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"We built this pillow house over the drums."
Zildjian: 16-inch K Light hi-hats; 20-inch Z3 crash; 24-inch K Light ride; 20-inch K ride
“Mike [Sapone, producer] has this big room upstairs, it was like the living room of this house and has all these angles everywhere. We experimented a lot putting the drums in different places but now there is this one place where we know the drums sound the best. He knows the room really well.
“We recorded The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me in Longview Farms which is up near Boston. It’s this old barn with stables that are 40ft long. You’re able to experiment so much with that. We learned a lot about what mics are good in different places and you can use the room to put a mic 40ft away which you don’t have the luxury to do everywhere.
“I always want to try new things and I think that is the best part about it otherwise things get stale. We know where to place the microphones and we know the [Sennheiser] 421s will sound good on the toms. There are the obvious ones but there are a lot of microphones I’ve discovered. Those Josephson E22s are unbelievable on everything - toms, guitars.
“One interesting thing that we went through recording The Devil And God... was on this song ‘Limousine’. We wanted to capture a very-small-room, in-the-closet drum sound. We built this pillow house over the drums where I had to crawl in and there was just enough room to play. It was such a great, closed sound, it was really fun.
“We never do the drum tracks all in a row so we just set up where and however we need to for what suits the song, whether it be outside, inside, under the pillow house, it doesn’t matter, we’ve got to figure it out.”
