Recording Glass Animals ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’

LOVE IT

Dave Bayley produced most of the band’s previous three albums himself, with occasional help from star producer Paul Epworth (who in 2013 discovered the band and signed it to his Wolf Tone label) and from John Bettis, who co-produced the band’s second album, How to Be a Human Being (2016). Bayley is sole producer on ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’, and also has credits for several instruments, programming, engineering and string arrangement.

With three of the four band members playing synths, the multi-genre music of Glass Animals has always been dominated by electronic sounds, which in the case ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’ reflects the futuristic side of Bayley’s retro-futuristic vision. For the retro side they called in the services of Matt Wiggins, who came up as Epworth’s engineer, and has engineering credits on the band’s first album, ‘Zaba’ (2014) and engineering and mixing credits on ‘How to Be a Human Being’.

“Dave contacted me to work on the new album as an engineer,” remembers Wiggins. “He ran me through the premise of the record – the sounds that he was chasing and the references they had in mind. They wanted the drum sounds and some of the guitar sounds to be quite big, which is not something they’ve done a lot of in the past. They wanted big phasing effects around the guitars, and a lot of spring reverbs. So lots of nods to the past, while the record obviously also had to sound very modern at the same time.

“They’d been demoing and recording bits at their studio in East London, which they had rented for over a year and filled with their own equipment. They’d obviously invested some ‘Heat Waves’ money, which makes a lot of sense, because then you’ve got that gear forever.  It’s an investment in your craft. It was a lovely, lovely studio, and they had some real choice bits of gear. I ended up recording guitars, drums, bass, and some keyboards there and also strings at RAK Studios in central London.”

STUDIO SETUP

The London studio in which Glass Animals were working deserves some elaboration. They rented the space from MJQ, which mostly deals in studio sales and rentals and equipment sales (the company has the original Beatles Abbey Road console The EMI TG 12345 MkI for sale, at the time of writing this story). The luxurious studio shell has a large main space of 62sqm, and an impressive list price of £4500+VAT (about A$10k) per month. According to Wiggins, both the space and the equipment that Glass Animals fitted it with were amazing.

“They were working in what’s the most premium dry room I know of in London. It really is entirely empty, so they brought the furniture as well, including the orange sofas. It’s well-insulated, with lovely flooring, aircon insulation, a shower and a kitchen. The studio spaces were designed by an acoustician, I think Andy Munro. There’s a great control room, and a live room with a window, in which we recorded the drums. The kit was on the red rug by the Selmer amp. There was also a small foyer with two chairs, which we used to reamp the kick and the snare for some songs.

“Gear-wise they had ATC SCM50ASL monitors with two SCS70 subs underneath, which are awesome, and Neumann KH310A nearfields, which we did not use. They had two or three UAD Apollo interfaces going into Pro Tools. They are massive Ableton heads, but we decided to record what I did in Pro Tools. All their programming/production bits were done by them in Ableton, because that’s where they feel most comfortable.

“They have this lovely 16-channel Rupert Neve Designs 5088 desk, that we recorded a lot of stuff through, which sounded incredible. You could have it really clean, or use the Silk function to dial in some transformer grit. A lot of the time you just have a rack of preamps going straight into Pro Tools, which is great if you want different flavours, but there’s something to be said about having everything in front of you, with mic gain at the top, EQ, auxes, and a fader, so you can drive into it. The convenience of that is hard to beat. It was also cool because I did not use any plugins, which meant that all effects were on auxes on the board, which could be spring reverbs on the snare, or bit of chorus or phasing, and I just needed to turn up the sends. We printed all effects at the same time as the mics, separately.

“The band built up a huge collection of gear over the years, so the studio was overflowing. There were racks of outboard, that included some gear made by Ed (Irwin-Singer, keyboardist/bassist), who is also a talented technician, including some great preamps modelled on early EMI units. I brought my Retro Instruments valve channel strip, which is based on a Pultec and a Fairchild compressor. There was a lot of driving preamps!  There were two 1176 compressors, and Dave had a Pulse Techniques EQP-1A, that sounded really great, and they had tons of pedals. They also had a great collection of microphones,  and we rented some in as well. Everything in the studio was set up, so we didn’t need to stop to plug anything in. It was a really fun and creative way of working.”

CREATING THE PALETTE

Wiggins recalls that the demos were in good shape when he came in. “These guys have been producing a long time, and with technology and the price/quality of equipment now, the line between demo and a full recording can be very thin or non-existent. Maybe due to the speed of getting the initial ideas down there was less thought about which guitar or pedal or drum to use, but for me that’s where the interesting and unique things happen. Then when you are hyper-focusing on the technical during the recording process, you can spend time trying to beat the original recording, and get that last 10% out of the idea.

“Dave wrote the project in LA and then got back together with the guys and they had thrashed out ideas and recorded the material. When I started, the ideas were pretty fleshed out. They’d honed the arrangements, and David had started to write lyrics and melodies. Everything was in a good place. After we talked about the sounds they wanted me to record, and the references they had, we figured out what gear we might need to achieve that.

“The references were quite varied. They included Cluster, Daft Punk, Suicide, Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, Four Tops, Trevor Horn, or more general references like Motown, and many more. The references could also be more modern. They often were quite specific, like they’d want to reference a specific hi-hat sound or snare sound or guitar sound in a particular recording. It varied per song. It could be the space on an instrument, or the frequency content, whether it’s bright or dark. Or a specific digital reverb. It was a case of listening to the references and figuring out where the main character was coming from, and if we could get a bit of that in there, and how to do that. So trying different instruments and mics and mic positions.

“I did a lot of research into these references, what equipment they would have had available at the time, why it sound like it does, what could we learn, and how to give it the flavour they wanted. A Trevor Horn production from the ’80s has a very specific sound, so I looked at what gear they had in Sarm Studios in the ’80s, and flicked through the Lexicon reverbs and used my ears, to see how we could match that sound. Once again, the aim was not to exactly replicate these references. They’d be using their own drums, guitars, amps and playing styles, so they made it their own. If necessary, they’d buy or rent extra bits, all while making sure the sounds are actually suitable for the song, and that the production can stand up as a modern record.”

MOVE QUICK DON’T BREAK THINGS

When it came to the actual recordings, band and engineer “moved pretty quickly”, says Wiggins. “They had honed their parts during pre-production, jamming as a band, and obviously they are such great players that we could focus on the sound and the production, rather than the performances, because they can play their parts immaculately. I recorded everyone individually. The stage at which they played together in the room as a band had been done.

“They would play along to some demo keyboard stems and programmed drums and a scratch vocal in Pro Tools. We went through and replaced things methodically, starting with Joe Seawards’ drums and percussion. Then Dave or Drew played guitar and Ed would play the bass or the Moog, and a few keyboards, though we did not spend a lot of time on recording keyboards. With each instrument in each song we decided on an overall sonic palette.

“With regards to drums, the room was not big, and this worked fine because we did not want big rock room drums. They were after quite a tight sound, and if the sound needed to be wet, we’d add spring or plate reverb. The room size worked out great, so it was a matter of tailoring the kit, the tuning, the mics and mic positions, and the outboard to suit the song. We really focused a lot on the drum sounds.

“Dave and Joe would work on the kit, choosing snares and tuning them up. We changed hi-hats, and tried different microphones. Options included Ed-made mics, like a Neumann U49 clone, and we had a Neumann U47 as well, so we had a choice of overheads between those and some old AKG 414s, as well as some Coles ribbons. When we wanted a chunkier hi-hat sound, we’d use a dynamic over a condenser. We could swap between ribbons, condensers, and dynamics, and change up the positioning.

“We didn’t just use old ribbons, because you’d have less punch than a modern record. It would sound like the ‘50s. So we made sure we had other options, such as a D12 on the kick, as well as an RCA SK50. We often switched snares, and Dave had some old Neumann KM54 pencil valve condensers on them, or modern Soyuz mics, and they all sounded great. A lot of the time, the mics were placed very close. As I said, the live room sounded great, but we chose to use spring reverbs or a delay or a Space Echo.”

STRINGS THEORY

“Finding the combinations of guitar gear that worked for each song was fun. Dave would be changing guitar for each song, whether a brighter Fender Jazzmaster or a wonky jangly Silvertone. He hit on good rhythm sounds and good lead sounds, and particularly the chains of pedals that he used played a big part in shaping the sonic palette of the record. We split the guitar, and the bass, to two amps. I’d have a couple of mics on each amp, usually a dynamic and a ribbon, like a Shure SM57 and a Royer 121. The amps and the pedals were giving us the frequencies and the sonic flavours that we wanted in the production.