Notes from the Road

Photo: Meg Sheff-Atteberry

Under Mics with the Oranges Band

PopMatters has had plenty of nice things to say about Baltimore’s The Oranges Band (specifically here and here. When the band announced that they were headed into the studio to begin work on their new record, having soldiered through personnel changes and struggles at their label, Lookout Records, it seemed like an excellent time to catch up and to allow them to speak for themselves by cataloging the happenings. Over the next several weeks, Oranges Band frontman Roman Kuebler will write in with updates from the sessions for the band’s third full-length. Here’s part four…
—Jon Langmead

VOCALS

I really have a great time singing in the studio. For some reason the set up seems so pro. The room is cleared of the instruments, the baffling goes up and instead of microphones hanging all over the place, like when the band is tracking, there is just one. It is a strange experience also, in the context of writing, practicing and recording your songs because, as long as you are a singer who plays an instrument, it is the only time ever you will sing a song without playing it as well and the only time you will sing a song without anything in your hands. So besides being a little anxious and overwhelmed by the formality of the studio setting you also have to approach the song in a much different way. It is rather exciting but also very nerve racking. For me, walking into the room after you do your first vocal take on a song is a roller coaster ride. You’ve worked hard to perform the song but you haven’t any idea what you sound like. The voice is very sensitive to placement of microphones and slight changes in sound can make a huge difference in the perception of the vocal take. It’s like the perfect storm when it happens to come together. And for the first time, you are hearing the lyrics resonate within the song and the voice is totally audible. Anyone in a band can relate to the fact that you never hear the vocals at practice.

Me at the mic part 1. I had to take off my jacket because it was making a ton of noise.

So why, with all these “hardships”, is singing in the studio fun? It’s simple. For me, when it works—when you get a great vocal take—it is the most satisfying part of making, playing or recording music that there is. I guess it is a risk/reward thing. Which is why, in a demonstration of appropriate cosmic duality, that when it doesn’t happen it is the most frustrating part of making music.

In approaching this album I wanted my lead vocal tracks to be distinct and adventurous. I wanted them to be energetic and irreverent. In the end though, I knew I would settle for them to not suck and be on pitch. A lot to ask in some cases I am sorry to say. I guess we are all our own worse critics and for me, if I am ever feeling a little over confident, I could take a crack at singing a song in the studio to bring me back to earth.

But as I said in an earlier installment, a record is a document of what you did when the tape was rolling so you don’t really have much choice but to step up and do something, right? And so I did. When Adam (co-producer, engineer) and I were doing vocals I’d start by describing which song I was trying to rip off and he would respond with an appropriate microphone, mic placement and effect scenario. The best part about trying to rip off songs, though, is that you can never recreate someone else’s magic so you hope to stumble upon your own. So here it goes, first song.

Me at the mic part 2. Less noisy…

We started with a song called “One More Dog”. Why? Well, it was the shortest. Short and fast and to the point. It reminds me of a Pink Flag-era Wire thing so that is where we started looking for sounds. When ripping off other songs (take notes, kids) I like to go right to the source so we played some songs from Pink Flag. We decided they were relatively dry (no reverb), mid-range (not quite a radio voice, but close) with maybe a slight delay on them. We picked out the right mic for the job and ran it through the effects and got the EQ just right… and it sounded nothing like the Wire song. Of course. The other thing about trying to rip stuff off is that what you are hearing is the whole song. You can’t isolate the vocals, necessarily, and predict how they will fit into a totally different song in a totally different context. It’s why trying hard to rip something off is a great way to work. It provides the parameters, the boundaries, and I think I said before that in the context of recording, I need some boundaries.

OK so, here we are with this vocal sound that doesn’t do quite what we thought it might, but it does sound pretty cool so we tweak it just a bit and forge ahead. Once you have a sound you can concentrate on the performance. This song was pretty straight forward, meaning I didn’t expect that it would change much from the practice room to the recording so it was just about getting the lines right—one at a time. I feel like I can always find some reason to re-do a line. A quiver in the vocal, just a little flat, I don’t like the “r” sound in that word, etc., etc. Basically, it is really hard to commit to the idea that the line you just sang will be the way that song exists… pretty much forever. Scared of commitment? Yikes. Oh well, you gotta say yes sometime and I am paying for this thing by the hour so eventually we make it through the song. The funny thing is that when you finish a vocal take you are so sick of hearing it that you can barely listen to it and appreciate it. In fact, coming back to it the next session is always kind of scary… did I really get it right or was I just sick of trying? Am I a hero or a heel? Like I said… a real roller coaster ride.

So instead of recounting my triumphs and tragedies while singing these songs… and there were a few of both, let’s just do a quick run down of what a few of the songs on the record are called and what I tried to ripped off while recording them. I imagine this could be an incriminating document in a court trial, but luckily I was unsuccessful in truly copying ANY of these brilliant works. When our album does finally come out (in 2012 at this rate) you can check these against the originals… you’ll see, total failure!

My view. With my favorite mic, the fabulous Shure SM-7.

“Everyone Burns Out” (working title): The Replacements - “Takin’ a Ride” complete with a… “referential” line.

“When Your Mask Is Your Revealing Feature”: Peter Gabriel “Steam” and “Shock the Monkey” also ESG for the female back up vocals. This one doesn’t sound at all like those things… but it came out ok anyway.

“Gordon’s Night Club”: I thought could be a Kinks song… but it totally isn’t. I did do a Phil Lynotte thing in the beginning that is really funny and a weird trill at the end that was ALL ME (or is that Paul Macca?).

“Absolutely (Instru)mental”: As the name suggests, this song doesn’t have vocals but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try to rip something off to get it. Ha ha! It is modeled after Laika & the Cosmonauts - “NY ‘79” a truly complete and catchy song with no vocals. It was recently announced that Laika and Co. will be breaking up at the end of this year… say it ain’t so!?!

“Ottobar (Afterhours)” - Hot Snakes - “Automatic Midnight” and “Salton City” (whoos!)

“I Wouldn’t Worry About It”: This one is pretty original, really. I was going to come up with something to steal eventually but we were doing some back up vocals on a different song (Ottobar) and had a really cool sound going. Really distorted and delayed and weird. When that song was over, this one was next on the reel so we just let it roll and I did the lead vocal… in one take. Easy. It also relieved me from having to rewrite the lyrics, which I was going to do for some reason. I mean why would you need more than two lines in a song?

This is the studio room cleared out for the vox. 

Well, that ain’t quite all of them but it is most of them. All secrets revealed right here. Man… these things take forever; albums that is. There are so many tiny parts to get right and it’s like an automobile or a golf swing… so many things working in harmony that when one things is off, your whole program is interrupted. This is just to say that here we are, nearing the end of tracking and it still feels a light year away. OK well, stick with me here. Thanks for reading.

—Roman Kuebler

Photo: Meg Sheff-Atteberry

Under Mics with the Oranges Band

PopMatters has had plenty of nice things to say about Baltimore’s The Oranges Band (specifically here and here. When the band announced that they were headed into the studio to begin work on their new record, having soldiered through personnel changes and struggles at their label, Lookout Records, it seemed like an excellent time to catch up and to allow them to speak for themselves by cataloging the happenings. Over the next several weeks, Oranges Band frontman Roman Kuebler will write in with updates from the sessions for the band’s third full-length. Here’s part three…
—Jon Langmead

On Overdubs

I feel like when we play live or rehearse, the songs we are playing are always subject to the performance and the instruments and the room and the energy. That is, clearly, what makes a live performance unique. It is also sometimes why the song itself must take a back seat to that energy and performance. Over the years, we’ve all heard about those incredible live bands that can’t seem to translate their talents into a recording, right? I always heard that about the Poster Children… maybe Jesus Lizard, too. I never much agreed with it because I was a huge fan of both band’s records and maybe, because I came across the albums before I saw them live, I had an appreciation for both the recorded and live dynamic. Their records are so great.

Anyways, this is just to say that in conceiving this album we approached the tracking as a live band in order to get a, sort of, natural feel. But the idea was never to make a “live” album because we still want to be able to highlight the songs so the next step was to begin the overdubbing process. It’s, ideally, a best-of-both-worlds scenario that will hopefully allow the songs to develop and focus outside of the mayhem of the practice room… but not too much. Get it?

Roman and Adam setting up for the overdub.

Dave, the Oranges Band’s all-time drummer, has both the easiest and the hardest job in the band. He has to put up with me in the practice room trying to describe how I think a song should feel in this sort of broken drummer language that consists of me trying to mimic bass and snare drums with my mouth and by beating on my chest and stuff. We should get Doug E. Fresh to be a translator. The other part of his job that is really difficult is tracking. Drums, in my opinion, can not really be overdubbed… not without sounding like it at least.

So in going for the live takes, Dave pretty much had to nail each one. Not easy. Guitars and basses, even when meant to be live can be “fixed” without too much evidence but the drums have got to be there. BUT… once Dave gets through the songs, his work is mostly done, that’s the easy part. He gets to soak in a job well done while we try so earnestly not to ruin his hard work. And there has been more than one occasion when we’ve had some really awesome basic tracks that didn’t make it through the rest of the process. I guess that’s a lame part of his job, too.

Doug lighting it up, pt. 1.

OK, so Dave is done and Pat, the youthful bass player of the group, comes in to “dial in” his parts. There are a lot of recording terms for the process that describe fixing up the things you screwed up while tracking like “dial in” and “tweak” and “tighten up” and maybe, more so in Pat’s case, “caress”. Anyways, it was funny because we made a big production of getting Pat into the studio at a certain time that worked for everyone involved and having the equipment available only to realize that his parts were all tight as is. The stuff we thought needed the fixes were other people’s mistakes… mostly mine, of course. Well, we had fun listening to the tracks at least!

This is an interesting stage in the recording because you pretty much have your basics covered. Bass and drums are good to go. The guitars are present and accounted for, at least in their “live” state. So now you have to determine what to add to make the song better. Problem is, the world is available to you at this stage but, as is the real challenge of making an album, you must restrict yourself in some way. Luckily for us, we have budget restrictions and really no access to an orchestra so the process, at least, begins to come into focus. Rule #1-There will be NO orchestra on this record. Rule #2- This will not be “Chinese Democracy II”.

Doug lighting it up, pt 2.

OK, so without an orchestra, or a string section, or a grand (or even baby grand or even upright) piano we begin the overdubs with what else… MORE GUITARS! My personal approach to overdubbing guitars has always been a bit of a shotgun styled attack. Plug the guitar in, turn the tape on start playing and see what sticks. In some cases this has yielded some pretty cool lead lines. They have been sort of one note melody lines that just kind of boost up the chord structure… at least that is how I think of them. The approach to my guitar overdubs on this album, though, is rather different. I have to say that while overdubbing lead guitars is fun and I think I have had reasonable success, I am NO lead guitar player. See when our previous lead guitar player left the group, he did so… mysteriously. I mean, it wasn’t clear that it was happening and we had shows scheduled. Now I am too proud and altogether too stubborn to cancel shows so the show goes on, right?

Well, we did go on as a three-piece for a little while. And then as a three piece with an occasional fourth guitar and backing vocalist and then kind of back to the three piece. We struggled with line-up fluctuations for most of the year last year. We were trying to figure out how to present ourselves live while we were putting together our next group of songs and figuring out how they would be recorded. It was a pain the ass and I learned a very important lesson… that I am NO lead guitar player and that I needed help!

Doug checking the goods, pt. 1

The other thing that I was reasonably sure of, in the context of the recording, was that I was really looking for another player who could influence how these songs sounded and affect their outcome as recorded pieces. So, what does this have to do with my guitar overdubs? It means that I didn’t really want to do any… or very little at least. I wanted to crank out my rhythm guitars, add to them in the context of the rhythm only and let Doug open up on the leads and second guitar. So my guitar overdubs took about a day, I think, and consisted of me just peppering in a little rhythmic addition here or there, an acoustic guitar that mimics my electric and oh yeah, the “guitar takeover”.

Wha? Listen, I will let you in on a secret technique that I have devised called the “guitar takeover”. I am perfecting the style and approach but, what you need to know is that while the band is playing a microphone marches across the room focusing on a guitar and as it gets closer to the speaker, that particular guitar engulfs the entire song like an avalanche. That’s all I can say for now… be prepared.

Doug checking the goods, pt. 2

When Doug Gillard came down from New York to join us for our first practice back in January, we had a show scheduled for the next night. It was cutting it a bit close but I certainly wasn’t worried about it not working out. See, we had traded some tapes and I got a sense of what kind of ideas he had and also, he and I had practiced in New York the week before. There I got a sense, not that he was completely ready and decided about what he wanted to do, but that could learn the songs without problem and that he definitely had ideas and could execute them. You know, I’d also seen him play with Guided By Voices on no less than 30 occasions and in those 30 shows I must have seen him play 100 different GBV songs.

As far as job interviews go, those shows were pretty convincing. So we are gathering to practice and the other guys in the band must have been a little apprehensive… I mean to play a show with someone they’d practiced with one time? It’s a little nerve racking. Well, about one minute into our first song at practice, everyone is all smiles and it’s pretty much like, “Yes, I am the genius that I suspected I might be!” A very smart person will come up with a way to do something themselves, but a genius will be smart enough to get someone who is better at it to do it for them.

This is all to say that in doing guitar overdubs, Doug was the man and had everything in place. I will admit to you that I actually slept through at least some of his takes. It was so awesome because I think I was working hard at my day job at the time and would be tired when we were in the studio… so I’d kind of doze off and when I woke up there would be this great guitar part that wasn’t there before. Pennies from Heaven! This is why I can only claim CO-producer credit on this album… it’s because I slept through part of the recording. This is also why I don’t have a lot of details about his overdubbing. I was sleeping or getting coffee or something while Adam (engineer) and Doug turned it out. Two days later and Doug had polished off all nine songs.

Now with pretty much all the instruments in place, I really have to concentrate on writing a few lyrics and we’ll start tracking vocals… next episode.

—Roman Kuebler

Photo: Meg Sheff-Atteberry

PopMatters has had plenty of nice things to say about Baltimore’s The Oranges Band (specifically here and here. When the band announced that they were headed into the studio to begin work on their new record, having soldiered through personnel changes and struggles at their label, Lookout Records, it seemed like an excellent time to catch up and to allow them to speak for themselves by cataloging the happenings. Over the next several weeks, Oranges Band frontman Roman Kuebler will write in with updates from the sessions for the band’s third full-length. Here’s part two…
—Jon Langmead

It’s a maze of equipment in the tracking room. Doug emerges from the “amp cavern”. I’ll admit to being slightly confused and just a little overwhelmed here.

Going into the studio kind of reminds me of going on vacation with my family when I was young. You’d look forward to the time when you were “on vacation” but until the day or so before you left, you’d forget that in order to get there you’d have hours of packing and organizing and driving to get there. And in the minutes before you left—the kitchen would get shoved into a box, you’d gather up every towel you could find and, for some reason, you’d pack four pairs of shoes when the goal was to not wear shoes at all for the whole week.

Because the studio offers “infinite” possibilities, you pretty much have to be prepared for anything, right? What if you needed the guitar to sound like that lead in that Steve Miller song? What do I need to make that happen? This song should have John Bonham drums, this one should have Talking Heads drums, and on and on. Well, after a week at the beach you’d pack to go home and realize that you didn’t need the collared shirts you brought, that one pair of shoes would have done the trick and “who brought a jar of pickles?”

Doug’s starting line-up.

I wish I could say that I learned something from those experiences, but here it was the day we are going into the studio to do our basic tracking and I am running ALL over town picking up this amp from this friend and this guitar from this guy. Everyone in the band has somebody bringing something over… you know, “just in case”. When all is said and done, we have three bass amps, about eight guitars and ten guitar amps, three different Fender basses and at least four snare drums. We have effects and cables and power supplies and “did you remember to buy picks?” All this prep and I haven’t finished the lyrics for half of these songs. One thing at a time, I guess.

Doug laying it down.

The funny thing about us gathering all these options is that our goal on this album was to sound like ourselves! Oh well, maybe a more stylized version of ourselves then. In any case, the approach on this album was to be considerably different than on our last, “The World and Everything In It.” That album was tracked rather carefully over the course of a few months. The songs, while rehearsed, were works in progress gaining much from studio embellishments. On this record we wanted to track live as a four piece, playing together in order to highlight the strength of the instrumental composition. That sounds more high-brow than it should… it just means that we were rocking out these songs and wanted the record to sound like the practice room. One other interesting decision on this record, no click tracks! If you don’t know, a click track is a pulse or click or something that goes through the song that regulates your tempo. It has the benefit of making sure the speed of the song doesn’t drop, losing momentum but can effect the performance of the band, especially when trying to play together and not track separately. I’d say I was trying to preserve the inherent qualities of the songs but the real reason I didn’t want to use a click track was that I read an interview with Nick Lowe who said that “music should speed up and slow down.” That was good enough for me.

Adam Cooke at the helm of the spaceship Lord Baltimore.

So now we have our instruments and our methods and we load all our crap into the studio and set it up. We have recorded a lot of times in a lot of situations but somehow you’re never quite prepared for how the songs come back from the tape the first time you hear them in the studio. Putting microphones on your instruments and amplifiers is like holding a magnifying glass up to a pencil drawing. It’s a level of detail that you didn’t really know existed. And we’ve got microphones all over the place! The drum set has about eight mics, the guitars both have two and the bass only has one.. but he gets a direct line in addition to his mic just to keep things even.

You know I don’t think that I mentioned that we are recording at Lord Baltimore Studio in Baltimore. It is a new-ish, high end-ish studio here in a town that has always needed one, especially one that is affordable and reliable. Adam Cooke is our engineer and co-producer. Adam and I have a very long history together that started in a band called Roads to Space Travel (look it up, yo!). Since then we have worked on tons of projects-mine, his and others-as well as working together at the Talking Head Club and oh yeah, I lived in his house for a couple years, too. Hey, that’s Baltimore style so, you know, to quote myself, “everyone knows everyone.”

Pushing the levels on the two-inch analog tape.

Ok well… we’ve got our stuff mic-ed up and we are rolling the tape. (In the digital vs. analog debate… we are definitely analog. Digital has it’s place and we will transfer the tapes eventually to mix but when recording, only analog tape!) I’d love to say that tracking is incredibly interesting or that we have some special way of doing it but I don’t think that is the case. Like every band has been at some point we’re in the tracking room, deciding which songs to do and how fast to do them and, in some case, how should they start and, in other cases, how should they end and when we finish a take we mosey into the control room to listen to it. By now we are sort of used to the tracks being detailed all under the magnifying glass so we are listening to our performances individually and, for as long as I can remember, there have always been two answers when deciding whether to keep a take or to re-do it. It’s either “We can do it better” or “It’s good enough”. Can’t you see it now… John Lennon looks at Paul McCartney after they hear “She Loves You” recorded for the first time and says, “It’s good enough.”

Roman and Doug, checking the tracks. “Uhh, it’s good enough, right?”

One thing that is really going for us on this session is having Doug there tracking with us. Dave and Patrick and myself have been kind of flogging these songs for about a year, really working them over so, for the most part, they are a little old to us. But having only played with Doug a handful of times and in some cases, really hearing his parts for the first time in the studio, the songs are feeling fresh and the dynamic between us is new and exciting. Recording is really a mental exercise because it is such a different way of playing and everyone’s interaction is essential and totally audible! 

Well after a couple days of monkeying around, we got our nine “good enoughs”. It was painless and without incident… we’re pros- or old, either one. The end of tracking is a relatively strange point in the process because you feel as if you’ve finished something, laid the groundwork for your entire album but somehow, you are about 25% finished. I guess I’d better get to writing those lyrics…

—Roman Kuebler

Photo: Meg Sheff-Atteberry

PopMatters has had plenty of nice things to say about Baltimore’s the Oranges Band (specifically here and here. When the band announced that they were headed into the studio to begin work on their new record, having soldiered through personnel changes and struggles at their label, Lookout Records, it seemed like an excellent time to catch up and to allow them to speak for themselves by cataloging the happenings. Over the next several weeks, Oranges Band frontman Roman Kuebler will write in with updates from the sessions for the band’s third full-length. Judging from the preview of the songs that the band gave at a recent show at Cake Shop in New York City, the arrangements are denser and the lyrics step a city block away from the sundazed atmospherics of their last album. Always an excellent live band, I’ve never heard them sound better. The hope now is that Kuebler will help us better understand the process, or at least the process in this specific case, of taking a group of people and a set of songs and bringing them into a studio for a set amount of days, singing and playing into microphones, plugging and unplugging effects boxes, adjusting levels, hoping nothing important breaks or gets lost or erased, and then, hopefully, walking out with a finished document that comes close to your expectations and which you can then turn around and call your new album.
—Jon Langmead

Doug and I met in NY to rehearse the new Oranges Band
material. We had a couple shows scheduled before we hit the
studio. My best pal Rachel from Palomar let us use their
practice space to get our crap together. There was a minor
commotion caused by new kittens… who can resist?!

The Name of This Band Is The Oranges Band

So we’re making this album and when making an album it’s important to remember that a recording is a factual document for the most part. It is the representation of a performance that happened for real. (It’s important to remember that when listening to an album also.) It is a point of view that doesn’t necessarily change anything but it does, for better or worse, kind of level the playing field. So, no matter what the budget, or where it was done, when the engineer hit the record button, David Bowie physically performed the lead vocal to “Young Americans”. (It is also rather funny to think about this fact when you hear it come on the PA at K-Mart while shopping for household items.)

Hey, that’s me taking my own pic at our practice
space in Baltimore.

Now, of course, in the context of beginning to make a new record this is NOT what you want to remember. I mean, it is really hard to try and create anything in a world where you are, theoretically, on a level field with David Bowie. But what is useful in that theory is that you have a time and a method to record these ideas that you have come up with… and that is what you have and that is when it is going to happen. All of the performances are added together and sometimes refined and sometimes redone and sometimes removed and, in the end, they make up your “SONG”. And your songs are then added and ordered and then re-ordered and sometimes removed and this makes your “ALBUM”. And it has happened a million times before and more and more and more and will continue, in some way, forever, I think.

I have to admit, though, I do tend to get a little hung up on the whole idea of the album. It’s about the potential. We all know what albums mean to us, so… you know, can I make one of those? But in starting this album, our third proper full length, the approach is meant to be a little less deliberate and a little more natural. Let the band sound like the band and let the songs be the songs… as well as they can be, at least.

Dave and Pat showing up for practice.
All the world’s a runway for these two stylish
gentlemen.

The Oranges Band on this as-yet-to-be-named album, are a much different group than we were just over a year ago and on our last album, The World and Everything In It, which came out in 2005. When dealing with a group of people you never know what is going to go down and most of the fun happens when things get unexpected. Losing our bass player to the family life and then losing both his replacement and our long-time lead guitar player to what amounts to a sitcom of inter-band dynamics left only Dave [Voyles] on the drums and myself on guitar and on the mic. Faithfully soldiering on, it took us no time at all to catch Baltimore’s Pat Martin, our erstwhile touring companion, up on the bass bits and we spent most of the year clowning around as a three piece with an occasional fourth wheel, Jim Glass (whom we borrowed from Impossible Hair) doing mostly backing vocals. But as for carrying on with this album, I think we knew that we would need to fill out the spots with another guitar (because we love guitars) and I knew that I didn’t want to just add parts on top of my parts (because I am not that impressive on the leads, eh?) so we’d need a new axe.

That’s Dave and Doug writing up the set lists backstage
at the Ottobar.

I had been wondering for awhile what we were going to do about not having that fourth corner when my friend sent me a YouTube clip of Guided By Voices playing “Pop Zeus”. The Oranges Band had toured with GBV a couple years earlier and I did a few tours playing bass with Spoon, who also toured with GBV, so I knew Doug Gillard (GBV’s only true lead guitar) and the rest of the guys well enough. Doug and I had often talked about doing some work together. As far as I am concerned, “Speak Kindly...” is the best treatment of Bob Pollard’s songs and I had dreams that Doug could work a similar strain of magic with some of my songs as well. So while I am watching this clip of “Pop Zeus” I remembered that Doug had co-written this one… and what a great song this is… and what a great player Doug is… and what ever happened to us working on some songs… and wait a minute, I need a guitar player!

And now you are wondering why, if this is a recording blog, is there no talk of recording and microphones and compression ratios and digital vs. analog and such like. Well, it’s because we haven’t started!

—Roman Kuebler