I spent the past two weekends in the studio with the band American Werewolf Academy. I’ve made a lot of records with these guys now, and I love them. The singer, Aaron writes a lot of honest, insightful, classic songs that stick with me for a long time. I think a lot of people dismiss them because of their name and their sometimes-ramshackle stage presence, which is a shame.
We’re doing overdubs for new recordings they made in their shed on an old Fostex 1/4″ 8-track (something we did for their song “Summer Ships” on the Zac Crain For Mayor compilation), and in the coming weeks we’ll track more songs from the ground-up.
Most of the recordings were 4 tracks of drums, some bass guitar, and usually a scratch guitar track. One song also had three tracks of Kris Youmans’ cello.
After dumping their 8-track recordings to the Studer, we started in on guitar overdubs. These were pretty straight-forward, except that I found myself using a Shure SM57 for the first time in years. I had put the SM57 up in the room as a talkback mic so I could hear Aaron while he played, but it actually worked quite well as a room mic. Who knew, eh?
For vocals, we mostly used an Electro-voice RE-20 (great midrange detail, low proximity effect) -> Neve 1073 -> a variety of compressors, depending on the song. We also effected the vocals heavily to tape, some songs getting distortion, slapback, or tape echo, all printed to a second track. We used the Soundelux 251 on one song, “Happy Now”, which was slower and croony, an environment the 251 excels in.
Howard came in and added piano, organ, and percussion to a few other tracks. He really brought “Happy Now” to life with an understated piano part accentuated with crazy glissandos, raked directly against the strings on our grand piano.