St Vincent Isn’t Perfect

FLYING THE COLOURS 

Congleton clearly isn’t afraid of nailing his colours to the mast, also the case when he discusses his work on the St Vincent album. “We tried very hard to cultivate the sound as much as possible while we were recording, so we had a committed approach,” Congleton explained. “Annie really likes to establish the sounds as we go, and I am a big believer in that as well. Most of the sounds on the album, including the more radical ones, were recorded to 24-track tape exactly as you hear them on the CD.” 

Despite his well-developed sense of aesthetic and strong gear preferences Congleton is, in fact, a reluctant producer. As a teenager growing up in Dallas he developed, “a strong interest in becoming an engineer. Becoming a producer was not my goal. I was fascinated by the way records sound, and by the art of capturing sounds and playing them back. So I made it a goal to learn to record and see whether I could make a living recording people. All I wanted was to have good engineering chops so I could record things properly.” 

Congleton did, however, have a parallel ambition, which was to become a good musician, and spent two years at the University of North Texas studying jazz composition. Soon afterwards, around 1997, he moved to Chicago: “I was 21 and spent some time with Steve Albini, who is a brilliant engineer. He was very helpful to me. After my time in Chicago I returned to Dallas and became a staff engineer at Dallas Soundlab, the biggest studio in Texas at the time, and worked there for two to three years. It was around the time that studios were closing, and that studio also eventually did, so I went freelance. For several years I struggled, recording anything I could, and worked my way up. I bought Elmwood Recording seven years ago. 

“The way I got into producing was by starting to push boundaries and experimenting with sound, and it gradually became clear that people were not satisfied when I just recorded them. Every time I suggested an idea there was a positive response to it, so little by little I thought: ‘Maybe I should get more involved.’ Then people began explicitly asking me to produce them, tell them what to do and give them feedback. From my end, this gave me a satisfaction I didn’t get from just engineering. When I started producing as well as engineering, my career really caught fire.” 

Congleton’s great leap forward into producing took place in 2002, the year The Paper Chase released Hide The Kitchen Knives, their second album and still widely regarded as their magnum opus. Congleton wrote all the material, and also had credits for engineering and mixing, as well as guitar, keyboards, sampling, sequencing and vocals. The combination of noise and chaos, great rhythms and a pop sensibility (and some King Crimson references thrown in for good measure) earned The Paper Chase and Congleton widespread acclaim. His experiences in writing and arranging his own music naturally informed his production efforts, though the man himself holds, “I produced The Paper Chase myself because I could not afford a real producer!” 

DEMO DESIGNS

Annie Clark can afford a producer, and when she and Congleton started work on St Vincent they were aware that, being their fourth album together, there was a risk of falling into a routine. A possibility she and Congleton — kindred spirits when it comes to experimenting and trying new things — were totally averse to. Congleton has the lowdown on how the duo managed to build on their past achievements and reinvent themselves at the same time: “For the previous album, Strange Mercy, she came in with raw ideas, like riffs and melodies, which we then put together in my studio. For the new record we thought it would be best if we didn’t do that, and for her to come into the studio with more complete songs. She wrote a lot of the material while she was on tour with David Byrne, and during a writing vacation in Austin. And, for this reason, we did a lot of pre-production over the phone and Internet; discussing her song ideas, what songs we wanted to work on, what songs we didn’t want to work on, and how the songs we decided to work on could be improved. She recorded the songs very simply; her singing just with an acoustic guitar or a keyboard, and occasionally a drum machine. Basic was the way I wanted it. It was a more traditional pre-production approach.

“Once we felt we had a good batch of songs to work on, Annie came to the studio in two chunks of time, first for three weeks in the spring of 2013, and later, another three weeks after going on tour with David Byrne. We also mixed the album during that last period. The way we worked was for her to record some very basic guitar/vocal demos, and we then had a rhythm section jam over them.

“The rhythm section, which consisted of one of two drummers, Homer Steinweiss or McKenzie Smith, and Bobby Sparks, who played all the bass parts on a Minimoog, would play around with the songs, and Annie and I commented on the things we liked and disliked. We always recorded the drums and bass together, so in effect the rhythm section was recorded live. I recorded a bunch of takes to analogue 24-track tape at 15ips. We then transferred everything to ProTools, because I wanted to be able to easily comp things together until Annie and I had results we were satisfied with. After that, Bobby and the other musicians — keyboardists Daniel Mintseris and Adam Pickrell, and horn player Ralph Carney — overdubbed their parts. Finally, Annie would replace her guitar and her vocals, and after that we mixed everything.” 

FROM GOOD STOCK

Almost all the musicians that played on St Vincent have a distinguished pedigree. Homer Steinweiss is the drummer of The Dap Kings, McKenzie Smith the drummer of the band Midlake, Bobby Sparks a Grammy Award-winning jazz keyboardist and producer, Ralph Carney has a long-standing working relationship with Tom Waits, Daniel Mintseris, who is now the nucleus of Clark’s live band, has played with Marianne Faithfull, Peter Cincotti, and Martha Wainwright, only Adam Pickrell is a relative unknown. 

Congleton went into more detail on what each of them contributed, and how he recorded them: “The drum recordings were kind of disparate, meaning we didn’t record all the drums at once. There never was the same drum kit and never the same recording set-up. But in general I recorded all the drums very minimally, with as few microphones as possible, because we wanted the drums to sound kind of old, and yet modern at the same time. The main drums for the song Huey Newton, played by Homer, were recorded with just one microphone, an RCA 44 ribbon microphone, placed in front of the drums, not in a special place, just pointed at the drums. Towards the end another completely different drum performance comes in. I wanted that song to sound like a Can song, so I recorded it the way I imagined Can would have recorded it.

“In other cases I would have had three or four mics on the drums. I like using an Electro-Voice 868 on the bass drum, which has a lot of low end, and the Beyerdynamic 380 was another bass drum mic I remember using for this record. I would have had an Altec 195 on the snare or a Shure KSM141, while I had an Electro-Voice RE-20 on the snare for the song Birth In Reverse. For the toms I sometimes used an AKG 414 — I like large diaphragm mics on the toms. You’re going to get a lot of cymbal bleed through a mic like that, but I think that actually improves the sound. Beyond that I would occasionally have one mic for the rest of the drums.

“I used the desk mic pres for the drums, and a lot of times I’ll push them to get it to sound dirty, or I run the drums through some insane effect. It could be anything, but it usually was distortion, as you can hear. A lot of stuff on the album is just one microphone that was heavily effected, which always leads to cool results in my opinion. We always printed it like that and didn’t keep the effected and clean sounds separate. As I said, I believe in making decisions. If it sounds good now, it will sound good tomorrow, and if it doesn’t sound good now, then start over.”

STICKING WITH THE NEVE

The mic pres of Congleton’s Neve desk were used on many occasions. The Texan is very content with it, saying, “The desk was built for the BBC, and there’s only one other like it. It was never used by the BBC, instead it ended up in New York, where it was used for Saturday Night Live during the Belushi era [late ’70s]. I’m not clear on where it went before it got to me, but it’s definitely one of my favourite consoles. I don’t like it quite as much as the 80-series, but there’s a price tag for that! My Neve has 33114 preamps, and some 31102s and 31154s. The preamps are very smooth-sounding and have great distortion. The desk sounds really great on guitars. It is also really easy to use, even though there are many things you can’t do with it. For example it has no automation and the bussing is extremely minimal. But none of these things matter because I love the way it sounds.”

Bobby Sparks’ Minimoog served up bass for the album, which Congleton was perfectly happy with: “Those old Minimoogs are incredible and the synth sounds that Bobby came up with usually sounded amazing right away. They are like the Rolls Royces of the Moogs. I have one, and Bobby owns five. Sometimes he’d play it through a pedal to spice up the sound, but for a lot of the time it was simply the Moog. There wasn’t a lot we needed to do to make it sound great. Sometimes it was DI’d, going directly into the desk, sometimes we ran it through an Ampeg B15, in front of which I put a Neumann U47. 

“Daniel [Mintseris] came in for a few days, and laid down quite a few ideas. He’s more of a soft synth guy, and he had zillions of sounds and made suggestions. Annie and I picked the sounds we liked, and then I’d manipulate them quite a bit. The soft synth sounds were often kind of cold and sterile, so I’d warm them up as much as I could, usually by putting them through a Thermionic Culture Vulture, which is one of my favourite pieces of gear. I also often ran Daniel’s sounds through an old Electro-Harmonix Memory Man. There is a lot of Memory Man on the St Vincent record! Adam [Pickrell] came in towards the end of the recording process and played a number of keyboard parts that we treated in similar ways to Daniel’s.”

WINDING DOWN WITH VOCALS

The final part of the recording process involved tracking Clark’s vocals and guitars. Clark’s uncle is Tuck Andress, one of the world’s premier finger-style guitarists, who performs with his wife Patti Cathcart, an extraordinarily accomplished singer. Clark has gone on tour with the duo, eventually opening for them, and strangely, according to Congleton, it wasn’t Andress’ chops that were intimidating for Clark, but instead she developed a degree of self-consciousness and insecurity around her voice. 

“When we first met, I said I thought her first record, Marry Me (2007), was really cool,” said Congleton. “But that she sounded really wound up about her vocals. She said she was petrified of doing vocals. She was so concerned about singing perfectly in pitch that she would lose a lot of other things. I think she has a great voice and from the beginning I tried to bring out something more soulful and looser in the way she sang. With each record we’ve done together you can hear that progression to a point where now she is sounding great and really connecting.

“Doing vocals for this album was a matter of being spontaneous and moving very quickly. We didn’t do any mic or signal chain shootouts. She hates that; it would drive her crazy. So for most of the songs I simply put a Lomo 19A13 tube condenser mic in front of her, which is a mic she likes a lot. For the more rocking songs we used a Shure SM7, which is one of my favourite mics. It’s not fussy. You put it in front of someone and they sound great. I usually used the Neve board mic pres. The distorted vocal sound in Rattlesnake is a special story, because she didn’t really know how to sing that song. She was maybe a bit insecure about it, so I just gave her an SM57, and she sang right into it, holding the mic very close to her mouth. The distortion is from her cupping the microphone and stressing the capsule. It sounds really shitty and was perfect for the song.

“For her guitars we used mostly small cabinets, and I would throw whatever mic I had at hand in front of that, and that then went through the Ampex 351 Tube mic pre, or my Stromberg-Carlson Tube pre/EQ, which was modified by Skip Simmons and has great distortion. Sometimes she’d plug her guitar into a distortion box and that would go straight into the desk, Jimmy Page or Hüsker Dü style. The song Birth in Reverse is almost all DI’d guitar. In general tracking the guitar was a lot of fun, because we were trying to find great guitar tones all the time. She’s an excellent guitar player, and she has so many great ideas that all you have to do is pay attention and look for the stuff that’s great. Again, when we hit on a sound we liked, we would believe in it immediately and just record it.”

GOT THE MIX DOWN

Unsurprisingly, given Congleton and Clark’s predilection for instant commitment and creating final sounds during recording, mixdown of the St Vincent album was for the most part a balancing act. “None of the songs took a left turn during the mix,” said Congleton. “We were already committed to what they were. The only real exception was Digital Witness, which went through a few different versions. We had a more synth-driven version, but we ultimately went with the horn-driven version. It was a very easy record to mix. We knocked all the songs out in just over a week, mixing two songs a day.

“I don’t really have a process when I mix. I don’t start with the bass drum, and then the snare drum, and so on. I can’t do that. Instead I just push all the faders up on the Neve and I work on everything at the same time. I’ll solve problems I hear, and make sure the vocals are sounding right and work everything around them. But I immediately try to make sense of the whole picture. Most of the outboard I used for the St Vincent mixes were simple nuts and bolts things, nothing particularly tricky or fancy. I don’t have compressors on my desk, so I plugged in the GML 8900 on the drum bus, and the RCA BA6 on the Minimoog bass, and my old Collins 26U-1 limiter on Annie’s vocals. I didn’t do much to the guitars. We already had this totally distorted sound, and if I was to EQ or compress that it would have started to sound too harsh. I did use a few plug-ins during the mix, mostly for delays, like the Echofarm. But that was more or less it.

“I’ll mix listening to my Focal Twin6 BE monitors almost exclusively, pretty much around 80-85dB, keeping it low and bringing the mix up now and then to check the low end. While mixing I try not to get too excited by turning things up! Before I used my B&W Matrix 805 speakers, which I still really like, but the Focals are more versatile. I also have some KRK speakers in the lobby next to my studio, and what I do quite a lot is play the mix back via them and listen from my studio. It’s the way many people listen to music, more or less in mono. If it sounds impressive coming from the other room, it gives you a good perception of how somebody else might be hearing it. I’m not a big believer in listening to things on a zillion different stereo systems, though, because it will sound different each time, and I’ll just get more insecure and the mix will get worse. Making the mixes consistent between stereo systems is the job for the mastering engineer.”

St Vincent was mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound in New York, and unusually, for Congleton, he asked for it to be mastered louder. “In general, records are too fucking loud. It’s ridiculous, and it’s stupid. There’s no integrity to bottom end on a lot of today’s records. A lot of hip-hop records are completely distorted. I don’t understand why people feel so insecure about their material that they feel being loud is all that matters. I think the overly loud records of today are like gated reverb in the 1980s. It doesn’t bode well for things standing the test of time. It will sound ridiculous later on and we’re doing music a great disservice by dating these records like that. I’m not working on top 40 records, so luckily I don’t get into these loudness arguments very much, but having said all that, we felt the first master of St Vincent was actually too quiet. It was at the same level as Strange Mercy, and we all agreed that for the tone of the record and what it is trying to accomplish it could be a little brighter and louder. This was one rare instance of louder being better!”