TALKING SHOP SCALPING

“…and record everything. Often the first time you do something or the first idea you have is the best. That could be the first idea you come up with for a riff, the first take you do, the first time you use a new synth. For that reason we always record everything, you never know what you’ll end up capturing. We’ll often use stems from demos in final tracks just because we already got what we needed the first time round and there’s no reason to go back and try and copy or recreate what you’ve already done. We also find it much more fun working like this, you can be more carefree and just enjoy making noise, worry about the details later.”

Distortion or compression after reverb

“I once heard someone describe this as the sound of cramming a cathedral into a shoebox and while I’m not too sure how that works it does kind of make sense. Essentially use a reverb so add some space and scale to a sound and then absolutely smash it with a distortion or compressor and it really brings up the tail.

“Coming from the background of playing guitar and building pedalboards, you come across hundreds of articles and videos from guys playing the same blues riff a thousand times telling you to put distortion before reverb, so it’s quite liberating working with plugins where there’s a much greater ‘anything goes’ attitude.”

Use your phone

“People don’t make the most of how powerful and handy their phone is. We use them for field recordings, free tacky music making apps and, our favourite, skipping through random YouTube videos; car crashes, fights, arguing, birds... whatever, jam with the pedals as you go, cut out the good bits and you’ve got your own samples!”