Have you’ve ever thought of picking up some old electronics manuals and learn to repair some of your equipment yourself?

Yeah, I’ve thought about it. But I also thought about getting burned and breathing in lead fumes. I’m a terrible, dismal, pathetic electrician. I don’t know anything - I can barely solder together a guitar cable. It’s really a bad situation for what I do. I have all this old equipment and whenever it breaks I have to take it to get repaired. I mean one of these days I’ll take an electronics class and figure out what’s going on, but I’m hopeless until then.

“Sometimes the less stuff you have to fuck with is better.”

What piece of outboard gear can’t you live without?

This has changed just recently. It used to be this little pre-amp I have called the Newcomb Pathfinder, but I don’t think it’s the Pathfinder anymore. I’m starting to think it’s my board. It’s an Allen and Heath, The Mix Wizard. It’s just this 16-channel board. It’s actually the Allen and Heath equivalent of the Mackie 1604, but it does some really weird stuff that I’m really, really digging a lot. It does stuff that I haven’t been able to hear on anything else. I mean its just this little portable board that’s built to do anything you ask it to do. It’s really awesome. The EQ section is so fun. One of my favorite things to do I got into on the last record: The EQ overlaps so much - there’s two midsweeps and they overlap between 500Hz and 1K so you can zero in on things in that range and boost them like 30dB and overload the channel. It’s just this ridiculously gritty, awful, brittle sound. It’s really fun. And I like to take the pad off the channel, just totally drive it so it’s red, then white. Then you can put an effect on that and place it way down in the mix so that’s it’s just barely there. The Allen and Heath has all these cheesy effects built into it and you can’t control any of the parameters. It’s like having a guitar with built-in effects. It’s like “Cathedral” and you don’t get to adjust the amount, or the time of decay, or the brightness or darkness. It’s just “Cathedral”. That’s all you get.

There’s only one “Cathedral” sound and that’s what you’re getting?

Exactly! That’s kind of cool though. Sometimes the less stuff you have to fuck with is better.

In “Title Track”, in the beginning of the song, there is a huge level change. Is that just a level change?

Not at all. The first half of the song we recorded bass, drums, and guitar all together live in a room into one microphone and then we doubled that same performance. Ben went back and added his guitar and vocal, and then we just stopped at that point in the song. Then I had Ben go and play the drums. We did that to click track, basically the entire album was done to click track. So you have those 2 tracks and then it opens up, and it’s all on the tape like that. We ended up mixing that song a lot. I mixed a version of the full song and then I went back and mixed the first half of the song and then mixed the second half of the song, individually. Then when Tony [Lash] mastered it we slapped the two together and then Tony dumped down the beginning a little and narrowed the stereo image a bit to make it more drastic.

On “The Employment Pages” it sounds like you used reverb on Ben’s vocals. Was it one basic reverb or a bunch of them?

There’s really no...

I mean did the “Cathedral” make an appearance on this album?

Anytime there’s a reverb sound on this record that is ridiculously bombastic it’s the “Cathedral”. I mean BOOM! But there’s really no artificial reverb on the record, it’s all just room sounds. The vocal on “Employment Pages” and all the delay on Ben’s vocals is from my little analog delay pedal, that and a little digital delay pedal I have. Ben got really into the slap-delay on his voice for this record, and there would be times where I wouldn’t want to use it. But Ben would get a little defensive and say, “No! I want it there.” So with that song, I ran his delayed vocal to my guitar amp and put a mic at the other end of the house and sent that back to another channel in the board and compressed it to shit.

On “405” there’s a pulsating tone that travels throughout the song. Is that a phone tone, a keyboard sample?

That’s Dr. Sample. Man, Dr. Sample is the key.

Is that one with like 24 second sampling time without a
memory card?

It’s this little black box with orange buttons. Boss makes it and it costs 300 bucks. It runs on batteries, on AC, it’s got RCA ins and outs. It’s got 1/4” in and 1/8” out.

Do you play with the waveform buttons?

Oh yeah. That machine is destined to be a piece of equipment like the Roland Space Echo is today. It’s kind of weird and twitchy, but it’s so easy to use and it does a specific thing and it does that thing so well. It’s great.

How do you usually pull samples? Do you mic things? Do you take them from CDs?

On “405” that pulse is actually a sample off a little Yamaha keyboard that I have. I distorted it into Dr. Sample, and then it does that repeat thing. So that was a quarter note and then I have a quarter note delay and then I had to manually line it up to the click track. We’ve been pulling samples from stuff we’ve recorded. Like the drum loop in “For What Reason” was from a different part of that song and just tweaked like crazy.