Drums:
1966 Ludwig Blue Sparkle Super Classic
Ludwig Supraphonic 14 x 6.5 Snare Drum
Zildjian 14" A New Beat HiHats
Paiste 302 Plus Crash/Ride 20" Cymbal
Amps
Vox Heritage Collection AC30H2 30W 2x12 Handwired All Tube Guitar Combo Amp
Roland KC-150
Fender '65 Twin Reverb
Vox AC30 Guitar Combo Amp
Fender FSR Blues Junior III Butterscotch
Pedais
Dunlop JDF2 Fuzz Face
Boss DD-20 Giga Delay Digital Delay Pedal
MXR Dyna Comp Compressor M102
Diamond Vibrato Pedal
Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Phase Shifter Effects Pedal
MXR Carbon Copy Analog Delay
Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Nano Reverb Guitar Effects Pedal
Empress Compressor
Dunlop Cry Baby Wah Pedal
Hotone Skyline Octa Octave Pedal
TC Helicon VoiceTone D1 Doubling Detune Pedal
Boss Roland RE-20 Space Echo Pedal
Roland GR -55 Guitar Synthesizer Multi Effects Pedal
Empress ParaEq
Synths Roland Juno-106 Synthesizer
Compressores DBX 165A Compressor (drum compressor)
The story behind Tame Impala’s one-man production process.
Story: Mark Davie
Some kids create imaginary friends. Kevin Parker just replicated himself. Parker is Tame Impala, a one-man psych rock band in which he does the lot: sings, drums, plays guitar and keyboards. And he records it all himself. So convincing is his act , that unlike sample- based artists, or bedroom DJs, there’s no distinguishing between the recorded ensemble constructed of versions of himself and a real live band. But even after the year-long solitary confinement in his bedroom that resulted in Tame Impala’s second album, Lonerism, Parker says he never actuall y gets lonely going about it the way he does. “I’m usually thinking and doing so much I feel like I’m in a room full of different versions of myself, all having a big conversation about the next step,” muses Parker. “It’s pretty egotistical now that I think about it!” THREE’S COMPANY
The crux of Parker’s recording methodology was formed at an early age — 11, 12, maybe — between the heads of two tape decks. His older brother had pioneered the way, recording tapes of himself playing drumbeats. Not quite at the same level of proficiency on drums, but inquisitive nonetheless, Parker followed suit. Then in the annoying way that younger siblings do, he one- upped his elder. Once he’d laid down a rudimentary backbeat, he dug up another tape deck, realising he could dub the contents of the first onto this new device, all while adding a single-note Casio keyboard solo. In retrospect the genre-less minute of one-finger clunking wasn’t as spectacular as the young Parker thought, but at the time it was the most “fantastical discovery”. He became obsessed, not because he’d figured out how to dub, but because he was jamming along with himself. “I couldn’t even play for shit. But it was amazing!” Said Parker. “There’s been no real structural change since then, I’ve just slowly gotten better at it.” TECHNICAL TABOOS
By ‘better’, he mostly means as a player, drumming especially. On the technical side, he still admits it’s a game of trial and error. “I still do things where a professional would have a heart attack,” said Parker. Taboo moves like plugging microphones into unbalanced laptop line inputs, with the help of some makeshift jack adaptors stickytaped together. The result was a completely out of phase vocal take, that while sounding trippy in ill-placed stereo speakers, had no chance when summed to mono. Not even psychedelic maharishi mixer, David Fridmann, could fix that one. “There are so many things I don’t know, and I just do them anyway,” he continues. “I’ve just gone blindly into the dark, because if I enjoy listening back to it right there and then, then I’m happy. I don’t feel a need to be as good as real professionals.” His pet area is drums. Perfecting the art of playing, recording, and mixing them in the Tame Impala mode is like an addiction. It’s a ’70s revival sound that dovetails perfectly with his Lennon-like vocals and fuzzy guitar. “I do love the idea of getting an awesome drum sound. I spend literally months on them,” he said. “If you tallied up the hours I spent on the drums for this album it would be ridiculous. Probably more time than the vocals.” And it’s worth it. Each track on a Tame Impala album is treated to a cleverly
constructed, and per fectly fitting drum track. His fluid style works because he doesn’t track the drums first, preferring instead to wait for inspiration to strike, rather than committing to rigid rhythmic structure. “I’ll do the drums when I sta rt feeling inspired to do a dr um beat,” he said. “If I’ve got the guitar down, and there’s a drum beat playing in my head, then I’ll just go on the drums and try and play along to it until i t sounds cool.” When you’re recording on your own, emulating that feeling you get feeding off th e energy of other musicians is the hardest part, e specially when you’re trying to track energetic rhythm sections. Though Parker doesn’t bother with elaborate monitor mixes, he just turns it up. “If you’ve got it up loud enough in your headphones then the headphones are going to start distorting, which gives you a kind of natural compression,” said Parker. “But that’s the thing. When you’re in a room with a drum kit, it’s so f**king loud that it doesn’t need to be compressed. The natural
sound of a
drum kit is so bad ass that it doesn’t need the effects when you track it, you just need to be feeling the groove. You just have to do whatever you can to enjoy what you’re listening to while you’re doing it. If it’s in any way annoying, or you have to endure it, you’re not going to get the most expressive take, which is what it’s all about. So you have to set up your environment so you’re in love with what you’re hearing as often as possible.”
KICKING CONVENTION
As for how he mics them up, he wouldn’t give too much away. The bulk of it is three mics, though not in any Glyn Johns-style arrangement. It’s basically a Rode K2 valve condenser (given to him by a friend that felt sorr y for Parker’s mic collection) as a mono overhead, and Shure SM57s for kick and snare. Where he puts the snare mic, he says, is top secret. And while he draws the ir e of engineers for using a 57 for the kick, it achieves exactly what he’s after. Parker: “Our sound guy always says, ‘It’s not a ver y good mic to use. Are you sure you don’t want to try something else that’s meant for a kick drum?’ But I just love that ‘bop bop’ sound of the kick. I hate the kic k drum sound that’s way too clicky.” As for the K2, he says, “I’m not even sure if you’re meant to use that as an overhead. I think it might be a vocal mic or something. But it works, and at the end of the day, even
if you’re doing it wrong, the fact that you’re doing it wrong is going to make it s ound different to how everyone else used it, which is ult imately a good thing. If you make it sound different in some way, then it’s going to give it a flavour differ ent to everyone else that’s using the gear as it should be used.” IF IT’S GOOD, IT’S GOOD
His total disregard for convention is admirable for a guy that’s been recording music since his childhood. You can only have respect for someone that goes completely his own way — technical proficiency be damned — yet still manages to release two of the most stimulating records of recent times. The latest of which, Lonerism, just debuted at #34 on the Billboard charts, #14 in the UK, and #4 in Australia. And he’s not worried about anyone judging him for a perceived lack of technical nous, because “if it sounds good, it sounds good.” Too true. With all this cosmic mangling of sound and makeshift technique, you’d think Parker would also be allergic to capturing natural sounds. But he doesn’t see it that way. Take the drums. To him, the typical sound of drums in a room is so loud that it’s “bad ass” and already compressed. So, naturally, he uses a lot of compression. Parker: “Compressors are what make awesome drum sounds. So I have a couple of vintage compressors. One of them is a dbx 165 that’s prett y much responsible for making the drums sound like John Bonham. I got it purely by chance. I bought it just before working on Innerspeaker because I felt like I should get some boxes with knobs on them with the album budget. I thought, ‘alright, I’ll just go on eBay and get a vintage compressor.’ I didn’t even know what I was doing the first time I used it, but I put the drums through it and it sounded pumping, like hip hop — it sounded awesome.” As for vocals, Parker usually holds on to a Sennheiser 421, and either sits or stands, depending on how his mood grabs him. It’s nice to know too, that even someone w ho regularly sounds like John Lennon reincarnate, hates his voice on record too: “ I usually double track it because I hate the sound of my voice on its own. If I’m still hating it after that I’ll just lob it into the great sea of echo.” GOING LIVE
Parker r ecorded Tame Impala’s first full-length Innerspeaker in a rented mansion entirely on a Boss 16-track digital recorder his dad bought him when he was 16. Not exactly the most spec’d out of interfaces. Fridmann, who has mixed both Tame Impala albums, got in his ear about upgrading after the first album. “I still love them. But Dave was encouraging me to try a more versatile recording format, rather than just a physical multi-track,” said Parker. “I just kept it until someone gave me something else to record with.” That ‘something else’ ended up being a copy of Ableton Live recommended by his friends because it was, ‘full-sick, and you can make electronic music and stuff.’ From the outside, it seems an odd choice of DAW platform for someone that’s mostly recording live psych rock, but Parker started fooling around with it, and fell in l ove once he realised he “could make Tame Impala music with it”. He doesn’t delve too deep into Ableton’s onboard synths though, and if he did, they would be treated to the typical Tame process of “putting it through some really crazy things, just to make it sound f**ked up.” For the most part he uses analogue synths,: “The first one I got was a Sequential Circuits Pro One. There’s a lot of that on the album,” said Parker. “I fell in love with it from the first moment I pressed down a key, and it pretty much kicked off my love of synths. Then I got a Roland Juno 106 and one
of those Radioshack synths. I just love the way they have this completely different origin of sound to something like a guitar. After all the effects and everything they can both end up in the same place, but the way the sound is produced makes you think a bit differently about how you’re going to play these chords, this melody, or whatever. They have this laser beam kind of sound that makes me want to cry every time I hear a chord played.” ROUGH MIX
David Fridmann, also being the custodian of the Flaming Lips and MGMT mixes, is the perfect engineer to harness Tame Impala’s cosmic energy. The issue is finding the balance between creative sonic arrangement and listenability. Parker supplies Fridmann with the tracks in a state that’s “sometimes totally raw, sometimes post-‘me messing with it’.” But he usually knocks up at least a rough mix to give Fridmann an idea of what he’s going for. “I’ll do a mix of the song as best I can with all the weird shit that I’m dreaming about, which is another thing that takes me so much more time than it should,” he said. “I’ll spend weeks and weeks trying to get a good mix of the song t hat’s not even going to be used. I don’t even know why I do it. I usually give him a drum mix to use, and the individual drums if he wants to poke them in there. He usually replicates it, but in a way that’s so much more dynamic, and with crunch and groov e in all the right places. Whatever it is that he’s doing, he makes it sound 10 times better than I ever can. It’s crazy and cosmic, but still listenable. “When I play it to Dave he says, ‘Alright, cool. But what the f**k is that flange on the whole mix?’ My methods usually aren’t conducive to a ‘pleasant’ sounding mix. “Sometimes he goes totally rogue and throws in a wild vocal dela y that lasts for the rest of the song once it’s set off. The effects and sounds are pretty important to the song. I usually start adding those kinds of things while I’m still writ ing the song, so they totally influence the evolution of it. For example, about halfway through Mind Mischief, a giant sweeping flanger falls over the whole mix, it’s at this moment that the chords change and it gets really emotional for me. That flanger coming in is just as important to the overall feeling of the song as a new lead melody or any other instrument part coming in.” SELF TURNED PRODUCER
Ironically, Parker’s production and mixing skills are now sought after by like -minded artists. Particularly for his drum sounds, but obviously also for his incredible ear for what sounds good, and experimental nature. Good friends, Pond, who Parker also plays drums for, have got him turning the knobs. Which could be a very regular gig, seeing as Pond has intentions to release albums every six months for t he foreseeable future. And his latest efforts for Melody’s Echo Chamber have so far been highly rated. “ Luckily, so far I’ve been really good friends with the people whose music I’ve mixed/produced, so we already have a great communication about music and sounds, and I usually get what they’re trying to do,” said Parker. “And messing with sounds is easily my biggest hobby, so that makes it pretty fun… not having to think artistically and just being the guy with the hands on the knobs and switches.”
Kevin Parker goes ‘old school’ and mixes Currents himself, finding a balance between lo-fi and his own teenage nostalgia. Story: Mark Davie
Artist: Tame Impala Album: Currents
“Just got back from tour,” explained Tame Impala frontman, Kevin Parker, settli ng in for a chat. “Decompressing… no pun intended.” For anyone that’s followed Parker’s trajectory, compression is no joke. Aside from those catchy psych-pop melodies, Lennon-esque dreamy falsetto, and Dunlop fuzz guitars, the sound of lo-fi, squashed drums was probably the most identifiable part of Tame Impala’s breakthrough album Innerspeaker . And even though the second album Lonerism felt harder to lump in as psych rock, the legacy of Tame Impala continued to be built on that specific kind of nostalgia. The latest album, Currents, trades on a newer sort of nostalgia, one that — as a teen of the ’90s — resonates more personally for Parker. You can hear it in the hard-ended repetitions of a scratched CD stuck in a loop on lead track Let It Happen, the Boyz II Men R&B drum machine and ’verby claps on Love Paranoia, and the chiming clarity of digital synths throughout. “I got a few new keyboards. All I had last time was a Roland Juno 106 and a Sequential Circuits Pro One,” said Parker. “I fell in love with those naff ’90s -sounding keyboards. I’ve got a Roland JV1080 synth module you can plug a MIDI keyboard into. An audiophile would think some of the patches are the cheapest, plasticky sounds. But for me they’re so romantically nostalgic. Because they’re t he sounds I remember from when I was growing up in the ’90s. The sounds that remind me of something I heard on the radio in the car. “That’s the truest kind of nostalgia I can find. Those plasticky sounds are far more nostalgic and hit a deeper spot for me than hearing a vintage Fender twin. Even though they’re sort of cheap sounds, they sound deeply fulfilling. There’s a lot of that on the album, glistening FM synth electro Rhodes, like a digital clav.” It’s a tough break for those young producers who’ve toiled over their Tame Impala emulations: Tea towels on kits, saving up for Juno 106s on eBay, and asking forums
whether a dbx 160A would substitute for a dbx 160VU. Now they’re going to have to contend with an inflated market for Roland JV1080s. Parker is the modern home studio poster boy. The ideal for a lot of bedroom producers who like the idea of rock ’n’ roll, but don’t necessaril y want to deal with band politics when it comes to writing songs. Just like those ‘lucky’ electronic producers, he justified the case for aspiring rockers to forgo the usual band-in-a-studio route, and play everything into a DAW themselves. The demo-in-a-day deal market has shrunk with the rise of a growing contentedness to wile away at the process rather than feel forced to produce in a short window. Of course, not everyone is K evin Parker. In fact, no one else is. But it hasn’t stopped leagues of musicians trying to emulate his ever y sound, image, and pedal board purchase.
IN-HOUSE MIX
While flying completely solo looks nice on paper, for this generation of psych rockacquainted bedroom producers, one name (outside their own) they’d be happy to see on the mix credit is Dave Fridmann’s. Fridmann is the hero of indie psych -rock mixing; fearlessly experimental and not afraid to go for colour. Probably most well-known for producing and mixing The Flaming Lips, he’s also leant psychedelic weight to Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, MGMT, Mogwai, and so many more. When Parker handed the mix for Tame Impala’s second album, Lonerism, to Fridmann, that combo became the benchmark for this crowd. For his latest album, Current s, Parker decided to take back the reins and do the whole thing himself; play, record, and mix at home. He’s mixed his own music before, and
done the same for Pond and Melody’s Echo Chamber, but taking over after such success with Fridmann must have required a newfound confidence. “It wasn’t even really confidence,” said Parker. “It was more like a leap of faith. I just wanted to see if I could do it myself. Dave is an amazing mix engineer. Even as I was doing it myself I found that I was pretending to be him. “Because of the sound and the way the songs were coming together, it felt like an altogether different way of mixing anyway. I was combining things usually done in the electronic world — like looping whole sections of the mix while leaving others unlooped on top, and filtering whole sections — but at the same time trying to get the drums to sound classic, awesome, and Dave Fridmann-y.” Fridmann-y is a difficult adjective to describe, says Parker. “Naturally it’s all those nuances you can’t properly describe that he does so well. If you could put it into words, that would mean you could probably copy it really easily. It’s the way his sound is so crispy and cooked, so deep- fried, but at the same time, so punchy, and doesn’t sacrifice the impact the mix has. That’s the elusive paradox that he’s nailed. The drums can be absolutely swampy and sizzling, yet at the same ti me hit you right in the chest. “People generally pass that off as an easily attainable thing, just drive it through a preamp and slap a limiter on it, you know. But it’s so much more elusive that that. You only realise how much of an artform that is when you tr y to do it yourself. “I’ve got my own experience of mixing that I’ve been getting better and bett er at over the years. Which, for me, is the most important thing. I’ve got my mixing style, my drum sounds, and effects I use. It’s mainly instinct that I’m going on. I just have to hope that it comes out sounding listenable.”
“They’re the sounds I remember from when I was growing up in the ’90s. That’s the truest kind of nostalgia I can find” A NEW PHASE
When we last talked to Parker, he was revelling in his relative engineering naiveté; recording vocals with a mic wired out of phase, plugging mics into the ‘wrong’ inputs. But this time he stepped up his professional attitude. “That’s not to say it was all the way there,” he laughs. “I still do things that would be laughable to professional recording engineers. To me it justifies the way I do it in a sense. I have a disturbed pride in the fact I don’t do it like everyone else. I don’t do it in Pro Tools. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. But to me it feels good that I’m a bit rogue. “Julian, the other drummer in Tame, he played me this album the other day. And I thought he’d gone to an extremely professional studio in France. It sounded amazing. But then he told me he did it all in Garageband. I couldn’t believe it. It’s the world we live in these days, there are no rules.” Taking on the mix was as much about gauging his current ability to pull it off, as it was an excuse to get some new gear. Gear only a professional would use. “It was a good excuse to buy stuff I could never justify getting, unless it was something as important as
mixing my own album. It sounds selfish. I’m not a professional studio owner, who lives off mixing people’s albums. So I’ve never really bought gear that is just involved in mixing.” The main adjustment to his mixing routine has been an analogue summing setup that takes that task out of Ableton Live’s hands and adds a bit of colour to the stereo bus. He bought two 16-channel Lynx Aurora converters that feed a pair of passive 16-channel RMS216 Folcrom passive summing mixers. The sum of the 16 stereo channels hits a pair of Neve 1073DPA preamps first to “crunch the mix up” and make up gain, then an SPL Vitalizer, the one piece he’s had for a while and is “just like a glorified EQ that adds a bit of artificial valve quality.” The last thing strapped across the master bus is a Manley Vari-Mu compressor before it gets fed back i nto the DAW to print. The gear doesn’t see any use other than for mixing, so it allows Parker to leave it set up and return to any mix at will. “I’ve always loved mixing with Ableton,” said Parker. “But I love the sound of a mix being crunched together in analogue. I love the sound of a desk, but I hate not being able to recall any time I want. I flit between songs, sometimes every few minutes. It goes completely against my workflow to have to set up for one song by going around the room and setting EQ knobs on a desk and adjusting faders to how the mix was last time. It’s against how I’ve grown up working.” It’s a big step up from “just whatever plug-in in Ableton” he used to place over his master bus. He’s always had outboard channel compressors, but never pressed them into service over his whole mix. That’s no knock on Ableton though, Parker is still a dedicated Live user. “It’s ultimately just what you’re used to. Everyone barracks for their favourite, like a football team. But for me, I find Live so expressive. The whole point of it is that you can link anything to anything, and the automation is amazing. When I’ve been standing over someone’s shoulder watching them use Pro Tools to automate stuff, it seems so laborious. It doesn’t want you to automate. It doesn’t want you to change things that are s o easy to change on Ableton. “I make our live shows on Ableton as well, which demonstrates how versatile it is. The basis of it is just so flexible, and I can move almost as quick as my brain is moving.”
HYBRID DRUMS
Parker recorded Currents in his home studio, where he has two rooms joined; one acting as a control room, the other houses his ‘mongrel of a kit’. “Parts of it are from my old ’60s Ludwig I used on Lonerism,” said Parker. “The kick is a vintage Tama kick I’ve had forever.” As for mics this time, Parker wasn’t that fussed about sticking to a set routine. “It was a bit of a range this time. Between several mics to just one, it really just comes down to how set up the studio is at the time I’m inspired. If I’m inspired to record some drums and there’s only one mic there, then I’ll just say, ‘f**k it.’ Just record it with one mic and go with it. I’m not prec ious. I used a Shure SM7 on a lot of stuff, for drums and vocals. “A lot of the drums were a cross between the real kit, a sampler on Ableton with something deep and woofy for the kick, and some drum machine sounds. I’m in love with the Sequential Circuits Drum Tracks drum machine, it’s m y favourite drum machine. I recorded a lot of claps m yself and used them as a set sample. I just recorded a bunch in a row, with a different hand position each time and put them all together at
once, spaced slightly apart. I try and get the best combination so it sounds the most feel good, ‘party times’.” For guitar recording, Parker uses his go-to guitar signal chain: “It’s the same pedal chain I’ve had for ages; reverb, a bit of compression, a bit of overdrive. I have this Seymour Duncan rack preamp that I love. They didn’t make very many, and it’s not even very good quality, but for some reason, I can’t find anything that’s got the same kind of sizzle to it. I DI all guitars… I haven’t used an amp in years.” There are some heavy riffs on the record, especially the one that pounds out the choruses in the otherwise dream poppy Eventually. But, rather than layering lots of parts, Parker says, “It’s just a guitar riff, bass riff, and a synth that’s escalating in pitch to add some tension. I find that when you try and make something heavy, the less elements you have in it, the bigger it sounds. If you try and make a heav y riff with seven guitars, three different types of synth, a bass synth, and a bass guitar, it reall y just muddies it up and loses impact.” TRANSITIONING OUT OF LO-FI
These days, Parker is using lo-fi elements as a transition effect. Similar to how mix engineers often make the chorus wider, he’ll just dial up the nostalgia in the intros and verses to lull your ears, before hitting them with t he power of a full-spectrum sound. It happens a few times across the record; band-passing the drums and guitar intro on The Less I Know Better , and turning the first half of Disciples into a radio pop single from the ’50s. Parker: “For the static on Disciples, I tuned my car stereo to an AM station that wasn’t an actual channel, recorded the static and mixed that in. Someone told me that AM didn’t have anything past 6kHz. So when I mixed it, I just lopped everything past that point to make the whole track sound like it was coming out of an AM radio. I used a multi-band compressor and followed the middle band, so it had that compressed, boxedin sound. When you turn it off, the song suddenly opens up. I love switching between the two, because your ears adjust to that set of spectrum. It’s like, ‘ok, this is what I’m listening to.’ Your ears forget about the sub and the super top. And all of a sudden, when they kick in, it’s like this sensory, pleasurable thing. “I’ve always tried to make things hi-fi, but I just haven’t had the ability. At the same time I’ve always loved lo-fi sounds. To me, they’re always the most instantly cinematic. Anything lo-fi, wobbly and crusty instantly transports you. In the past, I’ve used that effect, but it was the whole sound. But this time I’ve been embracing different kinds of textures. “Not just lo-fi sounds, but juxtaposing sounds that are super clean and super crisp. It makes it sound more like I’ve sampled something and put it in there. I was obsessed with that idea, in the way that hip hop has this really high-quality vocal, and maybe a high-quality drum machine, then the guitar that comes in is totally crusty and boxy sounding. I love that kind of juxtaposition of sound quality.” Already a master of nostalgia, this new sort Parker has added to his sonic repertoire perfectly complements the eclectic nature of his new material. While it was wrong to pigeon-hole Lonerism as just psych rock, Currents is completely new ground for Tame Impala that feels vaguely familiar.
