Steve Bays of Hot Hot Heat on Production Techniques & Closing One Door While Opening Many

July 6th, 2016 by Michael Duncan

It’s been six years since Hot Hot Heat released Future Breeds. That record—the band’s fourth—was a return to form in many ways, but it also showcased a bolder and dirtier sonic direction for the Canadian act.

After parting ways with Sire Records, their home base since 2005, the group took greater control over their output, with frontman Steve Bays delving deeper into the art of recording, mixing, and producing.

Steve Bays of Hot Hot Heat in the Studio.

“I bought a bunch of recording equipment and taught myself how to engineer by reading Tape Op, Sound on Sound, and listening to a lot of Pensado’s Place,” he told me over the phone from his Vancouver studio.

Bays’ autodidactic efforts certainly paid off with Future Breeds. The band’s sound was redefined and more focused than ever. Following the release, Bays diverted his attention and newfound production talents elsewhere. He collaborated with Small Town Pistols, Diplo, Steve Aoki, We Are the City, Fitz & the Tantrums, Gay Nineties, and Mother Mother, to name a few.

Recently, the band surprised fans with the announcement of a new album—and by disclosing that, after nearly two decades together, Hot Hot Heat are calling it quits. But, before they go, the band’s new, previously shelved album is primed for release.

Bays describes the new eponymously-titled record as “nostalgic, sentimental, and optimistic.”

It’s bittersweet, for obvious reasons. The good news, however: Bays still has an itch for saturated and overdriven sounds, making this LP a wonderful follow-up to their last.

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I might listen to a song by The Flaming Lips, for example, and think, “Oh, I really like how this was mastered.” And I know you can’t master something that way unless the mix is delivered a certain way, and you can’t have the mix sound that way unless you’re choosing your instruments carefully.

Then there’s the arrangement as well. Certain mixes won’t allow for too many ideas [to be] recorded.

Right. Mixing is such a delicate process. When you’re mixing your own music, it can be really difficult to wrap your head around the song when you’re—quite literally—in the mix.

Totally. It’s weird. A lot of the records I like tend to be by bands that have at least one guy that’s really curious about mixing or producing.

I like those bands too. There’s something nice about having someone in the band that’s an integral part of the whole process. I feel like that often makes the music better.

I think so. All the records I listen to, there’s always that “attention to detail” element.

I’ve spent years in so many bands that sounded like shit once we recorded, but I know they were good bands. I used to be in three or four bands and we’d often break up after we recorded our first few songs.

It was mostly because we were always like, “That’s what we sound like? Back to the drawing board!” I didn’t really think too much about the recording process [back then].

I bet that happens a lot. As you know, you can’t expect to go into a studio and always sound amazing right off the bat.

With some bands, you can kind of plop them into a certain style. You can say, “Okay, pop punk is supposed to have this kind of kick drum, this kind of guitar sound, and this kind of bass sound.”

But I feel like these days music fans really want change. I guess we’re just exposed to a lot more music now, so once a sound is really defined, people don’t want to hear a ton more bands that sound exactly like that. Every band owes it themselves to experiment with production stuff.

Hot Hot Heat’s sound has definitely shifted in a few ways. Sonically, is this new album what you’ve always wanted the band to sound like?

Hot Hot Heat in the studio.

I don’t think I ever really knew what I wanted us to sound like, initially. I was too busy thinking about being a performer.

I never really considered myself a singer and I never considered myself a songwriter, and by the time I was forced to admit to myself that I was a singer, I had been singing for years. I don’t think I actually called myself a songwriter until after our third or fourth album was out.

But I’ve been very active with my gut and my instincts. I grew up in the punk scene where I was a show promoter and I was more concerned about putting on cool shows. I was really more into the community aspect of music—indie and punk rock—and even all the way up to being signed to a major label I’d refuse to admit to the formality of it all.

I didn’t even want to know record sales. I didn’t want to know how much money was being spent or being made. I really had my head in the sand and then one day a switch went off and I realized that I wanted to take control of a lot more. I wanted to be a lot more aware of what’s going on. In my head, I was this spastic punk rocker that happened to stumble into some pop songs, and then one day I just said, “No, actually I want to think about what I’m doing and enjoy the process.”

I don’t know if that really makes sense, but I didn’t really get into thinking about the sound of our albums until I had produced a bunch of other bands. In 2008, I went into the Warner Bros. office and we basically turned down a half million dollar advance and asked to leave the label. I bought a bunch of recording equipment and taught myself how to engineer by reading Tape Op, Sound on Sound, and listening to a lot of Pensado’s Place. I even Skyped with Dave Pensado himself.

I recorded our second to last album, Future Breeds, and that was really fun. Then, for this most recent album, we all said, “Okay, let’s do that kind of DIY approach to this album. Let’s make it a little bit less freaky and a bit more songwriting-based.”

I feel like Future Breeds was a nod at Make Up the Breakdown, which was quirky and weird and punk, and this most recent record is a little bit more of a combination of Make Up the Breakdown and Elevator, in that it’s leaning more on the songwriting.

When I spoke with Luke [Paquin] back when Future Breeds came out, he described that record as the loudest the band’s ever sounded. How else would you describe this new record?

I’d say it’s nostalgic, sentimental, and optimistic. It’s like parting ways with someone but not in a negative way—it’s more of an optimistic and exciting way where you’re beginning a new chapter.

Life moves in chapters and sometimes you don’t realize that something is the end of a chapter or the beginning of a chapter when you’re living it, but if you’re self-aware enough you can be aware of the fact that you’re starting a new chapter.

It’s exciting being in the middle of a transition. I’m excited about the unknown. That’s the unfortunate part about the way the music industry works. It’s very predictable when you’re in it and that’s not always what musicians crave.

A lot of bands are really excited on their first couple of albums because everything is new, but then you figure out how it all works.

I’m by no means complaining. I’m very grateful for the adventures we’ve had, but there is something to be said about constantly feeling novice and feeling like an amateur. The second I feel like I’ve wrapped my head around something I want to know what’s next.

That’s understandable. When you were recording the new album, did you already know that it was going to be the band’s final one?

No, what happened was we recorded it at my studio, the same way we did Future Breeds, but then the band started moving in different directions and craving different musical experiences with less expectations.

So we all started different side projects and one of those side projects for me was Mounties. We went into the studio and recorded a full record in two weeks. It was such a great experience. That was with Ryan Dahle, who has a studio two doors down from me.

I asked him to mix Future Breeds for me even though he wasn’t a mixer at the time and we spent eight months doing it but I just wanted it to be mixed by someone who wasn’t a dedicated mixer. I’ve worked with the Chris Lord-Alges of the world previously, and I was bored with doing the L.A. thing, so I brought Ryan in to mix Future Breeds.

Ryan and I ended up doing Mounties and that was such a great experience, so I said, “Okay, let’s take this Hot Hot Heat record, which we basically shelved, and let’s record this the same way we did the Mounties record.”

We used all of the same equipment, went to the same room, which is a bigger studio a couple of rooms down from my studio in Vancouver. We just set everything up and told everyone to learn the songs.

I think I had sheet music out and lyrics printed and everything. It was a very formal process but we recorded most of it in a week or two. It was cool to spend months just dicking around in my room with programs, beats, and trying all sorts of weird techniques for writing and then abandoning it and coming back six months or a year later and relearning it.

[W]e didn’t say out loud it was going to be the last record but it was felt at the time.

That makes sense. I imagine that impacted some of the writing.

Yeah, I think a lot of bands go through this phase where your whole life is your band for so many years and you tour and tour and tour non-stop, and then you come home and usually you’re depressed.

I think we all got home after ten years of touring and tried to establish normal lives. It was really disorienting. And trying to start the band again was equally disorienting. You come back and you feel like a big kid in suspended animation.

Right. Obviously touring makes a normal life somewhat difficult.

Yeah, and I don’t mean to put a negative spin on it because we’ve had such a great time, [but] it’s almost like you’re in suspended animation and then all of a sudden you realize, “Oh man, all our old friends that we expected to hang out with have either gotten married, moved to a new town, gotten jobs, changed their priorities and values, or they’ve died.”

But the theme with Hot Hot Heat has always been to see the good in everything. I’ve been very hyper-aware of darkness in the world and I always wanted to flip over rocks and see the fucked up things that were under them, but still find the beauty, optimism, excitement, and the passion of everything. I want to know what’s going on with everything, but I still want to fight to find the light.

Totally. Let’s talk about your studio a bit because it is absolutely gorgeous looking.

Oh wicked, thanks.

You mentioned that it’s in a commercial complex, but it almost looks like it could be the basement of a house.

Yeah, I wanted it to feel like [that].

It’s two floors and there are three rooms. There’s a big upstairs where I spend most of the time and it feels like I’m living above my parent’s garage or something like that.

But it’s [really] just in a big concrete building that was built by these three guys that had a label in Vancouver but also have a background in construction. They buy buildings and rent them out for musicians.

It’s a cool thing. I waited for years to be able to get into it and then I just made it my own space and haven’t left.

That’s really cool. And it took you a few years to get it to this point?

Well, I used to have a space in this office building but it was built in 1903 so it was all marble, concrete, brass, and thick wood.

I was able to have this studio in that building without bothering people because of the beautiful, old construction. Then I had to leave because a TV show took over the entire floor.

I managed to move into this place and it’s just cool to be around a bunch of different musicians. I’ve been making records out of here for years now and I like it a lot.

Are the studios in the music videos for “Kid Who Stays in the Picture” early iterations of this studio?

That was all filmed when I was in the old office building—it was a really big old building. The guy that built it, on the day they officially opened it for the public, threw himself down the giant spiral staircase that goes up a dozen floors.

Wow. Really?

Supposedly it’s haunted, which would explain a lot. I was vigilant about turning everything off because I’d get paranoid about fires and I didn’t want my hard drives to go up in a ball of flames, but then I’d come back in the mornings and everything would be turned on. It was the weirdest thing.

How strange.

I don’t believe in ghosts but it was bizarre.

I often think, when backing up my own hard drive, “what happens if there’s a fire?” I need to have a backup outside of my apartment and I need to have a backup in my apartment and then another backup in the cloud.

Yeah, you actually got me thinking about this now. I’m working on so many records all the time and I can’t afford to have everything disappear. A lot of what I have been working on lately is not in the cloud.

Well, Dropbox is $100 a year for 1TB, which is enough for a few sessions.

That’s pretty great.

Let’s talk about the studio some more—Where did you find that great upright piano?

I often think of pianos like umbrellas: you pick them up for free and give them away for free. I’ve given away multiple pianos and I’ve gotten them as well, but always free.

It’s so hard to get rid of pianos. The cost of moving them is a few hundred bucks and people are just dying to get rid of that cost. I’ve had multiple pianos, but this one I like because it’s a Hammond, which is weird. I’ve never seen a Hammond piano.

It took four guys to move it in. The sustain was really bad once I got it moved in here. So I just put thumbtacks on it and there’s something nice about having the thumbtacks because everyone that sits down can play the same thing they’ve played a million times on a bunch of different pianos and it sounds way more exciting.

We used it a lot on Future Breeds. It has a really bright and fast attack and then the sustain is instantly dead, which I love.

That’s awesome. So, the monitors you have, are the Focal Twin6 Be, right? I have the Solo6 Be myself.

Yeah, they loaned me the Solos while I was waiting for the Twin6 to arrive—they’re so similar.

I remember a friend of mine who works for Primacoustic, which is why I’ve got all these acoustic panels here, was like, “How can you handle working on NS10s? They’re so harsh on your ears. You must be exhausted by the end of the day.” I was like, “Come to think of it, I am.”

I’d get home and I couldn’t even watch TV. I was struggling to hear the TV even if it was turned up because my ears were clamped up. Then I heard the Focal speakers and it’s true that you can work at loud volumes and it’s still really pleasant.

I remember when I got them I put Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” up and I swear it was a tutorial on how to mix properly because you could even hear the reverb they were using.

It’s really amazing and eye-opening when you hear high quality speakers for the first time.

Totally. I can’t wait for the day when we all have Focals in our house instead of $20 mono Bluetooth speakers.

I’ve been trying to make stuff sound more centered in the mix lately. I love taking advantage of super wide stereo and love doing all of these stereo widening hip-hop tricks but then I’m constantly testing stuff on other speakers like in my car or on shitty Bluetooth speakers because people are still essentially listening in mono a lot.

I thought mono was dead but that’s not the case. If your mix relies on the stereo [field] for excitement, then it’s just not going to translate.

On the topic of stereo widening, are you using certain plugins to achieve that effect?

Yeah, and sometimes I’ll do it in the analog world as well.

Most of my mixes are a combination of running stuff through a bunch of outboard gear and then I’m totally fine with using lots of fun plugins.

I’ve got some analog choruses and I’ll print anything from a vocal to an entire drum kit, and I’ll pan that to the left side and then I’ll take a different chorus and I’ll pan that to the right and just blend that in to widen it. It gives it a bit of x-factor. But, when I don’t have the patience, I’ll use a Dimension D [plugin].

I have three different Roland choruses and then I have an old Ibanez chorus. It’s like a multi-mode analog delay outboard rack unit. It’s super cheap. We worked with Chris Walla from Death Cab for Cutie and he got us really stoked on this Ibanez outboard rack. It sounds really fun.

Chris Walla is a great mixer/producer—one of my favorites.

Yeah, I like that world of people that are DIY and punk rock but study the classic ways of doing things but also don’t give a fuck about “the right way.”

Totally. I know you are a self-professed classic keyboard addict. When did your interest in keyboards start?

Yeah! Paul from Hot Hot Heat, and I used to be in a band where I was the drummer and he was the guitar player. His dad, who was in a metal band at the time, had a bandmate that traded some Ibanez guitar or something ridiculous for a Juno because Paul saw that The Locust, a band from San Diego, had a Juno. So he traded with his dad’s metal buddy and he brought it to my house and was like, “Let’s start a band where I play drums and you play keyboard.” I was like, “But keyboards are so lame. There are no cool keyboard players…”

Anyway, somehow he convinced me. We were in so many bands that nobody gave a shit about but the second we did it with him on drums and me on the keyboard, we quickly started selling out clubs. It was such a nice change so we stuck with it.

A lot of the early Hot Hot Heat had kind of a prog rock, classical influence in the keyboard parts. Our bass player Dustin and I were obsessed with bands with really dirty bass, such as a band from Victoria called No Means No.

They ran their bass through an old ‘70s Marshall and it sounded so dirty and gross. It was kind of nice—the sound of this really poppy, chorusy keyboard with a really dirty bass and a drummer who grew up playing metal. I think those three elements produced a sound that at least nobody in our hometown was doing before.

Our first band fight was actually over the concept of adding a second keyboard. I remember I was so resentful that I instantly started collecting more keyboards. Then it was one of those things where I didn’t feel the need to collect them [anymore]. I would use whatever was in the studio.

So, for example, on Make Up the Breakdown, they happened to have a Hammond B3 in the studio, so I was like, “Okay, cool. I’ll just record the whole album with the Hammond.” It’s funny because the organ is such a big part of that album’s sound and it was really just an arbitrary decision.

There are only so many chord progressions and only so many ways to keep yourself excited about your own skills, especially when they are modest skills and not anything too special. When you get a new keyboard, it can be enough inspiration to make an entire record.

Did you get any new ones for this record?

It’s a blur of what I got between the Mounties record and the Hot Hot Heat record because we did both at the same time, but I got a Roland JX-3P, an ARP Odyssey, and this old Yamaha. It looks like an organ. It doesn’t even stay in tune but it has sounds like pulsar, and bunny is the name of one patch. It’s got trumpets, French horns, and saxophones. It’s the sound of an instrument that electronics are struggling to make work and I just love that.

How do you feel about software synths? Do you use any of those or are you not so into them?

Yeah, for sure. I’ve got so many soft synths. They’re great and not just for writing on, but also drawing in the MIDI. When I hear an album that’s made with soft synths, I’m not opposed to it. It’s all about how you use it really. I use a lot of this company TAL.

Yeah, TAL is great. Have you ever compared their Juno to your Juno?

Steve Bays.

I did! I’m scared to admit it because it’s my secret weapon.

I A/B’d it in Noble Street Studios in Toronto. We were all mic’d up and I wanted to use the TAL Juno for the arpeggiator feature. The problem with the real Juno is you can never get the arpeggiator synced quite right. It’s such a nightmare.

Anyway, I finally had everything setup side-by-side and I swear to God, the guys could not tell the difference. And if you combine it with going through a guitar amp, it’s really good. A lot of what makes soft synths sound like they’re soft synths is the fact that they’re quantized.

What is your favorite technique for humanizing parts? Will you go in one by one and move the notes a little bit?

Well, in Logic, there’s an actual humanize algorithm that cheats it.

I’m always adding chunks of human element whether it’s going out through an amp, or if it’s only quantizing the occasional thing, or I won’t quantize it and I’ll bounce it in place so it’s an audio file and I’ll edit it.

With some genres of music, it sounds good when everything is on the grid, but with other genres, the more things are misaligned the fatter it sounds. I think people are a little too trigger-happy with quantizing, but I’m not opposed to quantizing. I’m not opposed to any trick. It’s just lazy habits and not using your ear that can lead to boring music.

So tell us about The Warehouse Studio. You were there last year, right?

Yeah, I was there with Mounties recently and then I was there again the other day with Mother Mother. I end up there all the time because it’s down the street from my studio.

How do you like it there? It seems like a great place and the history behind it is pretty cool.

Yeah, it’s [got] great gear. I think Bryan Adams paid $2 million for the new console.

Most of the time I’d prefer to work in my own studio, but I still end up in other studios quite often because it’s nice to have someone else deal with the file management and setting up the headphone mixes.

I love being left-brained, but I love being an artist as well and just walking in and being creative and not having to divert my attention. When I’m in artist mode, it’s a totally different thing, so it’s nice having somebody else set things up.

I used to micromanage preamps and microphones, and sometimes I’ll still be that guy and oversee how everything is engineered, knowing I’m going to mix it. I’d rather commit to all of the EQ and compression, but these days I often won’t touch anything. I’ll just hire good people and let them do their thing.

For the Hot Hot Heat record, I had worked so much with Ryan Dahle that I just let him oversee the engineering of it. He’s such a great engineer so I was really hands–off with the engineering. I just came as an artist and he allowed me to be a weirdo.

Did Ryan also help with the mixing?

He mixed the last track on the album, but the rest I mixed myself. But I should give him partial credit because he would be in here every day and he’d be giving his two cents. He told me to take mixing credit for it but he definitely deserves credit for the way it turned out. Also, his mastering on it was a big part of the final sound.

With certain records, what’s on the stereo bus and what’s on the mastering is such a huge part of the album, and then with other records I’ve done for people, it’s all about mixing each individual instrument to sound the way you want it to sound.

I don’t want the stereo bus to mess with the mastering at all. I just produced and mixed this album for this band Gay Nineties, which is a side project of Parker [Bossley]’s who is also in Hot Hot Heat and the Mounties on bass, and at first I was mixing the whole album through a Shadow Hills box, and Burl Mothership for conversion, and it’s just so nice, big, and fat. But you have to be so precise with your levels. If something is a dB too quiet or too loud, it’s really noticeable.

Partway through the record, I switched to saying, “Fuck it, I’m going in the box. I’m going to hit the stereo bus super-hard and I’ve got the Studer tape, SSL, and Fairchild compressors.”

That way you can move in these big, broad sweeps and you can just crank the guitar up for a guitar solo and not really worry about it being perfect because the compression seems to be very forgiving. So if you’re willing to have a dirtier record that’s potentially a bit more distorted and more saturated, then it’s fun doing it that way.

I really enjoy the distortion and the crunchiness.

There are a lot of great records that sound like they’re almost destroyed. If you can pull it off, then it’s incredible. The first MGMT album is almost criminally distorted but they pulled it off and I think that’s why Dave Fridmann is worthy of idol status.

You should take one of his classes. He teaches sometimes.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I think he teaches at [SUNY] Fredonia. I wish there were more videos of him actually in the studio because I’ve looked and there are not enough. I think I’ve only seen one.

I know. There’s so little. I read a Sound on Sound interview with him once and that’s about it.

[Editors Note: Fridmann shared his insights in SonicScoop’s 2011 Platinum Engineers panel, which can be found here.]

The first Phoenix album is squashed so hard but still maintains these incredible low frequencies that you allow to stay in before you compress super hard.

The more you compress and the more you distort the more you have to be on top of EQ and I think that the fact that my ears have always enjoyed things that are really hotand overdriven has just led me to have to obsess over EQ.

That makes sense. What’s your vocal chain these days?

My vocal chain is a Pultec where I’m removing a lot of low end and high end.

I’ll take a vocal, re-record it, and run it out through a Pultec to remove harsh frequencies or ultra-lows that are even below 200 Hz, then I hit the Distressor and 1176, then two channels of the Fatso, and then I add frequencies back in.

It’s a lot of compression but I’ve always loved the sound.

Do you use this process only for Hot Hot Heat songs or for any vocalist you’re working with?

Everything is different, but traditionally that would be it. My chain would be a couple of EQs, then about four compressors, then another EQ, and usually a de-esser or two before the compression.

Do you see yourself producing, mixing, and recording forever?

It’s so hard to say because I change all the time. I did some songwriting for the new Fitz & the Tantrums album, which was fun. I sang on this Diplo song last year and that was about 45 minutes of work. That was easy. It was like a bottle of wine and a few minutes, and that did so much better than something I would’ve spent months on.

Time management-wise it makes sense for me to keep songwriting. Songwriting is probably my favorite thing to do, and performing is my favorite thing to do as well, but it’s very contingent on inspiration, whereas I do love something about mixing. I can show up and work by myself and have fun by myself and I don’t have to worry about relationships or managing the emotions of bands.

So co-writing more with other artists is something you could see yourself doing in the future?

Oh, totally. I like doing anything creative. I’ve co-written for probably a dozen bands in the last couple years. I’ve directed music videos—those are really fun—and I like editing them as well.

I like to keep switching it up because I never want to have to ask myself how good I am at any one thing. If you pick just one thing, you better be really good at it. I keep myself busy switching it up all the time so that I don’t really have time to let my inner demons question anything too much.

I think that’s the danger of working in arts for a living. Once it starts to feel like a job, then you’re playing with fire and it can damage the thing that is most important to you. That’s why I think it’s good to keep changing and evolving.

A lot of people get caught up in expectations. You can get a little bit of success and it’s like, “Oh, I should really just focus on that because I’m so lucky that lightning struck once and it’s never going to strike twice,” but I disagree with that.

I think you have to follow your childlike enthusiasm because at the end of the day you’re going to be the best at what you’re the most excited about.

It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re excited to just play with Lego for hours. You can have that feeling in your day job, but you have to be really in touch with when you’re damaging your inspiration versus when you’re nurturing it.

Michael Duncan is an up-and-coming producer/engineer based in NYC. He has assisted several notable producers, including Andrew Maury, Dan Romer, and John Siket.

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