Brian is a master at leaving things to chance and then steering the chaos adeptly. Brian Borcherdt from Holy Fuck handles guitar and Mackie wizardry, Doug MacGregor from Constantines is on drums, and Alex Edkins from METZ plays bass. LIDS are a supergroup of Toronto music royalty. Perfect for what he wanted - and not to mention the pair looked adorable next to each other on my rack. We ended up doubling this with an ultra-compressed baby grand mic'ed with a spaced pair of AEA N8 ribbons, also through the Colour Box pair. Definitely piano - but it existed somewhere between Rhodes and a regular piano. This provided a super unique and hard to place sound. He wanted it to sound real, but not too real, so we ran my Yamaha CP-80 electric grand through the two Colour Box pedals. Co-producer and bassist Adam Pressley wanted to do a piano overdub to replace a sampled piano or some other weird thing he had made. I had borrowed a second Colour Box from The War on Drugs' monitor engineer Laurence Eaves "by accident" during a break from our tour. Very little electric guitar is employed that register is occupied by sawtooth this-and-thats and blown-out vocals. ![]() They are a power trio for sure, but their heft and prowess are derived from heavy synth bass and undersampled snare sounds - like Here Come the Warm Jets-era Brian Eno meets the best moments on Kanye West's Yeezus. ![]() Jamaican Queens are easily one of my favorite bands, yet it's difficult for me to put my finger on exactly why. You do this, and in doing so, you experiment further and then make it your own. You hear something on a song that inspires you to seek out that method. These moments are great for making records. Then I got one and played a Strat through it into a Marshall Plexi, and there it was - the sound I'd wanted for years. I'd heard them forever and coveted the sound. It was a similar experience to the first time I played through a Space Echo. ![]() Of course, the first thing I did was plug it in and play the opening to "Revolution." Yep - that's the sound. On the output side, both jacks are live so you can run one to the guitar amp and one to the mixer. On the input side, a switch lets you choose one jack or the other. On the side are XLR and 1/4'' jacks for input and output. A modified Baxandall EQ with treble, midrange, and bass bands is also there. Essentially, there are two gain stages of "Nevesque" discrete preamp inside, with knobs for master volume, interstage gain, and stepped gain of both stages. It's built incredibly well, and the knobs all feel great. It's burly, and it looks super cool with its red and blue knobs - and a line-drawing of a Neve console on top. So I was beyond stoked when I picked up a JHS Pedals Colour Box! We tend to switch back and forth a lot between overdubs and tracking, so the usual occupants of said preamps (kick, snare, vocal, etc.) stay put on them. I don't have a pile of Neve preamps, so they are usually in use for the duration of a session. ![]() I guess it's a combination of availability and convenience. The occasion to do this comes up infrequently at High Bias Recordings - strange because we do a bunch of weird shit around here. Like most engineers, I am aware that a number of my favorite guitar sounds have been achieved by using and abusing a Neve or EMI input channel going direct to tape ("Revolution" by The Beatles, "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin, "Bodysnatchers" by Radiohead, "Cinnamon Girl" by Neil Young, tons of Motown, etc.). I'd use the same gear to insert a Neve strip and/or an 1176 or LA-2A between a guitar and its amplifier for overdubs. Right around this time, I started doing the opposite of this. Somewhere in there, geniuses like Jonathan Little of Little Labs made it easier for everyone by manufacturing robust level-changing interfaces and thusly allowing for whole new sonic palettes using boxes that typically stay on the floor. Then everyone was talking about that Strokes vocal sound and saying it was a Rat pedal. I remember studio owners thinking I was crazy in the '90s when I patched in a SansAmp Bass Driver DI or BOSS DM-2 Delay pedal on vocals at mix. The use of effect pedals at the mixing board is by no means a new thing.
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