Deftones bring it back to basics
DEFTONES / Diamond Eyes
(Reprise)
Keep it simple,
play from the heart, and at all costs make it heavy. That about sums up what veteran
alterna-slammers Deftones had in mind when they got down to creating their Diamond
Eyes album just out on Reprise. While
the band has rarely failed to elevate their brave brand of rifftastic
bronto-beat to spacy new heights, Diamond Eyes brings the sound –– and the song –– right on
down to earth.
Recorded by Grammy-winning producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters,
Marilyn Manson, Velvet Revolver, Rye Coalition) at Burbank’s The Pass
studio, the new album’s game plan was to get back to keeping things real,
albeit in Deftones’ singularly surrealistic way.
“I really wanted this record to have a punchier,
it’s-a-little-more-about-the-riff type sound, and less about the ambience,”
says Raskulinecz. “I wanted it to be dense and thick and really heavy. And I wanted to create the space and
atmosphere through Chino Moreno’s vocals, instead of having the music and the vocals be like that, which is a pattern they
had fallen into with their last couple of albums.”
The
band had been forced to scrap previous sessions done with bass player Chi
Cheng, who was involved in an auto accident last year and is now
temporarily out of the picture; old friend Sergio Vega filled in on bass
for Diamond Eyes. Nevertheless,
going into the recording of the album, the band was “incredibly amped,”
says drummer Abe Cunningham, who notes that prior to recording, “We had no
concept whatsoever. It was all about going into it with great mikes and
great Neves and all that good stuff.”
The band underwent intensive pre-production rehearsals/writing
sessions with Raskulinecz, who served much like a film director in shaping
the band’s new songs. Under his strict aegis, the band put together nine of
the album’s11 songs in the first week of warmup at The Alley in North
Hollywood.
“We wrote it in the rehearsal space, and those guys just played,” he says. “I wanted to take it back to the
basics, and part of doing that was just getting them in the room together
and sweating and getting close and really tight. When they set up in the
room, they had all their amps and other gear spread really far apart, like
they were out on a big stage, and I made them push all their amps as close
as they could to the drums. I wanted everybody to be standing really close
together –– I wanted ‘em to be a band, you know, and it totally worked.”
By the time the band did get into the studio, they were well
prepared, and rehearsed, having played every single day in that rehearsal
room from noon to six.
“When it came time to start recording,” says Cunningham, “we were
ready to go. It was a breeze, and a joy. We hadn’t been that prepared in 15
years.”
The band and producer chose The Pass for its famed and rather
peculiar combination of supertight and ultra-huge acoustical properties.
“There are two studios in the building, and the room we were in is
an older, ’70s kind of room, with a big control room,” says Raskulinecz.
“The tracking room has a very high ceiling, and it’s kind of rectangular,
but it starts to twist at one side and almost turns into a triangle. It’s a
tough room to work in, because it’s really dead.”
Even so, that sonic tautness was exactly what Raskulinecz thought
Deftones needed.
“I knew by the time we mixed this album that it wasn’t gonna be
about how big the drum room was, it’d be about how tight and punchy the
drums sound,” he says. “It’s hard to get that in a big room, because you
get that sound in all your mikes, too; you can turn it off but it’s still
gonna be in the overheads, it’s still gonna be there every time you hit the
snare.”
Utilyzing the studio’s Neve 8078 board, Raskulinecz opted to go
all-analog front-end, with old tube mikes and Neve mike pre-amps, then
straight into Pro Tools, with no tape involved. The album’s hard-crunching
guitar and bass sounds were entirely grabbed off miked cabinets, with nary
a trace of direct-inject into the board. He used the Neve 8078 for all the
drums input, and did all the guitars with Neve 1073s. While he favors a
pure analog stream into those old Neve boards, for effects at the mixing
stage Raskulinecz favored a wide range of digital tools for EQ, delay/reverb,
compression and other enhancements. (The album was mixing on an SSL 6000K
console at Paramount studios in Hollywood.)
“I like the Waves SSL G-series channel stripper for combining EQ and
dynamics,” he says. “I like the Renaissance EQs –– they just sound good. You turn the dial and you hear it; it’s
subtle, but it’s kind of aggressive –– if I’m gonna EQ something, I wanna hear it.”
Diamond
Eyes’ paradoxically punchy but
widescreen wizardry is dominated by Raskulinecz’s beloved Echo Farm
effects. “I use it on everything, especially vocals,” he says. “But I
really like the UAD plugins, too, and I think overall they probably sound
the best; I love the SSL stuff, but the UAD stuff is great because they
have a lot of the same versions of the same things.”
For that devilishly tricky process known as compression, Raskulinecz
keeps it cheap and effective: “The DBX 160XT is my favorite compressor. You
can buy them for a hundred bucks apiece on eBay nowadays, and I’ve got like
eight of ‘em that I’ve bought over the years. I’ll use them on everything,
because they’re really fast and they’re really clean.”
Raskulinecz
also owns a number of DBX 160 VU compressor/limiters as well as a
Teletronix LA 2A, and for other simulated tube compression currently likes
the Retro Instruments Gate A Level and Retro Universal Audio 176. “And I
love the Fairchild 660. The record I’m tracking right now, we’re using all
of those compressors just on the drums. [laughs] Yeah, I like to mix it up.”
Mixing it up mikewise
was a way to capture Diamond Eyes’
spectacular instrumental textures as well. For the guitars, Raskulinecz used a Neumann U47
alongside a Shure SM7. “You get the width, depth and clarity with the fat
U47, and it’s just a large diaphragm condenser; then you add the SM7, and
that gives it the guts and the beef and the hair.” For the bass, he used a
Telefunken 251, which, he says, never fails to provide a very full range of
sound.
Yet the guitar and bass sonorities were the product of an odd
hodgepodging together of varied amplifier heads and cabinets alongside
assorted mike combinations. The sole amps employed were those of guitarist
Stefan Carpenter, with Marshall JMP 1 pre-amps.
“This record has a cool sound to it too,” says Cunningham, “because
Stefan is playing a custom ESP eight-string; it’s the first album he’s done
that on, and it really put the bass guitar in a totally different spot,
because the guitar is actually lower than the bass.”
There’s very little “clean” guitar on the album, and most of the
ambience comes from Chino Moreno’s vocals, the clarity of which was ensured
with a Telefunken tube 251. If Moreno wanted to use a hand-held mike,
Raskulinecz and his engineer Paul Fig assembled a U87 with one of those old
radio-broadcast windscreens on it, with a lot of duct tape and a large
piece of foam around it.
And as for the album’s simply spectacular drum sound?
“There were mikes everywhere, just an insane mike setup,” says
Cunningham with a laugh.
“I like to use a lot of
mikes,” says Raskulinecz. “I’m very particular about recording drums.”
Cunningham’s drum-miking arsenal included a Shure Beta 57 on the snare top,
a Neumann KM 84 on the side of the snare, and a Sennheiser 441 on the
bottom of the snare; there was a Sennheiser 602 inside the kick, with an
Adam NF10 speaker on the outside; the toms were captured with AKG 414
condensers. Overheads were Telefunken 251s, and then there were several
room mikes, including a pair of RCA 44 ribbon mikes out in font of the kit,
placed close to the drum but spread wide; old Neumann U47 tube mikes
handled the big, faraway room sound.
The question
is, given the modern recording studio’s tantalizing temptation to conjur enormous heaps of sonic magic, how on earth does a band
keep its eye on the prize? Raskulinecz is convinced that simplicity –– and
the message in the music –– is the key.
“I try to keep it stripped-down the whole time. It’s really easy to
get too dense and go too far with it –– and you know, sometimes we do,
depending on what the song calls for. But it’s really about the song and
not about the overdubs, not about how cool something sounds. It’s about how
great the song is.”
Ultimately, says Cunningham, a band ought to sound like a band.
“The studio is the place where you can get as busy as you want to
get, epecially these days with the infinite amount of tracks you can use
with digital recording tools. But you might shoot yourself in the foot,
too, when it comes to re-creating that live.
“It’s
just that we’re a rock band: it shouldn’t be that difficult. For lack of a
better word, we’re a rock & roll band.”
