battery, Pro-52 soft synths
Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro FireWire hard drives
Roland JP-8000 synth
Roland SDE-1000 delay
Roland SRV-2000 reverb
Roland V-Synth
Sherman Filterbank
Spectrasonics Atmosphere, Stylus soft synths
Tannoy 800A monitors
TC Electronic FireworX effects processor
UREI 1176LN compressor
Vintech Audio X73 preamp/EQ
Waldorf MicrowaveXT synth
Yamaha AN1X, FS1R synths
Yamaha O2R digital console
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
