Know those first dates when immediately after you just want another? Well, today we pick up Part 2 of our sit-down with Luis Moldonado of Into The Presence. Catch the first part right here.
“With (yesterday’s) frame of mind we created the INTO THE PRESENCE album. We recorded on two in inch tape, mixed it to half inch tape and from the actual tapes cut it straight to an acetate for vinyl production.
There was not one piece of digital equipment involved in this recording except for a guitar tuner and a digital watch hanging on the wall. All reverbs, delays, phasers, and so forth were real halls, spring reverbs, tape, and analog circuitry.
We used an MCI mixing board with no automation. The mic pre-amps on the board actually sounded miles ahead of most rackmount pre-amps that people use to warm up their Protools system. The tape itself had an amazing tone. The tone that everyone I know wants to get on their digital system, we had right there at the touch of the record button. No additional outboard gear or plug-ins to “simulate” that warm analog sound, we had the real thing without hours of effort.
With that, we were able to perform without hard drive backups, digital converters, and endless keyboard tinkering. As we thought, we performed, and tracked exactly what we felt.
We thankfully did not have the options of auto-tuning the vocals, nudging the drum tracks, cutting and pasting parts to create “simulated performances”. There was no “comp-ing” or endless tracks of “just in case” parts.
We committed to some very fundamental philosophies. Each note had to be important, whether it was a hundred notes or one note, it has to make a inspired statement. We wrote the parts before we tracked them. That allowed us to do first takes a majority of the time and move on quickly while staying inspired. Also capturing the essence of the actual tone of each instrument allowed us to capture the purity of the performance. Good sound inspires good things. With those things in mind we were able to write from a creative standpoint using our ears, and it saved of eyes from getting monitor burnout from looking at a screen. When we mixed we had no automation, so Tim and I with both hands were moving faders and compressor knobs as well as tape delay knobs. That alone was another creative process on its own.
If you buy the vinyl, I can assure you what we heard coming back from our monitors during mix down is what you will get on the vinyl. HONESTLY.
The lathe was cut right off the tapes with not one thing in the way. We were listening to the test pressing the other day and we would play other vinyl copies of music that inspired us and feel we accomplished making a true album. No format, no mentality for the “hit”. An honest record inspired as it was recorded.
INTO THE PRESENCE will be available in vinyl format June of 2009. We are also releasing it digitally through iTunes on April 28th from Razor and Tie records. Hopefully everyone will be able to listen to it from an honest, unbiased, and pure mindset as we recorded it.
The INTO THE PRESENCE album was meant to be on vinyl from the beginning. A common thing to do is to record on a digital system, master it digitally and then send a digital master to vinyl. We did no such thing. We kept it real and unprocessed. The difference to record digitally and then transfer to vinyl, from recording it analog and transfer to vinyl is night and day. I can’t say working in the analog format is for everybody, but it is what Tim and I found as INTO THE PRESENCE that works best for our creative process. We will continue to do so, until there is a much more refined analog system that surpasses ours.
Digital will always be digital no matter how high the bit rate, so I’m not sure we will venture into that realm, perhaps way later if we start needing new electronic type sounds. However our instruments at the end of the day have nothing to do with the machines that aid us in documenting. Tim’s instrument of expression is not the two inch machine or the microphones, it is his drums, his hands and mind. My instrument of expression is not my tape delays or the huge tubes in the amps, it is my voice, my guitar and my mind as well.”
