WHAT I PLAY PRESENTED BY YSL PRO
Andy Shauf
ANDY SHAUF HAS VERY QUICKLY CRAFTED A SIGNATURE SOUND with drawling vocals, tense and nuanced storytelling, and punchy clarinets that round out his lush chamber pop arrangements. It’s impressive asis, even more so knowing that he produces and plays each instrument on every record.
But a new recording of “Covered in Dust,” a deep cut from his 2012 album, The Bearer of Bad News, finds him countering his organic intimacy with the synthetic sounds of the MODAL Electronics ARGON8. Though Shauf’s clarinet accents and homespun vocals are as present as ever, the original version’s acoustic guitars, aching strings and buzzing room tone have been replaced by punchy synths.
When tasked with reimagining one of his songs with different instruments, “Covered in Dust” wasn’t his first choice — “I started redoing a different song, but I ended up tweaking it so much that I turned it into a new song” — but he ultimately settled on it due to how different the original version’s warm palette was to the cool tones of the ARGON8. “I looked through the songs that I’ve made and [‘Covered in Dust’] seemed like the right choice to give a different treatment [to] because it was such a specific sound on the album. The original version of it is so specific that I figured I could flip it all the way around to a synth song,” Shauf says.
He certainly succeeded — the new arrangement hints at new wave balladry while still retaining many of Shauf’s familiar elements. The chorus of clarinets was recorded with the Royer Labs R-10 ribbon microphone, while Shauf’s vocals were delivered into the Mojave Audio MA1000 tube microphone.
All of the microphones were plugged into the Universal Audio Apollo x4 audio interface, and Shauf used entirely UA plug-ins to record and mix the track, most notably the EMT 140 Classic Plate Reverberator and Capitol Chambers. ( The song was mastered by David Roman of 4130 Mastering, also using entirely UA plugins.) “There’s a really nice thing that happens with those [plugins], makes it feel like a real space,” says Shauf.
The analogue components juxtapose nicely against the digital sounds of the synth, opening up the possibilities of Shauf ’s future compositions. It’s not that Shauf is a stranger to synths — he owns two, a Prophet and a Juno — but “I mostly use them for touring, so someone else is playing them and someone else is getting to spend all the time learning them, and I pretty much haven’t got the chance to learn them. But using [the ARGON8] and the little screen, you see the filters and you see the envelopes and the waveforms. Now that I’m seeing all this, I understand. Diving into that was really, really fun.”
He adds, “It also gave me more of an understanding of how synths work, so I feel like I can probably go to my Prophet now and understand a little bit better. The way that envelopes work and filters work. I’m gonna dive in a little deeper.” To hear the new recording of “Covered in Dust,” visit exclaim.ca/music.