Episode 114 - Cian Riordan
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 114
May 14, 2024
w/ Cian Riordan - Week 6
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Show Notes
Q: What was the process for the new St. Vincent album?
Annie and I realized early on that we were kindred sonic spirits.
She's very self-sufficient in the studio, so one goal is to figure out how to support her in that way.
I helped her build a new studio at her home.
She started accumulating a lot of very specific hardware that was leading towards a specific aesthetic.
She has a quick and fast interest in drum machines and modular synthesizers.
She took to modular synths quickly.
A big question was how do we streamline the workflow, but make it an old school workflow with a patch bay and gear.
Setting up a patch bay was a big unlock for her because it allowed her go to town with routing the instruments through her outboard gear.
She is very capable as a producer and engineer and I really tried to grease the wheels and enable her in this way.
She was really driving the ship and making the decisions on this record.
Violent Times was entirely written and produced during the last record, but never released.
Justin Meldal-Johnsen (JMJ) contributed some additional engineering to the record.
Annie would go to the studio and paint in his world and then bring it back to her studio.
The mixing happened in parallel with the production
I probably spent a year mixing this record.
This gave me perspective to go back to a song three months later and approach it differently.
Flea was already a produced and mixed record before we brought in Dave Grohl to play drums on it, so there was some peeling-back of the record that needed to happen to give him space to contribute.
Everyone that contributed to this record did so with a lot of reverence for Annie and what she's about.
Annie was very open to her collaborators bringing their own perspective.
Q: How did you approach the sonics?
Personally, all of the references we discussed were inspiration. Very rarely was I A/B'ing songs to match something.
We were frequently listening to records and asking "What can we take away from this?"
Annie explicitly wanted the record to be competitively loud, but we all strove to make it dynamic.
On Broken Man, we deliberately added some very dynamic "jump scare" loudness to the record.
Shoutout to Ruairí O'Flaherty who mastered the record and didn't smooth out the dynamics that we'd spend so much time developing, like many mastering engineers might.
Q: How did you approach consistency in the drums?
There were no rules.
Some songs had "au naturale" drum recordings while other records I did whatever it took to make them cut through a wall of sound.
Broken Man had three drummers on the track, myself, Mark Giuliana, and Dave Grohl
We did some drum tracking at Electrical Audio with Mark.
Dave was recorded in the guest bedroom at Annie's home.
We switched from Mark to Dave during the outro.
For cohesion between the two halves I took some room samples from Mark's performance and blended them with Dave's kit.
You're done with a mix when nothing else is distracting you.
It was a rare luxury to be along for the record from beginning to end. I don't always get to mix stuff I track, nor do I get to track the records I'm hired to mix.
Matt:
It is very, very hard to be both the artist and the producer and the mixer and to know when the record is done.
Cian:
Tracking Dave was a bucket list item for me. Nirvana is the way I came up playing drums.
He is the coolest, easiest guy to get along with. We ended up chatting for two hours before we even got into the music.
People at that level don't give a fuck about the drums. They just sit down and say that it sounds good once they play.
Q: Are there any differences in how these elite drummers are hitting the drums?
There were some instances where I had zero time to get ready
There's no rhyme or reason. I just had to get a result.
The nice thing about these great drummers is that I'm not thinking about editing. I'm instead thinking about comping and picking from the great takes.
I then get to do my job and just listen to the sonics and Annie gets to listen to how it fits into her song.
On Hell Is Near, we recorded with a large setup, but ended up paring it down to a simpler and simpler setup.
All of the drums were recorded throughout a console and outboard gear, which allowed me to easily have a great monitoring sound and various auxes ready to go.
Being able to manipulate that in real time is very easy with a console and a patch bay.
Did you ever struggle to mix as you were producing?
As much of a luxury as it was to not have a deadline, it was slightly crippling because I could keep fiddling with the record.
Some songs were very close after signing off on the production, and some took much more time to refine and complete.
Being very close to the subject material made it hard to know if I was making the right moves
I had a crisis of confidence partway through and ended up changing speakers partway through mixing the record
It was all in pursuit of this sonic outcome I had in mind.
I was originally on a pair of ATC 25's with some subs and switched to a pair of PMC 6-2s.
It was very clear when I heard the record through the PMCs that I was given more information about how it would translate into the real world. They really paint the full picture, although I do have my grips about how they voice the midrange.
I found the ATCs had a midrange that I liked.
There's something about having a single integrated speaker box (rather than a hodge-podge of different speakers) that really works.
808s are pitched and you really need to be able to hear that pitch.
The PMCs made it far more detailed and easy to discern.
I have a pair of NS10's that I will occasionally reference.
Although switching between them and my PMCs doesn't make any sense until the very end of the process.
NS10's are great for getting the vocal in the right place where it's close to getting masked by the music.
Last Comments
Take some time. There's a bit of a rat race to continually create. For me this record was a testament to living with your ideas, proof-reading your work, and having a vision.
Spend some time going to other spaces, listening to music, and working with other people. Anything that will allow you to distinguish yourself.
It's definitely my best work.
