John Dieterich of Deerhoof on Making ‘The Magic’
Deerhoof’s The Magic was released this past Friday.
There’s always been something magical about Deerhoof. Formed in San Francisco, but now separated by state lines, the band has carved their own path for more than two decades.
Though often lumped into the noise pop genre, Deerhoof’s musical unpredictability makes it unusually difficult to pin them down. Past records have been wild blends of punk rock, jazz, doo-wop, and dance. Still, there’s two things everyone agrees on: they’re loud and non-formulaic, which is just the way they like it.
Given their current locations—Greg and Satomi in New York, Ed in Portland, and John in Albuquerque—it’s incredible that the group still gets together each year to tour and record new music. This week, the experimental rockers are releasing their thirteenth studio album, The Magic.
Coming together to record in an office in New Mexico’s high desert might seem strange, but it was simply Deerhoof being Deerhoof. The band’s approach to music, recording, self-production, and mixing has always been more or less avant-garde.
“We’ve developed a lot of tools while watching each other work and watching our friends work,” guitarist John Dieterich told me over Skype earlier this month. “We’ve done a lot of experimenting and have made tons of mistakes.”
Many of those “mistakes” have clearly shaped the group’s unique sound, best described on their new LP as dirty (“Dispossessor”), classic (“Plastic Thrills”), and wonderfully percussive (“Life is Suffering”).
To get a better sense of how the four-piece’s new album actually developed, we asked Dieterich to divulge some details behind the recording/mixing process, and fortunately, he was more than happy to oblige. As he says below, “the magic of it has not worn off on me.”
How’s it going, John?
It’s going good. I’m actually helping a friend record an album in Ithaca right now.
Cool, I’m in New York as well. Where do you live these days?
I live in Albuquerque. I’m just here recording for three days and I’ll be going to Hudson, [NY] to record another band on Saturday.
What studio in Hudson?
I think it’s called The Barn?
I’ve never heard of that one.
Yeah, I’ve never been there, but it’s in a barn.
[Laughs] That sounds awesome. Have you ever been to Dreamland Recording near there? It used to be a church.
Oh, wow. No, but I think I’ve heard of it.
[Editor’s Note: There’s a good chance that Dietrich is referring to The Orchard Recording Studio, which sits in a 200-year-old barn in Hudson, NY.]
I love the fact that old churches and barns are now recording studios. And you guys actually recently recorded your newest album in an office, right?
That’s right. It was incredible. Super low ceilings. There was a carpeted floor, which I think benefited us in that situation. It was a relatively small room but then there was a door that we had opened into another office space. We basically used that additional room for a room sound, so we kept a mic in there as well.
Is the office near where you live?
Yeah, it’s about ten blocks from where I live. My friend Jeremy Barnes’ [of Neutral Milk Hotel] dad owns the building. A lot of records have actually been recorded in that space. Not in that specific room, but in other rooms on that floor. It worked out great for us. In many ways, I think it was ideal.
No noise complaints from other people in the building?
It’s funny, the building was apparently a bunker at one time, so the floors are really isolated from each other. The first floor has a bunch of offices and then the second floor has offices but I don’t think any of them were being used while we were there and then we were on the third floor. It was amazing. I would be in the lobby and hear absolutely nothing, but then walking up the stairs to the floor everyone would be blasting the bass. It was pretty well-insulated.
Were there other people using the building too?
Yeah, actually, across the hall from us there was a swing dance group that would come in every other evening. We were keeping pretty sane hours because Greg was taking the train every day to Santa Fe to stay with his parents, so we had to make sure we were done by the last train.
Did you think about acoustic treatment options? Did you bring in gobos or anything?
I did bring in a bunch of moving blankets, which I used to sort of acoustically isolate things. We used all low wattage amps. We had a Fender Champ and a 5-watt Gibson amp.
The room was in an L shape and the drums were in the corner and it would turn and we would have the amps facing away. There wasn’t much bleed. In terms of actual treatment, we didn’t feel like we needed it. The drums sounded good.
As you were recording, were you also mixing as you went? I think I remember you doing that in the past.
A little bit. Our last album, before this one, we recorded in Ed’s basement. We weren’t really intending to make a record. We were just planning to record rehearsals. Greg was making these rough mixes so we could listen to things.
We started to think, “These rough mixes sound good. Maybe we should just tweak them and release them.” In that case, there was mixing going on every night. In this case, the only pseudo-mixing that we would do was if we recorded something and we weren’t totally sure about its sound, we would futz with it until it was good enough.
Generally speaking, we didn’t do a whole lot of mixing then. We were trying to get the sounds as we wanted them.
The band is definitely known for not using a ton of gear on stage and in the studio. Judging from the video for “Debut,” that appears to be the case again on this album. What gear did you use this time around?
First, we need something to get the sound into the computer. For us, that’s meant various things over the years. We’ve recorded our own records from the beginning. We have worked with people in studios sometimes but we’ve mostly recorded ourselves. From the beginning, even before I joined the band, they were recording on 4-tracks and basically trying to get the best sound they possibly could out of that.
I joined at a time when we had access to a recording studio at a college in Oakland called Mills College. We recorded some of Reveille there. It’s riddled with mistakes. I wanted to use two microphones on the guitars but I never checked the phase and we left with stereo mixes. We ended up using those matrix processors to try to fix the phase of the guitars without destroying everything.
We used to use the free version of Pro Tools. There was so much stuff we didn’t know. We didn’t know about inserts. For the first five or so years that we used Pro Tools, we would just process one thing at a time. We only discovered inserts like seven years ago. It’s crazy. I knew they could that at fancy studios, but I didn’t realize we could do it on our own.
The main tool we use is time. If you have enough time and a goal—or have enough time to find that goal—then you can work it out usually. We’ve developed a lot of tools while watching each other work and watching our friends work. We’ve done a lot of experimenting and have made tons of mistakes.
It’s funny because it feels like a very logical, natural progression. I know that recording is extremely intimidating for a lot of people. For me, I’ve always been so fascinated with it. Seeing a multi-track digital recording system where I can control sound was an incredible discovery for me.
I didn’t have musical training or know much about music theory, but I had a lot of ideas and I didn’t know how to execute them. But then, all of a sudden, it was like, “Here. You can become a composer, control sound, and be part of the party.”
Totally. It’s an amazing feeling. Do you remember your first time walking into a professional recording studio?
Yeah, I had a band with Ed in Minneapolis. The first time I ever went into a recording studio was with that band. It was one of those situations where someone had used it during the day but we got a cheap rate to use it at night into the morning. Our friend Dave [Yearsley] agreed to record us for incredibly cheap. It was incredibly exciting.
Was it after that experience that you realized recording and mixing interested you as well?
Well, I was actually already doing it! My older brother is a musician and when he moved away he left me a 4-track and few guitar pedals. I was usually playing by myself at the time, so I would just sit in the basement and play around. There was no time from then on that I stopped recording.
Cool. I think Greg has said in interviews before that he started messing around with a 4-track early on as well.
Yeah, exactly. Have you heard Halfbird? That’s all 4-track. And, to me, that’s a great 4-track recording. When I joined Deerhoof, they were in the process of finishing that album. I love the sound of that record. It’s not lacking anything as far as I’m concerned.
Do you find yourself trying to capture the sound of those early recordings today in the digital realm?
I actually recently made a record with Jeremy Barnes in Albuquerque, and we weren’t specifically trying to harken back to a 4-track or any recording technology, but we intuitively gravitated towards damaged sounds. Sometimes the aesthetics of the music dictates how you want to record it. It’s interesting.
It’s fun being able to do a wide variety of stuff. The music I’m doing right now is with my friend Annie [Lewandowski]’s band Powerdove. She has this master Baroque keyboardist who is collaborating with her, so I’m recording harpsichord, clavichord, and fortepiano.
For me, I was really excited about the idea of recording harpsichord because usually it’s recorded in a big space. It’s not really meant to be recorded close because when it’s recorded close you hear more flaws. To me, I want to hear the mechanism; I want to feel like I’m inside it.
That’s really cool. Has the only producer you’ve worked in the studio with as Deerhoof been Chris Shaw, in the Masters From Their Day series?
On Reveille, we worked with Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu on mastering our record. We actually ended up mastering that record five times. But, in that way, I think it is the one time we’ve done something like that.
Do you ever feel like bringing in an outside producer?
I’m into all of it. Actually, we did work with another producer. I can’t remember his name right now but we did a soundtrack for a film called Dedication, which was directed by Justin Theroux, and they hired a musical director.
We were there for about a day or two. Just getting to see how other people work is fascinating. If you work mostly alone, it’s very easy to just say, “This is how you work.”
The appeal of working with a producer is getting outside of your head. I just want the music to be good. In general, anything that can allow me to get into a room with other people is wonderful.
An upside to working alone is the fact that you can put out a record each year and not have to work around any outside person’s schedule.
As it is, it already feels like a monumental task to get the four of us on the same page musically, conceptually, and physically. We have to take advantage of our time together. It’s not as often as we’d like. When we do have that time, it’s really focused.
The Magic was recorded in a week, right?
Yeah, and some of it was built on demos. On a song like “Model Behavior,” we just replaced the drums. There were some things like that. It wasn’t everything from scratch.
So, overall, the songs were pretty much prepared.
Yeah, and we had a ton more too. We had actually recorded at Ed’s house six months before and we ended up getting rid of all of it. We had gone there with the intent of making the album there but we decided it wasn’t the record that we wanted to make.
How many songs did you throw away there?
It depends on what you call a song, but probably 50 or 60 things. Most were ones that we knew we probably wouldn’t want to do but were just checking. Everybody’s approach and ideas change constantly, so you never know.
Do you send sessions to each other or general song ideas?
Generally speaking, we’re sending stereo files to each other. Sometimes Satomi will just send voice recordings. It’s all over the place.
Let’s chat about mixing. How do you approach mixing with fresh ears since you’re so entrenched in the entire process?
I don’t know. I find it exciting. Everyone came to Albuquerque, we recorded it in a week, played a few shows, and everyone flew home. When we tour, you get a sense of what the music we make means to the people. So getting back home after playing some shows and getting started mixing was really useful.
I still had that mental picture of our audience. I was sort of mixing in the room with our audience. That’s what I’m imagining while I’m mixing and I find it really useful. But, in terms of proximity to recording, if you’re fried on three weeks of recording, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to go directly into it. Usually we’re pretty fast. I was just excited to do it.
Do you usually not take much of a break between the two processes?
Sometimes we do. For this one, we knew we had a deadline. We knew we had to be fast. It always depends. When we recorded at Ed’s house six months before that, we had no deadline.
Because you had owed Polyvinyl a record at a certain point?
Well, it wasn’t owed as much as we had just agreed to have a record at a certain time. You have to think about touring because you book so far in advance nowadays. One thing that we had all agreed on was touring in the summer. We also thought, “Let’s have a record come out in the summer,” which we had never done before.
Nice. After years of making records, do you feel like the process has become routine?
I still feel like a kid in a candy store. I feel like I imagine you feel. It doesn’t matter if you’re going into a multi-million dollar studio or just a room that happens to have a microphone there. The magic of it has not worn off on me. The part that can become tiresome is when I spend two months alone on something. The combustable energy that happens with other people in a room, I love that, and it always feels incredible.
In Deerhoof, we challenge each other. We don’t agree a lot of the time on what it is that we want to do. Our musical tastes are extremely wide and not static, much like anyone else’s. On top of that, you have the fact that we’ve already made a lot of records together. You need to take all of this into account when making a new record. Each one is a learning process.
I think we haven’t necessarily become comfortable with the process. We’re comfortable with certain aspects of the process and technology, but when it comes to the art and content, we don’t know what we’re doing; we never do. We technically know how to get a certain snare drum sound, but we’re always searching for the big picture and artistic idea.
How much is the recording and mixing you do a part of that big picture? Do you think if someone else was brought in it wouldn’t sound like Deerhoof?
Weirdly enough, I think we’re actually quite flexible in terms of our aesthetics. From an artistic standpoint, the more I do this stuff, the less I care about. I have a hard time generating too much feeling. I’m much more interested in getting the ideas out quickly. If a guitar string is out of tune a little bit, I just don’t care.
What’s your overall recording philosophy?
In my experience, if you’re recording yourself, it’s very exhausting to be wearing both hats. You have to choose your battles. A lot of times, for me, I will just put a microphone up and ask, “Is it working? Cool.” That’s all. I’m not usually concerned if it’s the perfect microphone for that application.
If I’m working with another band, then I go into that mode more, but the idea is always more important. You have to prioritize getting the perfect sound or getting the idea out. I prioritize getting the idea out and worrying about the sound later, which does come to back to bite me sometimes. For me, it makes the most sense. I can be as perfectionistic as anybody.
Totally. There’s something liberating about just putting up a mic and going for it. Was there a particular song on the new record that was especially challenging to record or mix?
I ended up making a zillion mixes of the song that Ed sings called “That Ain’t No Life to Me.” I kept getting these comments from the band like “more raw.” I heard that as “more distortion” and I kept blowing it out. In the end, the trick was to take all of the plugins off of everything. It was more involved than that, but that was where to start.
That’s another good example of why it’s difficult to mix via email. A lot of time can be wasted that way. It works out pretty well overall though. We only have miscommunication with mixing maybe ten percent of the time. We’ve developed a vocabulary at this point and understand what each other is saying.
Do you have any favorite workhorse plugins as of late? Anything notable?
For guitar sounds on this record, we were using a lot of pedals and the amps to shape the sound. If there’s any delay or reverb you hear on this record, it was all done at the amp. I have no problem with using plugins, but it can also be refreshing to sometimes hear something that is two-dimensional.
For years, I had been trying to figure out how people make their records loud. This was before there were brickwall limiters that people were using regularly. We always wanted to figure out how to get it loud without everything smushing.
Greg at one point just started pushing it all into the red—digital distortion. You won’t find anyone who thinks that’s a good idea. But it kept the rhythmic character of the music. Obviously, there are so many ways of approaching that today.
Being that you’re geographically separated from each other, how has that played into everything?
We used to be together all the time. Our relationships developed in that way. And we spend months on tour each year. I think having that background and the amount of time we’ve known each other was very important. Being on our own forces us to—or not really forces us, but everyone grows and changes in different ways. That can bring you closer together or push you apart. In terms of art, we’re all being pushed or pushing in different directions.
Recently, we hadn’t played together for about six months, which is the longest break we’ve ever taken. I thought, “What if we can’t play together anymore?” You never know. “That’s it! We had a good run.” But it really does amaze me that there’s something there that we’ve developed together that we can always jump into.
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