In-Session: Miniature Tigers With Bill Racine

April 7th, 2010 by Trenton

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LOWER MANHATTAN: In February, we dropped by engineer/producer Bill Racine’s studio inside Engine Room Audio, where he was finishing mixing Miniature Tigers’ upcoming record, Fortress. Due out in July on Modern Art Records, Fortress was produced by Chris Chu of The Morning Benders. Miniature Tigers’ lead singer Charlie Brand, bass player Alex Gerber and Chu were all in the studio with Racine and took a few minutes to chat with us about the making of the new record.

Until recently, Miniature Tigers were based in Phoenix, but Brand and guitarist Algernon Quashie recently relocated to NYC, and the rest of the band came east to record Fortress.

Admiring Racine’s production/engineering with The Comas and Phantom Planet, among others (Mates of State, Rogue Wave, Hopewell), Miniature Tigers hired him to record and mix the album. They all headed up to Dreamland Studios, near Woodstock, to track basics.

“The space was really incredible,” says Brand of Dreamland. “I’d first heard of it because Beach House mentioned recording there in an interview. It’s a church basically out in the middle of the woods, and they have living quarters so we were able to all stay up there and focus on the music with no distractions.”

Chu had begun pre-production with the band about a month prior to recording. They’d all met through mutual friends/bands and bonded through a mutual appreciation of some recent records.

“For the first time in awhile, there’s a lot of new music that we’re excited about,” says Chu. Brand agrees, adding, “In the past, my influences were always more from older, classic records like the Beach Boys and Beatles. Now, there are bands, like Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective, who are in my opinion making music that’s equally inspiring; albums that sound very different and songwriting that’s on another level.”

These bands also get heavy in the studio, use space, sound, gear, voices, etc. hyper-creatively; play the studio as an instrument. “Sonically, I think the last Grizzly Bear album [Veckatimest] is amazing,” says Brand. “The tones are so big and warm without being too over-produced.”

It’s worth mentioning that Chu worked with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor to co-produce The Morning Benders’ latest, aptly-named record, Big Echo, in epic Wall of Sound style. And that Miniature Tigers are currently touring with The Morning Benders, and will feature another Taylor-co-produced artist, Neon Indian, on the first single off Fortress, “Gold Skull” (due out in May.)

CAPTURING (& HANGING ONTO) THE MAGIC
With ample space and ambiance to capture at Dreamland, Miniature Tigers spread out and played together live in isolated or baffled-off areas to track basics on Fortress, then used the studio’s unique space, gear and instruments to layer in sounds on top of that.

In Bill Racine's studio within Engine Room Audio is (l-r): Miniature Tigers' Charlie Brand, Alex Gerber, producer Chris Chu (of The Morning Benders) and Racine.

Racine describes, “Some songs were going to be bombastic and some were going to be tighter, and we had different spaces available to record drums and guitars so we were able to get different sized sounds. We got really big drum sounds in the main room, which is a huge open A-frame church and very ambient. And in the smaller room, we prepared the drums differently — used a different kit, tuned them differently and did the tea-towel thing.” [That is, placing towels over the drum heads to dampen the sound.]

Everything recorded at Dreamland hit tape. “We recorded in sync, with Pro Tools chasing the tape machine, and pretty much everything went through the API console,” says Racine, “Except for one thing that was sort of a constant on this record — a Neumann U47 being blown up through an old tube pre to an old tube compressor.” Of that technique, Racine notes, “We just got the best sounding mic in the house and totally destroyed it and it sounded amazing. So we put it on everything. That definitely accounts for some of the ambient grit on this record.”

Dreamland’s keys came in big as well, adds Brand. “There was this Mellotron that sounded pretty messed up — you’d hold down a note and it would get progressively worse as you held it. We really liked how that sounded and used it on a couple songs; we also messed around with the [Sequential Circuits] Prophet a bit.”

The group used the space and sonic palette to build out the sound of Fortress. “I think the record really sounds like Dreamland,” Chu sums up. “That’s what I wanted to do going in there, and with every record — to make it sound like it takes place in that world. You take the sound of the room, the board, the gear and instruments in the studio — and filter the songs through that.”

Back at Engine Room, Chu and Racine tag-teamed the project through the mixing process, working through a combination of outboard processing, tape machine and Pro Tools HD. “I’d get it to a point where things are routed, going here and there,” says Racine, “And then dial in the compression, distortion and effects, and so on, and then Chris would jump in and do producer-ly things.”

For his part, Racine describes, “Mixing this record, it was a gradual process away from the board [a Toft Audio ATB console] because we’d captured a lot of magic at Dreamland, and there was a lot we didn’t want to mess with.

“Towards the end of the project, we ended up just using the outboard gear as hardware inserts in Pro Tools, where everything goes through a stereo buss compressor then to tape, then back into Pro Tools. It was a great way to work, really quick and neat — you don’t have to spend half a day just figuring out the routing and what you want to use and where. And on this project, sonically, it worked out really well, since we’d hit tape and used the API and great microphones.”

Look out for Miniature Tigers’ Fortress this July on Modern Art Records, a Phoenix/NYC-based indie label that recently joined Warner Music’s Independent Label Group. And check out Miniature Tigers on tour when they return to NYC and play The Knitting Factory and Mercury Lounge April 21 and 22.