GEARED puzzles out the sound of the WITCH HATS’ debut record, Cellulite Soul, with drummer DUNCAN BLACHFORD.

Cellulite Soul is fantastic. It does everything I’d expect from a modern rock record, while being recorded live to tape. The sounds feel like they belong together – crashing off one another. There’s so much natural distortion – of microphones crapping out and things hitting walls and bouncing back again. Is that something you were trying to do?

I guess naturally just by our taste and what we’re trying to do there was an inclination towards making things distorted and rough. I guess there’s a couple of songs where techniques were used to create a bit of extra distortion on vocals and things like that, but overall I think probably just micing-up what happened. The guys who recorded it didn’t intend on making it sound like the mics are crapping out, so they may be horrified to think so.

It’s not a bad thing, it just sounds really really loud. The bottom end surges forward, and there’s so much mid, and then the treble of the guitar comes slashing through all of the sounds. It’s sonically extraordinary.

Unfortunately there are no real interesting stories to tell on that front. I would assume that we like low-end bass and fuzz that up, and like high-end guitars so ... I don’t know, I think it’s just a reflection of what sort of sounds we would go for live. I wish I had a great story to tell.

I do too.

It would make life more interesting. We can make one up. There were a couple of things that maybe were done, and interestingly enough it is as you said about sounds bouncing of walls. The mics, with the guitar sound, were put into a fairly large room and I don’t think we ended up close micing it all. Phil had this theory (I’m not sure if it was true, but it sounded true to me) that close micing only ever really happened at a certain stage in musical history. His theory was: let’s fuck off the close mic, and we’ll record it from the back of the room, metres and metres away and we’ll have mics facing the amp and we’ll have some facing the wall and give it sort of a spatial, big sound. I guess that might account for a lot of the range of the different frequencies. Different positions in the room undoubtedly would have different sonics going on. Maybe that’s it, the multi-micing, and different positioning.

That would account for the really tight delay on everything – that residual boom that penetrates everything. What about the bass though? Without close micing it would have spilt over into the guitar tracks fairly grossly.

The bass was shoved in a small room. We messed around with a lot of mics. At first it wasn’t quite sounding grumbly enough. The theory was, let’s get things to go to tape the way we want to hear them back. So we did mess around with different mics and different placements and different settings on the EQs on the amp obviously. Once we thought we had the sounds we liked we put it down to tape so as much as possible not having mixing as a situation where you’re trying t o polish a turd. You’ve done the hard work and have the goods to work with from there. They talk about shelving audio as well, having things on different shelves so creating spatial qualities and things that give it a sense of clarity rather than all coming out from the same space on the record maybe through panning and different mixing things, but not having to fuck with the actual sound of it once you’ve got the sound, just the positioning of the sound.

You can certainly hear that on the record. It sounds, animated. The sheer noise of the thing is cacophonous, but all the voices are quite clearly defined.

Thanks.

CELLULITE SOUL is out now through Infidelity.

GEARED: Sound Check - Witch Hats

So I went to the Witch Hats show at Ric’s on the weekend, and discovered what gear they were using. It is surprisingly simple.

Frontman Kris Buscombe ran a Fender Telecaster through an Ibanez Tube Screamer, and a Boss TU-2. This went into an (expensive) Orange Combo, which seemed to dialled-in fairly aggressively. Kris played the lead guitar lines and other melodies.

Guitarist Tom Barry used a Fender Jazzmaster. He put that through an MI Audio G.I. Fuzz, a Boss DS-1 (old school!), and a TU-2 before plugging into a Fender Bassman head powering a quad box. He wielded all the low, gritty tones you would expect from such a rig, and stuck to playing a kind of desperate, paranoid rhythmic guitar.

Bassist Ash Buscombe brandished a Fender P Bass, which trailed down to a Electro Harmonix Hot Tubes – the pedal known for its tank-like construction, but ironically exposed (and fragile) vacuum tubes. It goes a long way to explain his mammoth tone, and it would be cool to see more bass players embrace valve tones, even if stompboxes are somewhat non-committal. His rig was a Hartke head with a small quad. He tuned with a TU-2.

I’m not sure whose drum kit Duncan Blachford was using, but I know he did have righteous hair.

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