Morgan Geist on producing "Palace Life" and "The Shore"

Sep 3, 2008 7:01 PM Tony Ware (Writer)

Based in the cleanly produced New York boogie, but equally steeped in Detroit’s melancholy futurism and Chicago’s raw musicality, Jersey-born DJ/producer Morgan Geist works hard to make lemonade out of limitations—releasing tracks that are sweet, zesty and a touch acidic, but always refreshing. “I don’t have rare gear, except for an OSC Oscar, and I only got that working recently,” reveals Geist, also known for his dubby robofunk as half of Metro Area. “For years it was just crap, common gear, used creatively and carefully. I think my approach is just to have a quality song and to never use studio tricks to cover up a lack in the writing or production.” Geist manages to craft always busy yet uncluttered arrangements through an old version of Digital Performer running on a Mac G4, a “mirror-door, wind-tunnel disaster” to which he gives no thanks. Here Geist talks about breathing life into two tracks scheduled for October 6 release on Double Night Time (Environ), his first solo album in a decade and a conceptual work of pure electronic composition.

“Palace Life”
“I think ‘Palace Life’ was definitely toying around with some of the constraints of the past,” Geist admits. “I used a preset digital drum machine for a lot of the rhythm—despite how weak-sounding, cheap and toylike it was, the patterns had a lot of groove and feeling. I feel like it’s important to find the strengths of less used (even lame!) instruments like preset digital drum machines, which are incredibly un-trendy. The certainly aren’t like 808s, which are akin to vintage Ferraris. The machine I was using is more like the discarded Datsun rusting in the junkyard.

“The synths and moods were definitely inspired by a lot of the early ’80s naïve Italodisco I own. I think putting the 303 sound against these un-trendy sounds was very Italo, too. You’d hear machines being used in these old records that later became legendary—808, 303, Prophet-5—but they aren’t being used in a fetishistic way. They are just what the musicians had, or what was in the studio. I love that. The 303 isn’t doing ‘acid’; it’s just a bass line machine. Actually, I think I was using a monosynth, maybe an old Studio Electronics ATC-1. Very cool.

“I think the main update to the original inspirations, besides my writing the song, is just good sonics—Italodisco is infamously badly produced, often in a fascinating way, but bad nonetheless. Also: tightness in the groove. A lot of the limitations inherent in old studio technology were in the timing. There were so many great ’80s tracks ruined by drifting or badly synced drum machines. With a computer, you can shift around whole tracks to get the timing tight. I spend a lot of time doing this and I think it’s very important, even with soft-synths and virtual studios kids use today that supposedly have sample-accurate timing. Sample-accurate timing doesn’t make it good. You have to play with the timing.”

“The Shore”
For this track, featuring Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan as the only “organic” component, Geist isn’t as interested in talking about what went into the track so much as what stayed in it. He believes he used a Neumann U 47 mic and ran it through either a Trident Fleximix console or Great River preamp to capture the lead vocal, which he kept as the focus. While dancing his arrangement in a nonlinear fashion around it, however, Geist found himself attuned to an atypical frequency.

“On ‘The Shore,’ I used a scratch sound for the chords,” Geist notes. “It was some free soft-synth, which I never use, but I was just writing tracks using placeholder sounds, the worst sounds possible. I do that sometimes because I figure if the song stands up with awful scratch sounds, it’ll sound great as a final product with careful programming, sound design and production. So, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the crap placeholder sound out of my head when producing the final version of ‘The Shore.’ Nothing sounded right. So I just threw up my hands and used it. As someone who detests most software synths and preset sounds, I thought it was shameful, but I was happy to have the objectivity to realize it was correct for the song. It was hard to put my beliefs aside, though, and I think I even ran it through an expensive, vintage Trident preamp just to make myself feel better! There’s lots of distortion in the EQs—not an ideal design, but nice-sounding. Better than the broken Mackie I used for a lot of my career.”

Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus

Want to use this article? Click here for options!