Chords for YOB & Bell Witch studio tricks: throwing amps at the ground and noise tracks I Aggressive Tendencies

As far as the noise track on the Bellwitch record went, we just set up _ _ _ _ five amps, I think,
and just cranked them up, put a bunch of pedals that I'd never used before out, [Db] and
the engineer, Billy Anderson, hit record and played back everything that we had
laid down track-wise so far.
[B] I just tried to make the weirdest noises [Gb] that I possibly could,
and make it kind of like play along with the _ song.
I think we did two or three passes of that
[G] before.
It was like, okay, that third one's pretty good.
We didn't use a whole lot of it.
There's
parts that we really cranked it up into the mix on the final [B] recording.
There were times [Bb] that it
wasn't really very present at all.
[Db] I think the idea was just to [D] kind of see what could come out
of it, [B] and how does that maybe bring out [A] things that weren't highlighted before or [Bbm] properly in the
limelight to begin with.
And I think it did a good job of that.
I'm really glad we did it.
I'll probably try to do it on every record I ever do going forward.
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_ _ _ _ [N] Kind of added in yours, there's like a, it's like this arcane quality, but also like this kind of
just sense of like an undomesticated just, ah.
Sure, like it seems like it fits, but I can't, when I listen back, I'm like, I don't know where
that's coming from.
I know where it's coming from because I made it, but it sounds like it.
We knew that we had a big thing that we were going to do at the end of Our Raw Heart,
but we had yet really to like figure it out.
We knew we [Ab] would let the main ending section carry,
and then it was a matter of feeling it out really.
And so that was kind of the improv element.
And
then as time went on, as we were doing that, when we started getting ideas of things to try,
and the coolest idea that I think we had, [G] it was our engineer's idea, Billy [N] Barnett,
because he has an old deluxe reverb and a late 60s Tele with a big speed, and we tuned it to D,
so it would be at least close to the same key [A] and figured out where it would sit in A.
And so I would hit that chord in [N] time, and he was in another ISO booth, so we could see each other,
and he was [A] holding the deluxe [Eb] reverb, and it has the [Gb] reverb tanks in there, which are springs,
and whenever you move those things around, you can hear the springs.
And so he had that [N] mic'd up and then a mic on the ground, so I would hit on the upbeat,
and then he would shake the amp _ in between so we could hear the reverb springs, and then he
would drop it on the ground on the downbeat.
_ _ And we did this for five minutes, where it'd be all
brrrring, and he'd be all shhhhh, bam!
And that's like a $1200 amp probably.
Maybe not so much yet, the next day.
Yeah, [D]
exactly.
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And then the other thing that [N] we did is we used Singing Bowl,
and we recorded a Singing Bowl at 33, _ [A] and then we also recorded a Singing Bowl at 15-iffs,
[N] and then played it back at regular speed so it pitched up, so there'd be two different levels
of Singing Bowl happening at the same time, and then just the right amount of riding an
Echoplex and riding it to get it to have the right amount of effect going.
And so that was
all just kind of created in the moment, and we had to do a couple [Gb] passes at it until we got it
the way we liked [Bb] it.
But what it requires to some degree is that we don't have time for that if
we're busy trying to get [A] takes.
We had to be really rehearsed on our own, and we were recording to
tape, [Bb] so we didn't have, as far as doing [Gb] things in one take for rhythm, we didn't have a lot of
ways to edit easily.
But we practiced a lot, and so we made a lot of time to do a lot of fun things,
and that's great.
[Am] Those moments, they can make the records.
[Gb] Did you do that on a lot of the other records as well?
I mean, maybe different, but_
[Bb] Yes more than no.
Yeah, there's definitely always [E] ideas and spaghetti being thrown at the wall.
See what's stuck, but it is absolutely.
Or when you get in the studio and realize that your
entire vocal idea really doesn't work, and then you have to rewrite everything,
[N] _ but for the better.
So yeah, that happened.
That's cool.
In the studio where we did the drum tracks,
Billy Barnett, his first studio he had in 1970, and so he's been slowly accumulating gear over
decades, and things that are very exorbitant now, it's not like they were cheap then, but they
weren't as rarified.
And so, like on the microphone, on the drum set, there's, I mean, I think he had
like 50,000 bucks worth of microphones on the drum set, two microphones of which accounted for 30,
_ but one of the microphones that we used quite a bit, he calls the Sprayto mic, and it's just this
old Sony microphone from the 40s or 50s when you would buy like your home recording, you [Bb] know,
two track [A] reel to reel, and it came [F] with a little piece [N] of crap microphone from Sony, which actually
really wasn't a piece of crap at all, but it's kind of a piece of crap, but we had that on the
drum set too, and we used it a lot. _
_ Just to give it that extra weird texture.
Yeah, it was the kind
of thing that like you put it in there and go, oh, that's interesting, you hear it by yourself,
you're like, oh, I'm not sure, and then you take it out of the mix and go, oh, we got to put that
back in there.
And maybe even [Bb] like some parts that's like higher than others in the mix, so [G] yeah,
that's fun stuff.
Yeah, we end up favoring that microphone on a [N] number of occasions, so really
it's, _ you know, you can have a bunch of fancy stuff, and certainly that's fun, but there's a
lot of cool tricks to be had with janky gear, and we've already decided on our next one, we're going
to start accumulating noise samples and weird things before we're even recording.
It's like
field recordings, just walking around, yeah.
Start getting a noise brewery.
Yeah, that's good.
That's a lot of fun
just to do throughout the day anyway, like thinking about the noises that these mics are picking up,
like car honks, like you slow that down 50%.
Exactly.
A bunch of reverb, that could be pretty sick.
Or hailstorm.
I have a buddy who recorded a hailstorm and then slowed it down to like 10%.
Like a barn with a tent.
And then he just puts a lot of reverb on it, and it just sounds like
comets of