11 AM, time for TRANESTRETCHING

I should rewind, though, because before I did any research for this album at all, I spent a few weeks to record thirty-something song ideas that would form the basis of all of the tracks on the album. The process was a continuation of the way I worked on Little Gwaii and MB-LP, with the key difference that instead of recording demo versions of the songs initially and rerecord once I knew which I was using, I went straight to recording good versions of the loops. I was able to do this because I finally bought a pair of nearfield monitors, so I wasn't stuck trying to judge the sound of the instruments I was tracking through a pair of headphones. The Adam F5 speakers I bought were great, and I felt more confident that I was capturing good sounds on the way in than I have on past album projects.

This no-demo recording process also meant that I cut the Boss RC-300 looper out of the tracking process. Ordinarily, I would record demos onto the looper, using its three tracks as I would when I play the song live. So drums would usually be on track 3, bass on track 2, and guitar/keys/vocals on track 1, depending on the song. Then I would figure out how I wanted to perform the song by muting and un-muting these tracks to create the song structure. But this time, I was recording good versions of my ideas right onto the computer, as I wrote them. I saved the looper for later, when I was trying to arrange the songs, since having the instruments separated into the three tracks as I would play them live made it obvious what moves and mutes would make sense for live performance.

I generally started the loops with a single instrumental idea or conceptual goal. I make a practice of recording any short ideas onto my phone whenever they come to me, so I mined my phone recordings for ideas I'd had that could form the basis of songs. One thing I also tried on this record was recording snippets of existing songs that were on where I happened to be that gave me a specific feeling. One was a classical piece that was on in Good for Grapes' tour bus when we were recording our album, another was a weird electronic jam I witnessed played by musicians dressed as Luchadors at the Fox Cabaret, and another was a song we played in the Delta Concert Band. Specific places and instruments also played roles in loops I included on the record; riffs I wrote on a terrible old bass at Steve Albini's studio in Chicago started a couple songs, and one I wrote and recorded in GarageBand on an iPad while up the Sunshine Coast made the album as well. I also manipulated found sound: one song started with a chopped up loop of the sound of a Vancouver Skytrain leaving the station, and another began with the chirping sound of crosswalks for the visually impaired.

I went for quantity with the loops, knowing the more I made, the more cohesive I could make the sound of the album since then I'd have enough good ones that I could then choose the ones that fit a similar aesthetic. Since I knew I would make a lot, I didn't have to worry about cohesion while I was actually writing them, which was great since I could just follow ideas through wherever they seemed to be leading me. I generally finished 2-3 every time I sat down to work, and considering I was trying to pre-mix and record nice versions of everything as I went it was a pretty good pace.

This was the first album I finally gave up and used drum machine VST sounds instead of recording real drums. I did it because I've come to terms with the fact that I don't have the gear or the ears or the room to make my drums sound professional, but I also did it because I realized that setting up real drums for my live shows is a bridge too far for me right now anyway, so I might as well record the way I'm going to end up playing live, with a drum pad triggering sounds. I still miked up a drum kit and played real drums while recording though, because I didn't want super quantized drum machine timing, just nicely recorded samples. So I converted the audio I recorded on close mics into MIDI and fed that into my soft synth, Session Drummer 3, editing for timing and velocity afterward.

Bass and guitar I recorded much as I have in the past, with both the DIed signal and miked amp and making decisions about which to use or how to blend them later. One thing I did a lot with the guitar was use my Boss DD-2 delay pedal to sync 8^th note delays to the song tempo, and then just hit chords once every couple bars, letting the delays continue almost as loud as the hit. I found that really filled space, when that's what I needed from the guitar.

One thing I noticed in playing the songs from my previous album MB-LP live was that I really underused violin and especially trombone. So I made sure not to do that this time around, incorporating them more often and more centrally, usually at the expense of the guitar. Violin I recorded very normally, with a cheap overhead pencil condenser, but overdubbed many takes onto every part and panned doubles in interesting ways to make a real ensemble sort of sound. I sent the trombone into Guitar Rig 5's talkbox effect, except not with the plugin “talking” but at a static position. The extreme EQ filter effect gave the trombone a nice place in the mix to sit, and I thought made it sound like an old-timey car horn, in a nice way.

I included some other instruments as well; the keyboard sounds all came from presets on my dad's DX7s, and I sent one through the Boss looper for the slicer effect it has. I made more extensive use of shaker, tambourine, and cowbell than I have in the past. Since I wanted this album to be a dancey, beat-driven album, I thought percussion could help propel the songs forward.

Different things would inspire me to write the loops that I used on Extinct! Sometimes it was an instrumental melody, other times a groove, and other times an interesting length for the loop. There are 3, 7, and 14-bar loops, as well as ones where chord lengths are asymmetrical, as in one 8-bar loop where the first chord goes for 6 bars and the second for the remaining two. Any way I could play with my own expectations for how the loop should go, while also making something genuinely nice-sounding to listen to, that was what I tried for. Harshness crept back in with the vocals, but in writing the instrumentals I really tried to make it a priority that they sound nicer than things I'd done in the past.