Something New Joins the Mix

Something new joins the mix
Calendar Live
November 16, 2002
POP BEAT

Singer-songwriter-producer-arranger and longtime Largo denizen Jon Brion takes his material to Spaceland.

"Hi, I'm Bobby Bare Jr."

Jon Brion has never met the rock musician who's introducing himself at the back bar at Spaceland, but when Bare, who is opening for Brion tonight, asks if he can use a piece of equipment Brion has left on the stage, he treats him like an old friend.

"Anything you want, just grab anything -- guitars, amps," says Brion, who's just finished his sound check at the Silver Lake rock club.

A few hours later, Bare is wrapping up his set, and there's L.A. pop sophisticate Brion on the stage with the singer and his rowdy, rough-hewn Nashville band, roaring through a raucous, ingenious splicing of the Who's "Baba O'Riley" and the Cars' "My Best Friend's Girl."

Obviously, Brion's gift for musical mingling has survived his transition from the Largo, the intimate club across town where his long-running Friday residency regularly attracts illustrious guest partners (Elvis Costello, Michael Stipe, Elliott Smith, et al) and has established the singer as a unique performer.

The Largo shows, Brion says, represent a self-imposed challenge to make the solo singer-songwriter experience something unique and unpredictable. Operating without the net of a set list, he invents songs on the spot and responds to requests. He spins from something avant-garde to a cheesy pop hit, and he supplements his guitar and piano with the sounds of antique Edison cylinder players and music boxes, schoolroom phonographs and electronic loopers that allow him to overdub layers of his playing and singing.

After appearing there with obsessive regularity over six years, Brion has become a magnet for pop aficionados and the focus of the Largo's circle of performers, which includes singer-songwriters Davíd Garza and Grant-Lee Phillips.

But Brion is also a familiar name beyond that circle. He's produced records for such A-list artists as his old friend Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, David Byrne and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau. Brion also enjoys dropping in on friends' recording sessions to add a tambourine part or a guitar lick (among his first jobs after moving to L.A. from Boston 11 years ago was session guitarist).

Tapping his orchestral side, Brion arranged and conducted the strings on the new Tom Petty album, and he's also scored three of director Paul Thomas Anderson's movies, including "Magnolia" (which earned him a Grammy nomination) and the new "Punch-Drunk Love."

It's an exhilarating pace for a pop-preoccupied guy like Brion, but one thing has tended to get lost in the shuffle -- his own music. His one album, "Meaningless," was distributed only through his Web site after Atlantic-affiliated Lava Records dropped him for being too problematic, promotionally speaking (i.e., radio probably won't go near it).

Brion has finally pumped himself up to deal with it.

"I do know I have to slant it more toward my writing and performing," he says. "It isn't balanced right now.... But I don't want people to look at it as the vanity project of a producer. It shouldn't be looked at as having less merit because of these other things I do. I do feel like I'm fighting that a little bit."

Brion, an enthusiastic talker who hops from topic to topic with little prompting, is sipping a Coke as he readies the second week of his residency at Spaceland, which takes place every Wednesday this month. Brion has assembled a three-piece rock band to back him in a loud set of mostly original material, launching himself into a new career phase as he approaches 40.

"I've always found it slightly preposterous, the 'You need to hear my music' thing, and I might not be doing it if it wasn't for a few people I care about going, 'OK, it's beginning to bug me that people don't know what you do.... You have more to offer than the people out there doing it for the wrong reasons.'

"They laid out clear enough cases to why I should do it where it made sense to me. Just doing it for the sake of promoting myself was never enough incentive. But a few people I really respected made me feel like there's some value in this.... It was really touching."

Brion, who has begun production on another Apple album and is also recording material of his own, isn't playing it completely straight at his Spaceland nights. He opened the initial show with a "mini Largo set," and next Wednesday he'll precede the rock with a string quartet playing "distorted Gershwin and Ellington."

It's all part of the Brion imperative: Mix it up.

"That's one of the good things about my career," he says. "For years I was told I really had to do one thing and for years I refused, and now it's panned out that I'm known for doing a bunch of things, so it's worked out OK.

"I think if there's anything useful I do, it's giving evidence that you actually can do what you want with your life."

Jon Brion Emerges from Shadows with Own Rock Band

Jon Brion
By JEFF MILLER

(Spaceland; 250 Capacity; $5)

Presented inhouse. Reviewed Nov. 6, 2002. Also Nov. 13, 20, 27.

Band: Jon Brion, Kevin Augunas, Dan McCarroll, Josh Klinghoffer.

It sometimes seems that Jon Brion's got his foot in just about everything worthwhile in pop art these days. A truncated resume for just the past few months includes composing the often minimalist soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's film "Punch-Drunk Love" (Nonesuch); producing Old 97's singer Rhett Miller's critically acclaimed solo debut, "The Instigator" (Elektra); and conducting the orchestral arrangements on Tom Petty's "The Last DJ" (Warner Bros.). So it should be no surprise that he's decided to take on another new challenge: fronting his own rock band for a series of shows at L.A.'s hipster haven Spaceland. It should also be no surprise that -- as with the rest of his overwhelming slew of projects -- the results are nothing less than fantastic.

That has a lot to do with Brion's anything-goes attitude toward performing, a mindset honed with his often improvisatory ongoing Friday night residency at L.A. club Largo. There, he strings together compositions in front of the audience's eyes, the aural equivalent of watching a world-class painter transform a canvas from a mess of colors to a gorgeous mural.

Spaceland's crowd got a taste of that one-man show early on, as Brion looped drums, keys and guitars to create complete arrangements for two songs. But the show peaked during the full-band set's run-through of "Not Ready Yet," co-written by Brion and the Eels singer E. Dueling guitars from Brion and Josh Klinghoffer (noisily perfect throughout the night) suggested the white-noise squall of the best Pavement and Dinosaur Jr., but Brion sang with melodic purpose that had less in common with those rowdy indie rockers than traditionalist songwriters like Paul Westerberg and Elvis Costello.

It's a beautiful juxtaposition, and Brion revels in it, throwing his body around and attacking his instrument, be it a guitar, piano or sampler, with both fervor and grace. When the band clicked, which happened often, Brion proved that he's not only playing a part in other people's pop art --he's making some of the best of it himself.

Music From Life's Mess

Music from life's mess
Calendar Live
Lynell George
November 17, 2002

Chaos and beauty compete on Brad Mehldau's 'Largo,' an album that defies labels. Is it still jazz? The pianist doesn't think it matters.

As evening crackles to life on Hollywood Boulevard, Brad Mehldau ventures out. Just like old times.

He wandered away from this old, cacophonous neighborhood not so long ago, but as he winds across the Knitting Factory's crowded main stage, he slips right back into it, its rhythm and attitude. California casual, his brick-red shirt untucked, rumpled, his dark hair tousled, the pianist appears ready to retire to a wrap-around porch with a cold beer, just in time to catch the first neon flickering on.

In fact, as if teasing out the illusion, he walks past the piano, reaching instead for two mallets, then hovers over the vibes. Out tumbles a spacey, herky-jerky intro that builds into a tricked-out version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Wave" before drifting into the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son."

Arranged around him are shiny tools for improvisation: two upright basses. Two drum kits. The piano. And, through the evening, a parade of brass and woodwinds. Mehldau is hip to hip with his utility men, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, long the backbone of his top-flight jazz trio.

On this fall night, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Darek "Oles" Oleszkiewicz add another layer of texture and sass to a set of compositions that elude easy descriptors. The band, which changes incarnations throughout the evening, takes its turns through the disparate cuts that make up Mehldau's latest recording, "Largo" -- part valentine, part journal of sonic sketches of his life in Los Angeles in the late '90s. This performance feels more like a no-holds-barred workshop than a prosaic "let's toss the solos around and sail to a close" club set.

Tonight offers a through-the-keyhole glimpse of raw improvisation that just a few hundred people -- musicians, fans, curious bystanders -- are lucky enough to witness. Mehldau and his producer-conductor-compatriot, Jon Brion, are in effect sketching as they go.

Out saunters "Dusty McNugget," a strutting, loose-hipped original that has been getting a fair share of crossover airplay for something from a "jazz album." Angular, thudding with acoustic drum-and-bass and Mehldau's own sly, funkified approach, it all feels buoyed by the spirits of both Thelonious Monk and Frank Zappa. Its humor is intrinsic, and never winking.

Pressing forward, the band disassembles the recognizable -- say, Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" -- or pares "Dear Prudence" down to its chassis.

A gleeful Brion, in turquoise suit coat and bird-nest coif, serves as antic ringmaster, trapezing from role to role. Conductor, sideman, cheerleader, he leaves no perspective untried, whether banging on the vibes as if on water pipes or crouched in a corner for a kid's-eye view.

Horn and woodwind players make their way on and off stage, and Mehldau is letting it all go: "I don't know who they are, but it doesn't matter. They know who they are," he jokes, his face slightly bewildered. About midway through, he scratches his mussed head: "I've never done this thing before. A set list ... I've never had such a big band to introduce," he marvels.

His face is relaxed, alight, as if all of it is quickly sinking in, happening right before his eyes. He's careful not to blink.

In select company

So where is jazz going?" Musicians and critics have been pulling at this for decades. A miffed Thelonious Monk once fired back a response both as direct and elliptical his playing: "I don't know where it's going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens."

The heart of jazz is the rush of what happens in a moment. That is the essence of improvisation, the excitement of pushing forward without signposts. Jazz itself is in a moment of improvisation, struggling with reinvention. As jazz, the marketing category, struggles for footing, Mehldau, at 32, has found his. He's among a small young coterie of straight-ahead jazz musicians -- the Marsalises, Joshua Redman -- who sell records, mount relatively ambitious tours and enjoy some crossover recognition. He has recorded nearly a dozen discs that mix solid original compositions with creatively realized standards. He has an articulate, warm style that is infused as much by classical training as by street chops. His improvisational intuition pushes him toward the murky and uncharted, but he always finds a way back. So what's got some jazz purists' noses bent out of shape?

"Largo" bends expectations about what jazz is. Although Downbeat magazine featured Mehldau on its September cover, heralding his "New Jazz of a New Generation," in the same issue's "The Hotbox" column, the new album didn't rise above "good": " 'Largo' starts with a lovely 'When It Rains,' then, like the rain, starts to sink into the ground," wrote critic John McDonough. Added Jim Macine, "The track-to-track change of dynamics and instruments becomes disjunctive."

But that is just what Mehldau's getting at: that life -- and jazz for that matter -- is as much about mess and chaos as beauty and symmetry. Although "Largo" might appear to be a far-flung departure from the intuitive three-way conversation of his trio, it still feels very much like a direct relation. Yes, he's got his "street creds" in order -- a stint at the New School studying with drummer Jimmy Cobb and pianist Junior Mance; spots on the bill with Redman, Christopher Holliday, Christian McBride -- and endured endless comparisons to Bill Evans (both pianists are white and have been chased by heroin addiction), but Mehldau has long been hinting at this more expansive inclination. His albums have always provided tasteful settings for Porter or Rodgers & Hart tunes, but Radiohead and Nick Drake have been comfortable there as well.

Going the way of his instincts, Mehldau demonstrates that one sound can dovetail into the next, that borders and labels, if not superfluous, are arbitrary.

A life-altering excursion

A week or so after his Knitting Factory Hollywood gig, Mehldau's back in Manhattan. He's installed in a hip hotel, Le Parker Meridien and seems slightly weary, with a post-bronchitis cough. That doesn't stop him from sneaking a cigarette, then cranking up the AC to clear the lingering smoke.

He's been putting the finishing touches on a new album with just the trio. Fresh off a week at the Village Vanguard, playing with Grenadier and Rossy, he'll be heading off to Europe for a month or so of dates. But first he'll duck upstate to spend a few days at home with his wife, Fleurine, and his baby daughter, Eden.

The showcases at Knitting Factory were experimental forays to see just how "Largo's" on-disc setup might play out live. Playing with that revolving lineup in the city that incubated many of the compositions had plenty of resonance for Mehldau. Those sketches marked the end of years of hard living.

"To tell you the truth, I actually went out there [in 1996] and wound up in drug rehab," he says, settling into the suite's stiff-backed love seat. "Before that, everything was in kind of shambles in my life. I stayed in a place for three months in Pasadena and then I figured, 'I'll just stay out here for a while and see how it goes.' "

He played dates with the late Billy Higgins and got to know bassist Darek Oles. He also fell into a regular session with the guys who played "The Tonight Show" gig. But what arrested his attention was a weekly "happening" at a Fairfax district cabaret called Largo, where he met producer Brion.

Brion's Friday-night show became Mehldau's new habit.

He says he was struck as much by Brion's daring as his intuitiveness. "I think the first time I heard him he was playing electric guitar, with a real sort of rock sound. Just all alone [with] all these real sort of sonic things going on. And then he launched into a Cole Porter song, I think it was 'I Love You.' ... And it was startling the way he was sort of reconfiguring it.... Then [he did] some of his own original music too. These beautiful songs that just drew me in on an emotional level. It was kind of an experience that happens less and less as you get older because you get jaded. Where you really feel blown away." Encountering Brion reawakened something old and familiar about his connection to music. Not his classical training or his tour of New York's jazz clubs, but what was beaming out of the radio during his formative years -- Steely Dan; Fleetwood Mac; Earth, Wind & Fire; Frank Zappa; Rush. Album-oriented rock was difficult not to absorb.

He was curious about Brion -- who had produced Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann and Rufus Wainwright -- and where he might go next. But Brion admits he wasn't, at first, so curious about Mehldau.

When Largo's owner-booker, Mark Flanagan, attempted a bit of matchmaking, Brion was more than skeptical. "I think I literally groaned!" he recalls. " 'Oh great, this year's Great Young Jazz Musician.' " But Flanagan slipped him "Art of the Trio, Vol. 2," and Brion floated down Mehldau's interpretation of "Moon River." "It comes to a section where the band drops out and a gear gets shifted. And [Brad's] hand-idea coordination is completely in sync. Here's the sound I've heard in my head but can't play with my hands! I told Flanny, 'You just point me in his direction.' "

Indeed, "Largo" isn't a jazz album in a purist's sense. Like a classic jazz side, it was recorded live with everyone in one room and without overdubs. But, says Brion, "it's got the scope of an artsy-fartsy art-pop record, where each song has its own sound. So it's like, this instrument we're going to mike like they did '50s jazz instruments and this one, well, we're going to give a really cockamamie, modern sound."

Brion's mark is embroidered throughout. "Largo" has a feeling of risk, of lightness, that shouldn't be confused with triteness. It's pretty basic, Brion says. "I despise what has happened to jazz since the late '60s with ... all sorts of stupid strictures on it. For me, jazz is defined by improvisation. Now, if you are always playing the things basically the same way every time except for the shapes you play over the chord changes, then you're not awake, you're not aware, you're not really improvising."

It should, as Monk said, "just happen."

"Originality is a delicate and ethereal thing," says Mehldau. "And usually no one is going to call it when it happens." You just have to be open. "I don't know if I would call Jon Brion a jazz musician or if that really matters. There is something jazz in the spirit of him." In the sense of the unexpected.

"People consider me a wacky, arty rock guy," Brion says. "What people don't realize is the way that I work is based entirely on improvisation. And that I'm beholden to improvisation as a life force. Whether it's a record that people like or not, I can tell you for a fact that it is human beings improvising head and shoulders above what passes for jazz. I don't care what people call it. "

Neither does Mehldau.

He'd rather just play it.

Thinking Outside the Boxes

Thinking Outside the Boxes
Jun 1, 2002 12:00 PM
By Kenneth A. Woods

From the time he was a curious four-year-old banging on a garbage-can drum set to his recent Grammy nomination for the score of the motion picture Magnolia, Jon Brion has been busily exploring the infinite realms of music and sound — and usually pushing the envelope each step of the way. Never one to heed trends, Brion has opted for the narrower path, pursuing only his own muse. Judging by his successes to date — as a session player, a songwriter, a producer, and an engineer — his muse has clearly appreciated the attention.

Brion's iconoclasm, innate musicality, and consuming quest for original sounds, not to mention his wonderfully diverse collection of unusual and vintage instruments, processors, and whatnot, have helped establish him as one of the world's most respected musician-producers. His production credits are as eclectic as any music geek's record collection, yet they read like a listing of recent Rolling Stone covers — Beck, Fiona Apple, Macy Gray, John Hiatt, Robyn Hitchcock, Dave Navarro, Elliott Smith, the Wallflowers, Sam Phillips, and the Crystal Method are but a few of Brion's satisfied clients. When studio veterans such as Bob Rock and T-Bone Burnett hit an overdub wall, they call on Brion, the one-man wrecking crew. His highly regarded session work (guitar, piano, vibraphone, harp, Chamberlain, and Optigan) on Fiona Apple's debut record, Tidal, stands as a prime example of his musical multitasking abilities.

Most recently, Brion's career as a producer has eclipsed his formidable work as a session player and songwriter. Indeed, it was the fruitful working relationship he developed with Apple that propelled him to the rank of producer on her second LP, When the Pawn…. Increasingly, Brion's career trajectory is reminiscent of eclectic musician-producers such as Brian Eno and Todd Rundgren: just as Brion has no shortage of odd instruments and inspiration, he has no shortage of opinions on what makes a recording compelling.

What are you working on now?

I'm finishing the score for Paul [Thomas] Anderson's new movie, Punchdrunk Knuckle Love.

What are you doing to mix things up on the score?

We're doing something tomorrow on an old wire recorder.

Do you think lo-fi or 4-track recordings have value?

I think they're amazing. I've tried to learn from my experiences and other people's experiences of having a great piece of music on 4-track and then going to the studio and killing it or worrying too much. The 4-track cassette recorder performs a wonderful task in getting people to feel less self-conscious. Its purpose is home recording. Everything about it makes you not worry about the recording — which, in truth, is how you need to be when you're in the recording studio. I like to think of what I do as a 4-track approach, but with extra tracks.

The reason I can be such a hard-ass about my choices for mics and preamps is that I don't want to be equalizing when I'm working. I don't ever want to sit and watch a drummer hit a snare drum for an hour. I get massively depressed if I do that. That's one of the great lessons of the 4-track — don't get so hung up on fidelity. People with a 4-track take a Shure SM57, shove it in front of a guitar, and say, “Go.” The immediacy of that is so good, and that's what all recording should have — immediacy.

Is home recording relevant only when you're doing demos or going for a lo-fi thing?

Here we get into the realm of the D word, which is demo. I don't believe in demos. I think they're really bad. What happens is people spend their first-take energy on the 4-track — the one moment when they aren't self-conscious with the song. Then they go into the studio to try and recapture the magic. It's never going to happen. You're not the same person you were the day you recorded the demo on your 4-track. Now you're in a big studio and you're paying for it. It's not the 4-track sitting on your kitchen table. Everything's different now.

Every time you record a song, you should think of it as a version of the song. If you're dissatisfied when you're done, try doing another version — but remember to take a different approach. After all, you were already dissatisfied with the song.

What are the key benefits of digital recording in the personal studio?

The beauty of digital is that instead of wasting that wonderful moment when you're first messing around with something, you can capture that first-take magic with the same sort of immediacy as with the 4-track and with the same ease of operation, but with better fidelity. That unself-consciousness is the main thing I try to capture on recordings. Always keep things rolling. Try to get the moments when someone stumbles onto something.

Of course, digital is unbeatable for editing. There are times when I choose Pro Tools simply because of noise-floor issues, especially with ballads. I usually run Pro Tools in tandem with my analog setup.

What do you think are the most frustrating things about recording at home, and how can we avoid them?

The most frustrating thing is that computers are so powerful that they set up unreasonable expectations. Because they can do so much so fast, it makes you think you can just go and go. But crashes are virtually inevitable. You get a large number of tracks in the computer, and then it just goes kablooey. It's a number of tracks you could never expect to record onto an analog machine. Before digital I would never have kept all seven passes of the same guitar part. Now I'm asking my digital recorder to do things I never would have expected from an analog machine. Then you run around the room cursing the computer when it crashes. You can easily avoid all that stuff by remembering it's your job to be a good musician still. Don't get caught up doing endless permutations of parts.

How did you learn to operate your personal-studio equipment, and how long did it take?

I'm still learning Pro Tools. I'm not very good with computers. When I'm working on real projects, I have somebody do all that stuff for me.

You're between personal studios right now. What are you looking for in a personal-studio location?

A gigantic room is what I want. I have a lot of bizarro drum sets and keyboards that I'd like to be able to have set up all the time. That way I can easily play an instrument without any setup, and I can pull microphones back and get the air around things. I'd like to have six upright pianos around. You can rent a truck on a weekend and pick up four or five amazing pianos — they're in the paper for free every week. For example, you could have one with an old-fashioned John Cage treatment, another with the hammers cut off and replaced with something else, another that's detuned honky-tonk style, or whatever. You could have endless great keyboard sounds on your records that nobody has heard before. I guess what I want is a laboratory.

What advice would you give to someone who is building a personal studio?

Buy one microphone that you really like. Just buy one really good mic and use it on everything: drums, acoustic guitar, vocals. Also, go to music stores and buy the stuff that nobody else wants. I go in and say, “Where's your junk?” Often you're better off buying a cowbell at a thrift store — and having a box of that kind of stuff — than you are buying an expensive piece of gear. I have a pile of cheap snare drums [see Fig. 1]. It's also great to have, like, ten tambourines when you're working on a track: one might hide behind things better; another might do a better job of poking through tracks that are really full; yet another might blend in just right and sound like it's part of the drum kit — you don't even sense it as a tambourine.

I also think comfort is important in a personal studio. The studio should be like you. If you like a big unholy mess, then let it be that. If you want good sounds, there's no faster way than recording in your bathroom. Every bathroom has a different sound. Even if you have a tiny practice amp in your bathroom, it's going to sound great. People need to get back into recording the molecules around a sound, the air. There's so much distinctiveness there.

Also, when you're recording at home, don't get hung up on what the standard of tone is. I think that notion should be abandoned. Even if you spend days, you won't get as good a tone as what a great studio can. So don't waste your time tweaking to get “record-quality” sounds. If you sit down with a song and spend an hour on a guitar sound, your brain will be gone. Just get a quick, accurate version of the song. If you're going to tweak the tone, it should be for fun — to create original sounds. Why spend all day equalizing to get a B+ sound when you can just move on and get an A+ performance instead? There's a really clear hierarchy for me: first is the material, second is the performance, and last are things like sonics. It's great to have an A+ sound, but that's always secondary to the song and performance.

What are some of your secret weapons? Do you try to avoid doing the same things twice?

My secret weapons are secret, and I try not to use them all of the time so they won't be a crutch. [Laughs.] My secret weapons were developed by not doing the same thing all the time — and by remembering that that principle works best every time.

So I guess you always do the same thing.

Yeah — I always try something different. [Laughs.] Now it's not a secret.

What's the most amazing technique you have learned in the studio?

I think it's probably understanding the psychological environment that's important to making good music. As a session player, I've been able to examine a lot of producers' techniques, and I've experienced what it feels like to be told certain things. I've learned a lot about how to be in the right place mentally to record. The best tricks are more about attitude.

As far as mixing goes, I've watched Bob Clear-mountain mix, and you think he's going to have all these secret boxes. But in fact, there aren't any. He sits with the vocal twice as loud as the rest of the mix and listens to the song for hours. Each fader moves imperceptibly. By the fourth hour, everything sounds amazing — and he's been using only the faders. The real secret of the people who make great records is that they know when to stop and not worry about things.

What is the most important piece of gear you own, and why?

Me. Whatever the hell it is that makes me me and makes me want to find new things. I didn't realize that until I was telling someone that my best asset was my collection of vintage gear, and the guy said, “No, dummy, you are.” It seems like a really obvious, dumb thing, but the real solution is realizing that everything you have is your palette. It's all important: your good mic, your bad mic — anything that makes a sound is potentially important. The various dishes and silverware from this room are just as vital as the most beautiful snare drum, because things are always changing — it's a new song and a new day. Things are constantly morphing. The real job at hand is to ride with it.

What pieces of your gear get the most use?

My MGM Church Cinemikes [see Fig. 2] and probably my pump organ or Chamberlain. My Dictaphone is big, too, because it gets used so much in my day-to-day life, which spills over into the studio. It's with me every step of the way, from the core idea of a new song to an interesting sound I hear to being an instrument that I play while singing into it and applying the speed control as an octave device. I've used it to make basic tracks that I then lay down on my multitrack machine. I do so many things with my Dictaphone.

What do you think of some of the new digital products such as modeling amps and vintage plug-ins?

The good thing is they're inexpensive, and they put a ton of tones in more people's hands than before. That's great. They open people up to playing with a variety of tones when recording. That's great, too. But when people buy a new product with a choice of 99 sounds, they spend the first night going through all 99 sounds. Then they pick a couple they like, and that's basically what they use the rest of the time, because the other sounds aren't actually that different.

In every modeling box, there's a device that creates distortion, and it has its own “grain” or window of fidelity. The unit may claim to have every sound imaginable, but it's still all those sounds within that grain. The fact is you always get a more individualized sound from boxes devoted to a single function. So if you've already used a certain fuzz box on a song, plug in a different fuzz. Now your song has two entirely different grains of distortion, which gives that much more tonal “life force” to the track.

Another trick is to combine your modeling boxes with other effects. One of my favorite sounds comes from patching a factory preset on my Line 6 Echo Pro delay modeler through this little Ibanez FZ7 fuzz box. [For more on the Echo Pro, see the review on p. 146.] There's a preset on the Echo Pro that's delay with a chorus [Digital Delay w/Mod], and when you put it through this cheap little Ibanez fuzz box, you get this great sound from the fuzz being driven like crazy. There's all this different information from the delay time moving and the chorus. You get the sickest, meanest fuzz sound out of it.

Another tip is to run your Line 6 Pod through an old cassette deck to keep it from sounding like a glorified Rockman. You'll turn it into a more important piece of a much more complex sound.

You can take the same approach with samples. Instead of using samples of vintage instruments, why not take a woodwind sample or something with some complex harmonics, run it through a fuzz box and then into a guitar amplifier, mic it from a few feet back, and compress it so you can hear a little bit of the room? Then you have something with complex harmonics making the fuzz box go crazy. It can't handle how complex the initial tone is, so it starts spitting out weird stuff, and that's going to an amp and getting colored by the tubes, then that's getting pumped into a room and it's moving molecules, and you're recording the reflections of actual atoms moving. With compression you can decide how much of the information slapping around the room you want.

What other tips do you have for overcoming the limitations of plug-ins and presets?

Don't always use the plug-ins. Run out of your I/O and into some hardware. Most people think their Neve, LA2A, or whatever plug-ins sound great. But most of these people have never even seen a real Neve, let alone listened to one. Stop expecting plug-ins to sound as good as the devices they are simulating and respect them for the good sounds that they do make. Mix it up. Go to the local used-instrument music store, spend a hundred dollars on some weird effects pedals, and experiment with those as your outboard effects. I'm more interested in acoustic ambience devices and making use of acoustic environments the way engineers did in the old days. Joe Meek used to have a speaker with a fan in front of it and a mic on the other side.

Here's something else you can try: I heard that when Trent Reznor starts a project, he makes a list of things you're supposed to do, such as eighth-note tambourine on the chorus and chorus bigger than verse. The list gets posted in the studio, and you're not allowed to do any of those things. That's a great way of working.

Do all the different recording mediums and techniques somehow complement one another and influence the material or the artist?

Definitely. I use different mediums a lot to consciously color what I'm working on. A specific medium can force everyone in the environment to work differently, especially the players in the room. Pro Tools, for example, makes people play a certain way. You stare at the screen and you know that you can play ten tracks of overdubs, and someone will comp it together when you leave.

People playing live together results in something entirely different. Tell everybody, “Okay, we're going live,” and see what happens. I find that people perform really well live to two tracks. It gives you some of what we had with bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

We need more communal music making, human beings responding to each other. Now there's the overdub, and it has become massively powerful with digital. Recording as an art form is about using all these different mediums as a palette, not an instruction manual. Potentially, everything you own is the perfect thing for the job. No one piece of gear, technique, or scenario is any more important or useful than another. In fact, your most prized piece of gear or your best friend's secret weapon can often be the wrong thing for a given song.

Kenneth A. Woods is a writer, producer, and musician living in Los Angeles. He is working on a book titled Rock and Roll Is Dead.