Matthew J Barnhart

Two new albums I recorded

I just got back from a great 5-week tour with The Dodos, and have myself booked for a couple of weeks in the US with Scratch Acid (dream come true) and a couple of weeks in Spain and the UK with Superchunk! In between tours, of course, I make records.

Two records I recorded and am very proud of were released this week. I of course highly recommend checking them out.

• The Angelus On A Dark And Barren Land: I recorded this, Josh T. Pearson of Lift To Experience helped produce, and Dave Willingham mixed it. You can listen to, and purchase their album at their web site.
• Deep Snapper Bipedal Disorder: the 4th LP of fIREHOSE/Minutemen-influenced punk-ish rock I’ve recorded for them. This one is the debut of additional guitarist Aaron Bartz, formerly of Arlington’s Tame. . . Tame and Quiet. I love these guys.

Heading out again soon with the Dodos

Holy hell, it has been one scorching summer here in Texas. I’m usually on tour in the summer and miss the brunt of it, but I’ve spent most of this summer at home sweating my ass off.

I leave in a couple of weeks to start the next Dodos tour. We start in Big Sur, loop around the country, and end in Boulder. I had a totally great time with them in June, both musically and socially. We didn’t spend much time together last summer when they supported the New Pornographers, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got in a van together. They are funny guys, great musicians, with adventurous musical tastes and a love of great food — that’s just about all I could ever hope for in tourmates!

Mixing them live was a challenge at first — there’s no bass player, and the drummer plays a kit of floor toms, a snare, and a couple of cymbals. The two guitarists also each play through two amps, so I spent the first week or so experimenting with different mics and mixing strategies. I also brought all my own microphones, as well as Z-bars and LP Claws — all I need from a club is 3 tall boom stands and mic cables, and we’re ready to go. Changeovers take all of 10 minutes, so long as the opening band gets off stage quickly. It’s really a great gig.

I’ve done a decent amount of studio stuff this summer, including a 7-day stretch this past week. The first few days were spent with two different high-school-aged bands, which were a rewarding challenge. My first-ever recording studio experience (at 16) was definitely not awesome, so I try as hard as I can to give younger bands the opposite experience.

Austin’s The Gary came down to record 5 songs this past weekend. We tracked and mixed 5 songs over the course of a lazy day and half, and I enjoyed their company and their music very very much.

Tre Orsi played a couple of shows, including one with Mission of Burma. Holy hell, THAT was exciting! We’re lying low until next year while we work on new songs and raise newborn children.

Lessee, what else? Oh, there’s this thing.

I updated my Recording page with some new discography entries and links to some production samples. I’m currently in the middle of a bunch of projects, many of which have been on the back-burner due to illness (food poisoning, then bronchitis, then a sinus infection – AWESOME).

I’m leaving Wednesday for a tour with Dodos as FOH engineer. After that, back to the studio to finish up all of these pending projects and also work on new Tre Orsi stuff.

Mostly of my internet activity takes place on Twitter these days. Follow me there for all sorts of ephemera and pictures of cake.

Short update

Oof, so little time these days. The latest:

• Got back from the Destroyer tour April 18. Was it awesome? Of course it was awesome. Full re-cap to come.
• Started a new LP for the band Pinkish Black. They’re the remnants of the sorely-missed Great Tyrant. Heavy, goth-y, creepy, funny. I love them.
• Finishing up a new Deep Snapper LP. This is number 4! I love this band and these people.
• Returning to work on the new Nervous Curtains LP. The first single we did (“Wired To Make Waves” b/w “Something Sinister”) is now available on their Bandcamp page. I’m very proud of this one, and can’t wait to get the final mixes done.
• Going to Brazil with Superchunk next week, which required a day-trip to Houston to pick up our visas. Very excited about this one.
• Finally, starting a tour with Dodos on June 1st. They supported the New Pornographers last summer, and I enjoyed every minute of their set every night. Great people too. 
• Tre Orsi has been slowly working on new material. Hopefully recording this summer, and live dates too.

Spent the last week making new records with Nervous Curtains and Deep Snapper, two bands I’ve worked with a lot previously. Both records are starting out great, and I can’t wait to get them done and out to the world.

This week’s session with Zapruder Sequence has been postponed due to the snowpocalypse occurring here in North Texas. Crossing my fingers I’ll be able to see my friends in the Yann Tiersen band tomorrow night in Dallas. (I was unable to do their tour due to other obligations. Heartbreaking. My buddy, Esteban Rey, is taking care of them this time around.)

Leaving for Japan on Feb 14 for 4 shows with Superchunk. We do 3 shows in March after that, 1 in Chapel Hill followed by 2 nights at Radio City Music Hall with Wild Flag and Bright Eyes. I’m excited and nervous as hell to mix there! We’re also going to Brazil in May, it looks like — two new continents to add to my list.

In between Superchunk stuff, I’ll be finishing up the new Chris Brokaw album. It’s a rock band album, kind of a cross between Red Cities and Incredible Love. I’m a huge fan and am honored to work on this with him.

Last, but not least, I’ll be out for a month in North America with Dan Bejar’s band, Destroyer, supporting their new album Kaputt. They have a new video that put me into hysterics, in a good way.

After ears and good monitoring, my notebook is the most important piece of equipment I have in the studio. I log details about every session in it: musicians’ names, microphone choice and position, signal path (mic preamps, compressors, etc), instrument and amplifier settings, and, most importantly, stuff I tried that didn’t work.

Some session notes are more in-depth than others, but I always write something. This particular notebook goes back to the Fall of 2006, and has saved my bacon more times than I can count. (“How the hell did I record the clarinet on that Shearwater record?”) It’s also helped me out of ruts (i.e. trying something other than a Royer ribbon mic on guitar amps once in a while). I couldn’t work without it.

I was up at 5:30am last Friday to make my flight home from the first leg of Superchunk’s first tour in 9 years. Their drummer, Jon Wurster and I met last year on the A.C. Newman tour and quickly bonded over our mutual love/hate/confusion of the lesser stars of the SST Records universe. Superchunk’s former tour manager/sound guy, Jason Ward now stays home to tend to the Chicago Mastering Service, so Jon recommended me as his replacement.

(I can’t stress enough how much of a dream-come-true this is for me. In high school, my favorite bands were Bedhead, Superchunk, and Minutemen — I’ve been working with The New Year for 8 years now, so unless they reanimate D. Boon, all my teenage daydreams have been realized.)

For once, I felt almost totally prepared for a tour. Typically, the night before is a scramble, tying up loose ends and looking for that fucking GPS, but I’ve been on tour so much this year that I have a system down. I make a pack list a few days before we leave, and I mentally go through each day of the tour, checking it against my itinerary to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. Backpack (for to-do lists and reference info), Google Docs (guest lists, tour budgets, other spreadsheet-ish info), and Dropbox (for all my other files) also play a big part in keeping things organized.

Sound-wise, Superchunk is straightforward rock band, a welcome change from the other bands I’ve mixed this year. Midlake had 7 members, 4 singers, and wide variety of instrumentation that made for a challenging, yet fun mix. The New Pornographers were an uphill battle most nights: 7 singers, a really loud (and excellent) drummer, tons of dynamic shifts, and lots of layered instruments to cram in there.

Mixing the The New Pornographers was more like mixing a record than any band I’ve worked for previously. Live sound is usually about sound reinforcement, supplementing the band’s natural stage sound with the PA system to achieve a nice balance. For the most part, you shouldn’t have to fiddle with a mix too much after the 2nd or 3rd songs, but with so many different singers and so much instrumentation, I was constantly bringing channels up and down to achieve the proper balance and keep the audience happy.

Superchunk, on the other hand is pretty simple: drums, bass, two guitars, and one main singer. Once the basic balance was dialed in, it was just a matter of riding individual elements: bring the vocal up here, a little delay there, etc. I spent a lot more time tweaking the overall balance instead of fiddling with individual instruments on a per-song basis.

Anyhoo! I’m flying to Las Vegas on Friday for the big Matador 21 party. I’ll be doing monitors for Superchunk, and mixing front-of-house for Come and Chavez, while not plugging away at the Limit Hold ‘Em tables or communing with my fellow audio nerds.

Listening pile – 9/29/2010

I managed not to buy a single record on the first leg of the Superchunk tour (Maybe I’m burned out on record stores? Maybe I’m waiting for another visit to Aquarius?), but I do have a few things I’ve been listening to lately:

• Nina Nastasia – Outlaster: Another terrific album from one of my heroes, with unbelievable string arrangements.
• Cate Le Bon – Me Oh My: I met Cate a few years ago when I worked for Neon Neon at SXSW, and I fell in love with her voice and delivery. I like the minimal arrangements on this record quite a bit, and pretty much the whole thing is in mono.
• Arbouretum – Song Of The Pearl: Probably my favorite band going right now. Featuring Dave Heumann from Human Bell and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s band. The man is the king of riffs.
• nestorisbianca – Genetics: This is Lionel from Yann Tiersen’s band. I don’t know much about them, but I’ve been enjoying it a lot. You can download it at their Bandcamp site.
• Three-Cornered Moon – s/t: More Yann Tiersen band members, this time Robin Allender and Dave Collingwood. Mostly long, dreamy, songs with lots of finger-picked acoustic guitar. Also available at their Bandcamp site.

Bazan: Live at Electrical Audio

While on tour last Fall, I recorded David Bazan and his band at Electrical Audio in Chicago. TW Walsh mixed and mastered the record, and it’s available now as Bazan: Live at Electrical Audio.

I’m really proud of how this record turned out. The band did every take live, all together in the large room (“Center Field”) of Studio A. I plan on writing detailed recording notes to post on David’s site, if I can ever find the time.

David and his band are on tour in the US right now, and I of course highly recommend seeing them.

Finally home. . .

I’ve been on tour, almost non-stop, since Jan 4. I was scheduled to go out again with Midlake again in a couple of weeks, but we both agreed that I’m burnt out and need some time at home with the wife, dog, cat, band, and studio.

This weekend, I start tracking a new record for The Distant Seconds. Next weekend, it’s a new EP for American Werewolf Academy. After so much driving, lack of sleep, and stress, it’s comforting to know I’ll be helping two of my favorite bands make some great art.