Category: Blog

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SCREENS Cover

The new Forest Fire record Screens is coming out September 10th on Fat Cat and is available now to pre-order. I recorded, mixed and co-produced the record with the band last fall, at Tree Time (Fat Cat’s studio upstate), Doctor Wu’s, and my home studio.  It was honestly one of my favorite record-making experiences of my career, and is some of the best sounding work I’ve ever done… no joke.  The first song “Waiting in the Night” and a brief interview is on MTV Hive for you to enjoy.

“She (Was My Baby)”, the second single from the Keepsies, is out now.  The Keepsies are Vince McClelland, Austin Brown (from Parquet Courts), and Jason Kelly (from Fergus & Geronimo).  I recorded some overdubs and mixed these songs last year, so I’m super excited that they’ve hit the web for everyone to enjoy!  Hopefully the third one will come out a bit faster…..


And the entire series of Catherine is now online!  The series was created by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleicher-Camp for the JASH Network (Sarah Silverman, Tim and Eric, Michael Cera, and Reggie Watts’ Youtube channel).  If you haven’t yet ventured down this mind-numbing wormhole of a show, here’s your perfect chance!

I just got back from Chicago, where I mixed the Blue stage at Pitchfork Music Festival.  It’s always nice going back and working with my friends and associates from when I lived out there, and it was extra special to have so many friends playing on my stage… Frankie Rose and her band, Parquet Courts, Chairlift… all slayed.  I rode back in the van with Parquet Courts, which was great to catch up with the gang, and got us all excited to get back into the studio in September to finish the album!

If you wanna talk sound, please write at jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.com.  Thanks for checking out my site!

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Otari MX-5050 vs Tascam 388

A couple months ago, I was at Seaside Lounge with Parquet Courts recording a bunch of new material.  We finished an EP, which will be coming out this September – you can hear live versions of some of the songs (and a thoughtful interview with the band) on a recent edition of NPR’s World Cafe, recorded a couple weeks before we hit the studio.

Part of the setup process was figuring out what tape machine to use for the sessions.  We recorded Light Up Gold on Austin’s Tascam 388, so we knew we could get something good on it.  There’s an almost cult-like following surrounding the 388, from the San Francisco psych-garage scene to the Black Keys and a host of other analog enthusiasts.   I’ve worked on it a number of times (with Austin’s other band The Keepsies and the folk-rock revivalists Wild Leaves) and really love the sound, but wanted to explore some other options.

Seaside Lounge – in addition to their beautiful Otari MTR-90II 2″ 16-track (on which we recorded Funky Was the State of Affairs) – also has an Otari MX-5050 1/2″ 8 track in their B room.  Nirvana’s Bleach, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, and a bunch of early Sub Pop records were recorded on an Otari MX-5050.  The guys at Daptone Records still swear by them.  I recently picked up a MX-5050 for Doctor Wu’s, and was eager to try it out with the band.

So I set up a shootout of the two machines!  Through the Sony MPX console, I was able to simultaneously bus each track to the Otari (at 15 ips, no DBX), the Tascam (w/ DBX on), and Pro Tools HD (as a control).  Since we were using 8-track tape machines, I submixed my drums (kick, snare, rack, floor, stereo overheads) to a stereo pair.  The bass and two guitars had one mic each, but I’ve bounced the guitars as a stereo pair for this demonstration.

The recordings are from an early take that we discarded, so there are no vocals or other overdubs on it – just the live tracks.  I adjusted the clips levels so that they would be roughly the same volume (the mix between -18 and -15 RMS).  No other processing or effects were applied to these tracks post-tape/computer.

These clips are from a song called “Descend” (which will be on the upcoming EP).  There’s a rough mix of all the tracks (with the same relative mix level for each transfer), and the drums, bass, and guitars by themselves.  In each clip, the order is Pro Tools > Otari MX-5050 >Tascam 388 > Tascam 388 (w/ DBX off during playback, a really cool trick that seemed worth documenting!).

Mix:

Drums:

Bass:

Guitars:

We went decided fairly quickly to go with the Otari.  The low end is robust and punchy with a nice natural dip in the low mids, and an accented-but-not-hyped high end.  The Tascam sounds are really cool too, though.  With DBX on for both recording and playback, it gives a sound that’s more compressed and mid-rangey than either the Otari or Pro Tools… it sounds tough.  The low-mids of bass guitar got a bit out of control on the 388 – if we had stuck with it, I would have adjusted the EQ on the amp or the console to clean it up a bit.  Almost as an afterthought, I also transfered the tracks from the 388 with DBX off.  Austin and I had done that with some of the Keepsies recordings, and it totally changes the sound (as you can tell) to something bright and sparkly.  It’s a bit extreme in this case – I was using a lot of condensers on these recordings… but try it on something like a guitar overdub with a SM57 or whatever dynamic you’ve got around, and you can get some amazing/unique results.

This shootout was done for our own purposes, so it’s not particularly scientific or exact.  I hope that these recordings are as interesting to you guys as they were to us!  Big thanks to Charles and Mike at Seaside Lounge for all of their enthusiastic help to set this up.  Thanks for checking this out, and feel free to get in touch at jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.

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The next three episodes of Catherine are now showing on the JASH Network (Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric, Michael Cera, and Reggie Watts’ new Youtube collective).  It’s been so much fun to get so weird with these sounds, and the series just gets more bizarre and beautiful as it goes.  Jenny and Dean killed it with the show – get into it!

I’ve mastered a couple records for Chicago associates recently.  The Clams have a new EP full of oddball Kinks-inspired pop tunes coming out soon. And Maxel Toft just released the album 32 in his Presidents series.  It’s a folk record about FDR (our 32nd president), and is available for download with a Roosevelt dime as an individual keepsake.

I also mixed a short film called Dissocia by Kyle Waszkelewicz, which has a score by Wild Leaves.

I’m very excited about the addition of a UAD Satellite and a bunch of new plugins to my personal studio.  It’s been a huge boost to the quality of my mixing and mastering work – I ended up mastering the Parquet Courts EP myself with these, and loved it!

Also, I did another interview recently, this time with the Red Bull Music Academy‘s paper The Daily Note.  The interview is in a column called Work Flow, where musicians and technically minded people like myself are asked to elaborate on their creative process and the effect that gear and its limitations have on their work. You can download a pdf of the whole paper (which also has articles on Vogueing and Nile Rodgers) right here.

Thanks for stopping by!  Please get in touch if you’d like to talk more about sound: jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.com

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Parquet Courts @ Seaside

Words cannot describe how much fun I had recording with Parquet Courts earlier this month.  Seriously, that much.  We holed up at the always-awesome Seaside Lounge in Park Slope for a week-and-a-half, and recorded as much as we could.  Check out our setup in that pic above, and there are some more photos from the sessions on the Parquet Courts website.

From a sonic perspective, I’m really thrilled with what we did.  It sounds like Light Up Gold, but way more!  We tracked to an Otari MX-5050 8 track, which is the same model that a lot of early Sub Pop records (like Bleach and Superfuzz Bigmuff) were made on, as well as a lot of the Daptone stuff.  It sounds awesome!!  To help guide our decision, we did a shootout in the studio between the MX-5050 and the Tascam 388 (which we did Light Up Gold on) – I’ll be posting the results here soon for all my fellow recording nerds.

After the recordings, I edited everything at my place and we went over to Doctor Wu’s to mix.  Look for an EP later this year – I can’t wait for people to hear these songs!

If you’ve read all this and still wanna read more about me working with Parquet Courts and about the recording process in general, then you’re in luck!!  The Deli interviewed me recently about just that!


Since then, I’ve been mixing and working on sound design for a new web series called Catherine.  It was made by Jenny Slate and my old Food Party cohort Dean Fleischer-Camp, who also brought us Marcel the Shell.  I’m still genuinely weirded out by it, but I can’t stop watching it!!  The first three episodes are up now on the JASH Network (Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Reggie Watts’ new Youtube collective).

I had someone ask recently, so I thought I’d write something about it – I link to as many projects as I can find on my pages, so there’s actually a ton of stuff to listen/watch laying around here!  Thanks again, as always, for checking out my site.  And if you’d like to talk sound directly, please email me at jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.com

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Recording Beverly

I spent a week in the studio this month with Beverly, the new band by Frankie Rose and Drew Citron (of Avan Lava and Frankie’s touring band).  We did a round of tracking at their practice space, a bunch of vocals and overdubs at Doctor Wu’s, and a few days of editing and mixing at my place.  The songs are really cool – punky and melodic, on a real Last Splash/Pacer tip, with killer vocal harmonies.  We’re taking some time off to work on other projects, but I’m really looking forward to getting back into it in a couple months… I think people are really going to love this!

I’ve been doing some mastering over the last few weeks too…. I mastered an album by the Chicago band Warmbloods (featuring members of Watchers and Low Skies).  It was particularly fun to work on since my old studio mate/mentor from Experimental Sound Studio Jacob Ross played on and recorded it…

I also worked on a reissue series of the 80s Australian band The Sunday Painters, remastering from transfers of the original reels.  Their three EPs and two LPs were self-released in the early 80s in very limited numbers (like 250-500 copies each), and have long been out of print.  The sound really runs the gamut across the releases, ostensibly a punk band but with songs ranging from almost twee pop to full-on noise and everything in between.  I think a good frame of reference would be some intersection between Big Black, Swell Maps, and Flying Nun records.  A lot of really good stuff here, I’m really looking forward for these to come out.

My good friend Chris Hefner is nearing completion of his new feature film The Poisoner.  To raise the last of the funds (for Daniel Knox‘s score and sound mix by yours truly, among other things), he’s holding a presale in the form of a Deluxe Investor Ticket – a  limited-edition, signed and numbered, screen printed ticket for a special screening of the film after its completion.  I’m a big fan of Chris as both an artist and a person, and am really looking forward to working with him on this over the summer.  Check out a teaser above.

Chris has also posted The Pink Hotel, his first feature (which I also mixed), in its entirety.  Get spooky!

But honestly, the thing I’m most excited about doing right now is going back into the studio with Parquet Courts!  We’ll be at Seaside Lounge for tracking (where Andrew and I did Fergus & Geronimo’s Funky was the State of Affairs), and Doctor Wu’s for mixing.. two of my favorite studios in NYC.  They’ve got a bunch of new stuff ready to lay down to tape, and we’re all eager to get in there to see what happens. They’re also playing some sick shows coming up, opening for the Roots at BAM(!) and the Breeders(!!).  If you still can’t get enough, here’s some videos from Vice/Noisey and MTV getting in on the action.

Please write me at jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.com if you wanna talk about sound.  Thanks for reading through all this!

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South By Southwest was awesome this year!  March in Texas is still in my opinion the best weather in the world, and it was so nice to get to see so many friends all in one place.  Parquet Courts killed it, and Daniel Francis Doyle’s new band blew my mind… so much good stuff going on….

The Apocalypse won best in program at SXSW, following a strong showing at Sundance.  But maybe the coolest thing about this short is that while hanging in Austin, I caught up with my childhood babysitter and was telling her what I’d been up to.  When I told her the premise of The Apocalypse, her jaw dropped, and she told me that her son had come home one day and showed it to her on Youtube, and that it had sparked a long conversation about information overload in our lives…  SO COOL!!!

The Apocalypse is hitting a bunch of other festivals too, check it out:
Sundance London
Dallas International Film Festival (this weekend!)
Sarasota Film Festival (also this weekend!)
Florida Film Festival (ALSO this weekend!!)
Rincon International Film Festival
Bradfrod International Film Festival

The Fuzz Press Conference

The Fuzz debuted at SXSW, as part of the new Yahoo! Screen (along with a new show by Tenacious D).  There was a great sneak-preview event with the creators and stars (including Herbie and Rainbow) – with jellybeans!  The crowd reaction was great, and I’m really excited for everyone to get to see this.  The first episode will be premiering next month, but you can check out the trailer now.

Wind & Rain, the debut EP by Wild Leaves, is out now.  The limited-edition vinyl comes in a lovely hand-printed cover, which you can stream and purchase on their Bandcamp page.  They’ve also made a couple videos, check ’em out!

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The new Thin Hymns EP (which I mastered) is available for pre-order.  It’s called Black Water, and you can stream it and purchase a cassette copy at their Bandcamp page.

I’ve been keeping busy in the meantime – working on a master by slowcore shoegazers Vibrant Light, and doing sound design for a new Intel ad campaign.  I also started working on a new musical project with my buddy Bob Jones called Eaters… expect an EP in the next couple months!  So psyched about this…

Thanks for checking out the site – please drop me a line if you’d like to talk sound!  jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.com

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coracaotexano

I’m heading down to my beloved Austin, TX this weekend for the South By Southwest film festival!  The Apocalypse, a short film by Andrew Zuchero (which I sound designed and mixed), will be showing a few times, and I’m very excited to see it on the big screen!

Another project of mine showing during the festival is the mini-series/feature The Fuzz, directed by Duncan Skiles.  I spent a big chunk of my winter months cranking away at this thing, and am so psyched to see it in action…. think the Muppets meet Goodfellas…  There’s a special screening of the first episode Monday March 11th at Brazos Hall @ 3PM, which you better believe I’ll be at!

In anticipation of all this, I’ve put together a new demo reel – CHECK IT OUT!!

Parquet Courts are playing some sick shows down there too (including the closing party with Kendrick Lamar and Black Lips?!).  They have a new single for “Borrowed Time” coming out March 18th on Rough Trade/What’s Your Rupture?, with two previously-unreleased b-sides from the Light Up Gold sessions.  One of ’em, “Smart Aleck Kid”, hit the web earlier this week:

I’ve been working on a variety of other projects since wrapping The Fuzz… I finished work restoring and remastering the Del Shannon-produced Brett Smiley tapes, and mixed a long-lost single by little-known glam-rock band Fa Bonx, both for What’s Your Rupture.  I’m mixing a couple short films when I get back, and working on a couple albums in April… very excited about spring!!

Thanks for checking this out…  and please get in touch if you wanna talk sound or hang in Austin: jonathan[dot]schenke[at]gmail[com]  Thanks again!!

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The Apocalypse is happening at South By Southwest!  After premiering at this year’s Sundance festival, the short by Andrew Zuchero (which I sound designed and mixed) will be part of the Midnight Shorts program.  I’ve never been to the film festival part of SXSW, and am really looking forward to being a part of it!  There’s another project (still under wraps) that I mixed debuting at SXSW, and I’m really excited to see 12 O’Clock Boys, which is currently doing a fundraising campaign to finish post production…. help out if you can!

I’m sticking around for the music festival to hang with my boys Parquet Courts, who are playing a buttload of shows this year.  The love for Light Up Gold keeps flowing,  with prominent voices like Rolling Stone, NPR, The Guardian, Village Voice, and Sound Opinion’s Jim DeRegotis showing their enthusiasm.  Can’t wait to do some more recording with them soon.

Wild Leaves EP Cover

Wild Leaves are releasing a 12″ EP on March 26th called Wind & Rain.  We recorded this to a Tascam 388 upstate in a quonset hut leading up to Hurricane Sandy, which was a totally fun and bizarre experience.  They’ve debuted the title track, which has already got some nice press… check out this review and interview.  The artwork is hand-drawn and assembled, and it sounds like it will be one of those lovingly-crafted packages that will be a treat to pull out and listen to.

I recently mastered an EP for Chicago buddies Thin Hymns recently called Black Water.  It’s for a cassette/download release coming out soon… really cool stuff!

Recording Forest Fire

The new Forest Fire record – tentatively titled Monorail – is currently being mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Mastering.  Listening through this album again got me soooooo so excited – I can’t wait for everyone to hear this one.  It will be released later this year on Fat Cat, and check out these photos of us recording in the meantime.

Sweet Talk Cover

The new Sweet Talk record Pickup Lines got some serious love from one of my all-time record store and Chicago homies, Permanent Records: “YES!!! REAL IN YOUR FACE ROCK N ROLL GOODNESS, we couldn’t agree more.  Fans of the Bad Sports / Mind Spiders / OBN IIIs / ViDEO tangle of Austin garage / punk bands will no doubt need to grab Sweet Talk’s Pickup Lines.  But those who, like us, have an affinity / addiction to loud catchy guitar rock along the lines of Dinosaur Jr, Redd Kross, Pavement and the Makers definitely won’t need to get sweet talked into grabbing Pickup Lines.  This is a rowdy rock n roll time just like those other great Lone Star state heroes, Moving Sidewalks, ZZ Top and 13th Floor Elevators.  So crank up the volume and get ready to have a blast.  We nabbed a stack of the super limited white vinyl version (only 100 pressed), so don’t sleep on it.  SWEETLY RECOMMENDED.”  Hell yeah!

Dumb Fun Cover

And I totally spaced on posting this earlier, but The Keepsies got a 7″ pressing of the Dumb Fun single on Chrome Waves Records and a review from Impose Magazine.  The Keepsies are Austin from Parquet Courts, Jason from Fergus & Geronimo, and Vince of His Own Bad Self… I love these songs, and there are a bunch more where they came from.  Pick up a copy of one here while you can!

I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff on the horizons, and I’ve added a bunch of links to different projects throughout this site, so please feel free to check things out.  Write me at jonathan.schenke [at] gmail.com if you’d like to chat, and THANKS FOR READING!

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parquet courts band photo

Light Up Gold has been re-issued on What’s Your Rupture (home of Royal Headache and Iceage), and Parquet Courts have officially blown the fuck up.  I couldn’t be more thrilled – not only did the record turn out better than any of us had imagined, but all four of these guys are amazing people.  The album currently has an 87% rating on Metacritic, including a 5/5 review by the Guardian, a 9/10 in NME, and a host of other glowing reviews. Pitchfork threw their muscle behind the band with a super-positive review and a Rising feature.   Light Up Gold and the first single “Borrowed Time” made their way onto a number of Pitchfork’s year-end staff lists, and eMusic voted the band #1 Band to Watch in 2013 and and the album the #15th Best Album of 2012.

Most humbling of all, the band named ME one of the best things in 2012 in Pitchfork’s year-end Guest List…. I’m blushing now as I type this….   I can’t wait to see what else is in store for these guys this year – we were already thrilled with the work we had done and looking forward to the next one, but now more so than ever.  Hold onto yr butts.

Sweet Talk‘s new album Pickup Lines is out now on Gerald Cosloy’s (of Matador Records and Homestead Records fame) label 12XU.  I was introduced to these guys through the Parquet Courts and Wiccans albums, and mixed the record this past fall.  Think “the best parts of Cheap Trick, early UK power pop and the dual guitar work of Thin Lizzy.”  There’s a video for the song “Last Dance” above, and you can stream the title track over at the label’s Soundcloud page.

I’ve been doing a lot of sound design work recently, working on a feature and a couple shorts, including The Apocalypse by Andrew Zuchero, which just debuted at Sundance Film Festival.  Sundance has shared the short (along with a handful of others) in its entirety, which you can stream above!  It’s been really fun digging into these projects, and while some of the info on the others is still hush-hush, we’re really hoping to be screening and premiering them at festivals soon… I’ll keep you posted!

One of the sound design projects I worked on last year, Reggie Watts‘ A Live in Central Park (for Comedy Central), made it onto Vulture’s Top 10 Stand-Up Specials.  It was a really fun project to work on – the director Duncan Skiles did an amazing job blending all these different elements together – and I hope more people get a chance to see it!

Field II Cover

And one of my favorite records that I worked on last year, Wiccans’ Field II, got some year-end nods as well.  It was Magnet’s #5 Punk/Hardcore Record of 2012 and A.V. Club’s #7 Loud Record of 2012, as well as making Parquet Courts’ Pitchfork Guest-List.  If you haven’t heard this bad boy yet, check it out.

2013 is already shaping up to be an amazing year!  I’ve got a number of exciting projects coming up over the next couple months, and a number of projects I did in 2012 should be coming out soon… I’m seriously excited.  If you wanna get in touch, please just write me at jonathan.schenke[at]gmail.com – thanks, as always, for reading this!

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I got some exciting news this week: The Apocalypse – a short film by Andrew Zuchero, which I sound-designed and mixed – will be premiering at Sundance in January!  It was such a fun project to work on, and I think it turned out truly great… I’m very happy about this.  “Four uninspired friends try to come up with a terrific idea for how to spend their Saturday afternoon”, starring Martin Starr from Party Down and Freaks and Geeks and Ella Rae Peck of Gossip Girl fame.

The love for Light Up Gold by Parquet Courts continues to pour in! Time Magazine just named the opener “Master of My Craft” its #5 song of the year (better than Skrillex, almost as good as Taylor Swift). Stereogum has gotten behind it too, premiering the titular track and ranking the LP as the 49th Best Album of the Year.  NICE!  What’s Your Rupture is re-releasing Light Up Gold (on CD as well) just in time for their tour this winter (check out their site for details).

Since their signing, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Kevin, the owner of WYR and all-around cool guy.  One project he brought me on board for is a restoration of a recording by Brett Smiley.  I was unfamiliar with who this was, but Kevin schooled me pretty quickly – teenage glam heart-throb who worked with Del Shannon and then Andrew Loog Oldham, recorded a LP, then had it shelved for 30 years.  The album Breathlessly Brett was finally released in 2004, but these tapes are from before then, when Brett was working with Del Shannon (of Runaway fame).  It features 5 recordings done with Shannon (3 of which are previously unreleased) and some unheard demos…. needless to say, it’s been a cool project to work on.

Another recording to recently resurface is the original Hindu Windmills by Elephant Micah.  Joe O’Connell (E.M.) and I recorded this eight(!) years ago, late at night in a performance hall on the Northwestern campus, while we were working on the Mittens on Strings album Look Up the Sky!! (another album worth revisiting).  Joe wasn’t thrilled with his performances, and as we were discussing what to do with them, a mutual friend accidentally leaked the mixes, which quickly spread across the Internet.  In response, Joe re-recorded the songs himself, which were released a couple years later on Time Lag.  As the years have passed and water has flowed under the bridges, Joe decided to put our sessions online for posterity.  I found the original mixes, did a quick remaster, and they are now available online for a donation as the Hindu Windmills: First Sessions.  I have to say that while I can hear the tiredness at times, and that I will always be disappointed that these songs leaked the way they did, I’m really pleased to have them properly out in the world now – they’re great recordings of wonderful songs.

If you’re free tonight and around the NYC area, come to Glasslands to celebrate the release of Fort Lean’s new EP Change Your Name, and see why the New York Times recently gushed: “Three or four decades ago, Fort Lean would have been a mainstream success spawning emulators. Nowadays it’s a one of one, not that anyone should bother trying to compete.”  Patrick from Chairlift (who produced the EP) will be DJing, and Ludwig Persik (who recently released an awesome self-titled EP) and Cruiser open.

Thanks so much for reading through this!  I sincerely hope you like this stuff as much as I sincerely do.  If you’d like to talk about sound or come check out Doctor Wu’s, please drop me a line: jonathan[dot]schenke[at]gmail[dot]com