There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.
You cannot enter a studio and just start crooning before the mike. It is essential to understand the mind of the composer, mood of the song, and meter of the tune.
In the studio, I don't use an amp, I just go direct into the desk. It's virtually acoustic, what I'm doing.
I jump into the process, and the record begins to gel at some point. Then I begin to get a picture of where I'm going. But it's not always something I know on the front-end.
Texture is very important. Just the feel of everything. It's not always about recording everything in pristine quality and having everything mixed where it's absolutely perfect. It's more about a vibe.
My manager came up with the idea of taking a Pro Tool rig out on the road to record every night and I thought it was a great idea. I felt like it would be good to record over a certain period of time and then take the best performances of that collection of recordings. It appealed to me that it wasn't going to be from just one location.
The best way to use the auto-tune is not to! And that's what I do: I do not use auto-tune!
The majority of my records that become big records are usually done in one day.
I use Auto-Tune but it's not to mask anything. If you come to see me live, I can sing on the spot. Auto-tune is just for the recording. It keeps everything really precise.
There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I'd write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song 'Hurt' in one go at the school studio.
We can even sing off key, but if it's produced properly it can be a hit.
Mad World's distinctive percussion intro was played on a Roland CR-78 drum machine. We first recorded it at twice the speed, but it sounded great slowed down.
When I record in a studio I don't use an amp. I go directly into the board, so I can get that very fat, full sound - which is my favorite sound.
I just freestyle. I don't actually write the words on paper. It's just whatever comes into my mind. I'll record three or four lines at a time, get a good take, and do three or four more. It may be whatever comes into my mind. But I care about my craft a lot more than a lot of other people.
I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud. One night I was listening to a record by Lester Young, the horn player, and it came to me. Relax, just relax. It's all going to be all right.
Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year.
It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out.
I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then.
We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.
I don't like the way recording to digital sounds.
I really wanted to get that dynamic on the record onto people and let them know it wasn't just a simple strumming along the guitar type of thing without ramming it down their throats so I kind of went the opposite way and sang some of the songs more quietly which allowed for the louder parts to sound as though there were more. It was the only way singing those songs made sense to me.
My best capacity is to edit. If anything, I am a specialist at editing: my usual approach is to record a song very long. In the beginning just jam, jam on and on. Then break the song and play with it.
The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event.
I definitely use "smiling while rapping" as a tool in the booth. I want to have fun while recording. At times it can get tedious and stressful when it's not sounding the way you heard it in your head, but you've got to remember to just smile and appreciate the fact that you're even in the booth and there are people who want to hear your art.
Whenever I record more than two or three layers, it starts to get cluttered up, and you can't hear the cut of the guitars as good. It's hard to get four guitars to hit at exactly the same time and keep the attack tight.
