Ben Green (Fairweather-keyboards/vocals)
SPB: Did you experiment with different sounds in the studio for Deluge, or did you enter knowing exactly what equipment you wanted to capture it? (Do you have any examples of equipment that helped to define this EP?)
Green: Lots of different guitar sounds went into the recording of this record. I think my guitar parts were mainly recorded using either a Jazzmaster or an Ernie Ball Music Man Stingray guitar, which I love to play, but really the instrument choices came down to the specific parts we were playing. We used a mixture of different amps - Vox AC30, Orange Rockerverb 50, Marshall JCM800, and Roland Jazz Chorus 120 were the main ones we used. Nick used his old Fender P Bass on everything I think, and into a Gallien Krueger 800RB. One of the important pedal chains we used on his bass tones was a mix of a Rat and a Dunwich Labs Volt Thrower, which just has this incredible mid bite and this buzzy, almost synthy top end. On “Control,” I reamped the bass track so that it was super filtered out into the Roland Jazz Chorus to get that stereo width those amps are so primed for. Mics on the guitars were always Beyerdynamic M160s or Cascade Fathead IIs. I like a dark, sweet sound from guitar mics.
Truthfully I can't remember which drum kit we used. I think Shane's trusty Premier Kit. I believe the snare we switched between a Gretsch Brooklyn Chrome/Brass and a Q Drum copper snare. Much of the sound of the drums comes from the way they sound run through an Overstayer Modular Channel, which is an incredible piece of gear that is a little hard to describe. It is a set of preamps, a stereo resonance filter, EQ, compressor, and saturator, and then those sections of the unit can all be mixed in different ways. The filtering effects are unreal, and the compression and saturation are unlike anything I've ever heard. Often I'd run just the kick and snare and ambient mics through the Modular Channel and compress them with these hyper exaggerated attack and release settings to get these dramatic dynamic snaps and pumps from the drums, then re-run with slightly different settings, and layer them together.
The end mix-down all runs through some additional parallel drum compression with an Overstayer SFE compressor, a BURL Vancouver summing mixer and then ends using an Overstayer MAS distortion unit, which is just barely touched. Obviously, I love Overstayer!
