He listened to everything totally flat for the longest time, and at first I was going, ‘Come on, EQ it a little.’ But then he’d say, ‘Okay, let’s try moving the mic a little bit over this way,’ and we would move it, and it would make so much of a difference. I think it was really a good thing to do because sometimes you put a mic up and start EQ’ing stuff right away to make it sound better. You can’t polish a turd, so we really concentrated on getting the drum tuned right and made sure it sounded good without any mics before we put a mic on it. Hugh’s approach to recording is that a sound really starts at the source. “At the beginning of the project it was mostly Hugh, and we were consulting with each other to make sure we were consistent with the other albums and that we were getting good sounds. Ralston also considers producer Hugh Padgham’s involvement in the initial sessions invaluable. On this album we really took the time to refine the songs, and we concentrated on a small number of songs so they could have our attention, which I think will benefit the album in the long run.” Transistor lacked focus, which is a lesson we learned for this album. It was a little hectic, and I think maybe we should have refined it a little. We wrote and recorded 30 songs in three months, so it was every day, all day-a lot of work. “We came up with all these songs, and everyone had a little bit of affection for every song, so we didn’t want to cut out any of them. “After the Blue Album I think we felt invincible,” Ralston admits. There was another tour, and then it came time to record again. “And it turned out to be four years!”ģ11, or what they call “the Blue Album,” followed. “They said, ‘We just need you to finish this tour, it’s only a couple of months,'” Ralston recalls. Ralston and the group then lost track of each other until the band parted ways with their live sound engineer and called Ralston to bail them out again. But they had done everything to a click, and Chad is pretty much a rhythm machine, so we came in and knocked it out, and it turned out all right.” So we did the drums last on that record, which is kinda weird. “They had already done all the music-all the guitars, vocals, percussion, everything-and then they wanted to redo the drums. “They had a whole bunch of tracks on ADAT, so we had to take all the ADATs and lock them to a tape,” Ralston explains. They had had a falling out with producer Eddy Offord and wanted to know if Ralston would finish the record with them. Back at the helm was Scotch Ralston, whom they had met as an assistant engineer on their Capricorn debut, Music.Īs the “young ‘uns” of the studio corps, 311 members and Ralston had bonded, so they called him up out of the blue in ’93 during the recording of Grassroots. They brought in their equipment and created a stable comfort zone in which to rehearse and then record. In June 1998, 311 leased the building that housed L.A.’s Kendun Recorders in the ’70s.
Time really gave us perspective, and we were able to make the right judgments.” “With this album it was more like, ‘Make a song, go away from it for two months, come back to it, see how you like it, something’s not right so change the chorus, or add a part, or get rid of the song altogether.’ We tried not to force anything with the attitude of, ‘Oh, we can make this song great.’ If we weren’t feeling it, we didn’t even mess with it. “On our last record, Transistor, we would make a song, learn it, record it, and it was on the record,” Sexton says. According to 311’s drummer Chad Sexton, time had been the missing piece of their musical puzzle, made particularly evident by the recording experience of their current project, Soundsystem. Sometimes time is short due to budget, and other times it’s because the band gets caught up in the merry-go-round of needing to be on the road to promote an album, which shortchanges them when another project comes due. Time should not be a luxury in the recording process, yet so often it is.
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