I know that most of the time you guys like going direct in terms of recording?
Directly into the computer?
Yeah.
No. I wouldn’t say we prefer anything actually. That way of recording we’ve used, we did that for Friend Opportunity and it has its advantages. You don’t need to have a fancy recording studio if you’re doing something like that. You could use just a very basic kind of computer set up and record yourself and do everything that way. There are advantages there. This time we recorded in a recording studio for a couple of days with our friends Janey and Pellecci. It was different. We’ve recorded with those guys a lot, and we did some things with them for Friend Opportunity, but I felt like I had more of an opportunity on this one to kind of really work through all the sounds and come up with something that basically when we got out of there it was a lot further along than it sometimes is. Especially if you’re recording things direct, it’s like, ‘I think this sounds horrible, and I know I can make it sound good, but I don’t know how to start.’ When we got out of there I felt like our sounds, we were all like, ‘Wow, these sounds are nice. We don’t need to do that much.’
I guess recording direct you don’t have as much time to let things breathe or hear it.
It’s just with direct, you’re not going through an amplifier it’s not going into a room and you’re just taking whatever it is that the instrument happens to sounds like and recording that exactly as it is. In our case, probably usually wrong, because I think you’re usually supposed to run it though, I forget what you call it, some sort of impedance matcher, some sort of technical jargon, I don’t know what it is. We generally, when we do that kind of thing, we’ll tell people later, and they’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s kind of funny, that’s not how you’re supposed to do it.’ (laughs)
In terms of arrangements on the last record, it seems there was a lot of call and response, keyboard and guitar back and forth, whereas on Offend Maggie there seems to be more merging of ideas and a gentle flow through the songs.
I think you’re kind of right about that, but I haven’t really thought about it that way. Maybe it’s just actually playing the material together [live], the material called for something different than what the Friend Opportunity stuff called for.
