Andrew Maury On Ra Ra Riot & The Road To “The Orchard”

NEW YORK, NY: For young producer-engineer-remixer Andrew Maury, the last few years have been a whirlwind tour both on and off the road with Ra Ra Riot.

Andrew Maury pictured in Sound City

Between touring as their FOH engineer and co-producing their latest record, The Orchard (released yesterday!), Maury has become that indispensable “fifth Beatle” kind of co-producer for Ra Ra Riot — an “in-house engineer” that can be accountable for the band’s sound on and now off the stage.

In the barely three years since he joined Ra Ra Riot on the road to tour ’08’s The Rhumb Line, Maury has pinballed through his own personal crash course in remixing, sound reinforcement, recording and production. On tour in ’08, he buddied up to Death Cab For Cutie guitarist and producer Chris Walla and landed his first recording gig on Tegan and Sara’s Sainthood, then bounced to his first record production with The Static Jacks, remixes with RAC (Remix Artist Collective) and onward to his latest work on the beautifully-rendered The Orchard.

We caught up with Maury earlier this month while he was out in Los Angeles recording with Princeton, and talked…EVERYTHING, including specifics on recording The Orchard. Check it out:

Man, in a short amount of time, you’ve moved pretty quickly from remixer to FOH engineer to recording engineer and producer. Let’s start with mixing FOH for Ra Ra Riot since this is kind of what led to everything else. How did you land this gig?

There was some luck involved! I’m a musician and played in bands and my college band in Syracuse played the same local venues as Ra Ra Riot. We became friends. When they left school, they’d come back through town to play shows and they’d stay with me. At that point, I was doing some remixes and taking audio classes at school. I was really into all that, plus I was a real cheerleader of the band. I just loved them.

They saw an opportunity to take me out on the road and have a sound guy a little earlier than they might have been able to given their budget at the time. So I went out with them and started learning FOH sound as I went.

So it was total trial by fire?

Maury (right) with Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles and Milo Bonacci

At the beginning I would go and make friends with the FOH guy at the venue and tell them I was just learning how to mix FOH — that they should feel free to give me some tips, and if they had any ideas how to improve the mix, I would dive into it. I picked it up pretty quickly. The concepts weren’t new to me, but it was a matter of getting to where I felt I knew how to handle the PA, which is like this big beast. You have to know how to cut frequencies and when you’re riding the PA at the right level — these are just visceral things you only know after doing it over and over again.

And how did this process prepare you for working with the band in the studio? Does being a band’s FOH engineer help or influence the studio work at all?

I don’t think the live work influences the studio work other than that it enhances the communication. You just get to know the band really well. We’re all comfortable with each other and we all have the same goals in mind and we all know what the band’s about.

I think the reason they went with me for engineering the new record was because they felt that comfort with me. They could have picked a producer, someone they didn’t really know, to come in and handle the album. But I think they got really into the idea of making it their own with me and that’s exactly what we did. It was just the band and myself at the studio tracking the album.

Makes a lot of sense, especially since you were able to get your engineering and production stripes so fast.  Seems like one of the milestones was probably working with Chris Walla on Tegan and Sara’s record, Sainthood. Tell us about that!

Yeah, that experience was really cool. I met Chris when Ra Ra Riot was opening for Death Cab For Cutie on tour in April of ‘09. I’ve been a huge Death Cab fan for a long time. So getting to meet them and hang out was exciting. Chris and I got to be buddies on the subject of recording and he asked me to come out to LA and help with that Tegan and Sara record.

Maury in Sound City control room during recording sessions for Tegan and Sara’s “Sainthood.”

He was producing and playing bass on it while Howard Redekopp (New Pornographers, A.C. Newman) was the producer who was actually running the console. That album was tracked live “off the floor” to tape and Logic simultaneously — so they needed an extra person in the control room to run Logic.

It was cool because I got to see Chris and Howard making all these decisions — as far as placing mics and setting compressors, etc. The record was made at Sound City, which has unbelievable equipment and an incredible history. It was a great experience.

Sounds amazing, and quite a workflow and crew to be rolling with. What was the takeaway for you? Is this the ideal way to work if you can pull it off?

I think about it often. I really have to hand it to Chris for really pushing that method because I think it’s so easy for bands to fall back on their own space and time to think about things and make decisions later. It was really inspiring to see them do it this way, where they’re all under the gun — it’s now or never — and I think the record sounds really cool as a result.

I’ve read Chris say that he can count on his own 10 fingers how many times something was digitally manipulated on that record, deviating from what was recorded to tape. It was definitely inspiring but not something every band could do.

You did go into your first producing/engineering gig straight from there though, with The Static Jacks and their EP, Laces. So what were you able to apply from the Tegan and Sara sessions to your next gig?

Yeah, I’d known I was going to be working on The Static Jacks even before I got the gig to work on Tegan and Sara, so it was great to be able to experience this super-pro session and then dive into this next project myself.

We recorded The Static Jacks in Westfield, NJ, the band’s hometown, in a cavernous church Sunday School room. This was my first real recording session with a band where I was fully responsible for making something happen and making it good. And, if anything I learned from the Tegan and Sara record, it’s that even though we were in this incredible studio, with an amazing history and all this amazing gear and musicians, it’s still just a group of people problem-solving. That was inspiring and made the process less daunting. I learned to just push through and in the end, everyone’s talented, so it will work itself out. We did not have exceptional gear for the Static Jacks record though…

You brought your own gear into that situation, setting up in this church?

Yes and this was last summer. I was still using my PreSonus 8-channel interface — I’ve since bought Apogee converters, some preamps, and more microphones. I’ve been investing almost all my money into my own rig to be able to do this better.

It’s funny though, I listen back to the Static Jacks EP and it still sounds good. It’s amazing how some of this inexpensive digital audio equipment still sounds relatively high quality.

We tracked that EP live and then went back and re-tracked a few parts. And then I mixed it in Logic.

You’ve also recently mixed a record by The House Floor, Warship. Tell us about that.

Right, they tracked most of that that themselves, really DIY. And it was recording over the course of a few months. I heard a couple of the rough mixes and I really wanted to get involved and help them do justice to these great songs.

Maury recording DC’s Detox Retox

I spent about a month mixing on my own in my free time, and then we got together for the last four or five days to collaborate on the final decisions. It was kind of a beast — there are tons of tracks and tons of things happening and the recording quality was a little dubious at times, so we were sort of hammering it into places we wanted it to be. I’m pretty happy with the way that turned out and I really think it’s a seriously brilliant album. I can’t begin to describe how heavy and moving that record is.

Did you mix it in a studio or on your laptop? What kind of setup do you have for mixing?

It was a laptop job. I’m almost at the point where I’m going to buy a better computer, but it’s funny — I keep doing these projects where I’m mixing or tracking on my Mac Book Pro, and I can’t believe that the thing gets the job done. This is a computer I got in 2006 and it almost never chokes!

It really is powerful enough to do what I need it to do at 48k. Even this Princeton record has like some songs with upwards of 60 or 70 tracks on it and it’s been cool.

And you keep it in-the-box, using the built-in Logic plug-ins?

Yeah, the plug-ins in Logic are great. The compressor plug-in has 6 or 7 different circuits, which are meant to emulate the classic gear – 1176, the Focusrite RED, LA2A, 160. They totally work for me right now.

I’m wary of investing in plug-ins. I have a few, but they’re expensive and there’s no resale value. My next move is to start summing out of the box and eventually building up analog compression. Chris Walla was telling me that the API DSM (Discrete Summing Mixer) is really cool. It’s a rack-mount, streamlined summing system and it sounds unbelievable.

But, I grew up doing this stuff in Logic, on a computer, being able to pull up a plug-in or automate anything is second nature to me, so to not have that is kind of scary. I think I’ll probably always be working out of a DAW just because that’s how I move quickly and know how to get it done, but sonically, I want to start feeding it into hardware.

RECORDING THE ORCHARD: BIG RHYTHMS & STRINGS, BIG CLASSIC POP

So now back to Ra Ra Riot and The Orchard, what was the band looking to accomplish sonically. Going into the studio, what was discussed?

Well, there was a lot of talk about 70s records. Sonically, I think the goal was to make a ‘classic sounding pop record.’ There’s influence from Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, The Police, maybe even Elton John. There’s piano and Wurlitzer and they weren’t afraid to use synthesizers. The drums are also pretty huge sounding. I remember them saying they wanted to get away from that four-on-the-floor disco drum beat which there’s a lot of on The Rhumb Line. We just went more classic pop all around.

You guys recorded at Black Dog up near Albany. Was that after significant demo sessions?

“The Orchard” came out August 24 on Barsuk Records.

The whole album process was done in two parts — the first part being at an actual Orchard (the photo on the album cover) of a family friend of Milo Bonacci, the guitar player. The band went and wrote/lived there while the house was on the market for sale. It was a period of writing and total experimentation.

We put together some comprehensive demos and also left with some not-yet-fully-formed demos for some songs. Then they did a Fall tour and following that, we went into Black Dog to actually execute the record.

The studio is located in a rural area in the middle of nowhere. And it’s a privately owned studio built at the end of the owner’s driveway. So we got to live there and have 24-hour-access to it. It’s a really great studio, really well designed and it had some cool gear. The coolest thing was that it was just the band and I working on the album and we could use it as much as we wanted.

There’s definitely a spaciousness about the production — how did you approach the production overall as far as tracking basics?

We hammered out all the drums in five days because Gabe was headed to Portland for a little while. We also hired a drum tech — Jon Cohan who was recommended by [producer/engineer] Chris Zane. He owns all these really cool drums: a lot of great snares, a bunch of old vintage toms and kick drums and a huge pile of cymbals. You just tell him anything you want and he’ll make it happen somehow.

I also took a bunch of cues from how I saw Chris and Howard engineer drums for Tegan and Sara. One tip I picked up from Chris is to place a mic just over the kick drum, where the beater hits, between the snare and the kick drum. He calls it the “crotch mic.” It’s a really good complimentary mic to have; it sounds really good.

We really went instrument by instrument, building it — drums then bass, then guitar then synth than strings and vocals.

There are some real stand-out bass lines early in the record, on “Boy” and “The Orchard” and awesome bass sounds.

Yeah, Matt [Mathieu Santos, Ra Ra Riot bass player] really shines on this record. It’s pretty cool how in the foreground he is on some of these songs. He has two basses — a Fender P Bass and another is a Fender Sting Signature model (he’s a huge Police fan) and he uses Flatwound strings on his basses, which is kind of the cornerstone of his sound. And he has an Ampeg SVT. We also tracked a couple songs through one of Milo’s guitar amps, a Fender Twin Reverb with a 15” speaker. I think bass on both “Boy” and “The Orchard” were tracked through that. [Stream “Boy” here: http://www.barsuk.com/shop/bark106]

He played every song about four times through and then we did a quick comp and it was done. Perfect. He is one of the most incredible bass players I’ve ever seen.

What else in particular did you spend a lot of time engineering? Are there other sounds that you worked especially hard to get?

I’m really happy with how the violin and cello sound on the record. We found a combination of microphones that really seemed to bring them to life and then we doubled or tripled them in every song, so it’s a really rich sound. They wanted bigger, fuller, more apparent string sounds throughout.

On violin, we used an old AKG C 414 in cardioid down by Rebecca’s chest to catch the underside of the violin for a warmer less immediate, full sound. And then we also had an AEA R84 ribbon mic over top. And it was pretty sensitive to placement. You have to really try and get the phase lined up and complimenting each other, but we found the right spot and just went with that for every song.

On cello, we did a similar thing. We used a Soundelux iFet 7, down by the F hole near the bridge. And then another mic in Omni up near the scroll of the Cello, which was Allie [Lawn]’s idea. She wanted to try miking it from where she hears her cello and it worked so that’s what we went with.

Sonically, “Massachusetts” stands out to me. The sort of reggae-chamber-pop feels really loose, but with a tight groove. Tell us about making this track.

“Massachusetts” was a really fun song to work on. Matt wrote this song and had made a demo of it on his laptop. They’d arranged it as a band but didn’t have a fully formed vision for it. And so when we started tracking that song, we set up this really cool Frankenstein drum set — a really weird kit with tons of toms tuned really high and cymbals resting on toms, a cowbell, just a huge array of weird drums set up in weird places. And Gabe improvised the whole thing, all the way through four times, and then we just ended up picking one of those to use as the foundation of the song.

From there we kind of built the song not having any idea exactly what it was going to be…it just came together on the timeline as we saw fit. We were all floored when we found our combination of parts and how it all worked together. I couldn’t be happier with how it came out.

Ultimately, as far as how the record sounds overall, I have to credit Chris Walla who mixed it. He did an amazing job!

Stay up with Ra Ra Riot via http://www.rarariot.com and buy The Orchard here: http://www.barsuk.com/shop/bark106 or on iTunes. Catch them live at Bowery Ballroom on 9/21-22 or Music Hall of Williamsburg on 9/23-24. For more on Andrew Maury and to get in touch, visit http://www.andrewmaury.net.

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