Imagine this scenario: You’ve made it.
You’ve got a Grammy nomination to your
name. Your electronic beats have driven
everything from video games to the Thunderbirds
fighter drill team to an exercise
routine by Nike. The rise of electronic
dance music in the U.S. owes a lot to you,
and you’re celebrating the tenth anniversary
of one of your platinum-selling albums.
Thanks to all this success, you’ve been
able to build your dream synth studio, and
you’re powering it up for the first time. . . .
That’s how Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland
— the Crystal Method — began their
latest effort, Divided by Night. The first
sounds of the album were born as their new
studio was finished. What might surprise
you is that their biggest challenge was to
return to the spirit of the poorly-heated converted
garage in which their seminal debut
Vegas was crafted. Making the new album
was half invention, half archaeology, as the
duo rediscovered old working techniques.
Getting a state-of-the-art studio with
(nearly) every synth you’ve ever wanted? A
very good thing once your MasterCard can
take it. Reclaiming the freedom to make a
record for no one but yourselves, to share
that effort with your favorite collaborators,
and recapture some of the feeling of making
your first album? Priceless.
Going Back to
Vegas
The seeds for the new album were planted
as the duo deconstructed some of their
own work. Vegas set the course sonically,
technically, and philosophically, for Crystal
Method’s fourth studio album.
“We were preparing for the ten-year
anniversary of Vegas, going back and listening
to that album,” says Scott. “We had
it remastered, had remixes done – pulling
up some of the parts gave us a chance to
reflect a little bit about where we were in
the beginning.” It wasn’t just listening to the
album itself, recalls Scott, but recalling
some of the scope and ambitions of the
duo’s first outing that helped fuel Divided
by Night. “There’s a lot of attention to detail
on that record, lots of sounds that we
crafted from scratch. When you make your
first record, you don’t think about anything
else. You don’t think about what this certain
person would like, or try to make anybody
at the record label happy, because you
don’t have a record deal. We loved the
freedom of that. We loved both Tweekend
and Legion of Boom, our next two studio
albums. But we thought, especially on
Legion of Boom, we left some things on
the table. We didn’t explore the full potential
of a song.”
Realizing that potential, Scott explains,
meant both fully developing the songs and
involving the duo’s favorite collaborators to
add dimension. “We just had the new studio
and had great sounds coming out of it,”
Scott says. “We warmed up a lot of our old
synthesizers and had space to put them
out and access them quickly. It was just an
opportunity to really expand on where we
thought our sound could go. And we
reached out to some amazing people,
including Jason Lyttle from Grandaddy,
Emily Haines from Metric, and Justin
Warfield from She Wants Revenge. We
wanted to hear more melody and beauty in
the music and just really take each song as
far as we felt that they could go.”
Unraveling Vegas’ sonic DNA brought
back memories of some of the techniques
that made that album tick, as the duo dug
deep into archival DATs to find stems for
remixing and remastering. “Some of the
separate parts were coming back, says
Scott. “A track like ‘Busy Child,’ [from
Vegas] even — you start to remember
exactly how you’d recorded it. We were
bringing out some of these old synths that
we hadn’t used — the Minimoog and the
Yamaha CS-40. We’ve always used the
Roland Jupiter-6; it’s pretty much a workhorse.
It was getting back into that world.
We loved the amount of melody that existed
on Vegas, all the little bits and pieces that
put together the song. That’s something I
think you hear a lot of on this record.”
Scott and Ken are both serious about
reconstructing the tiny details of how the
first record was assembled, even as they
replace gear with slicker, new equipment.
“As you get more money to invest in the
studio, all these little boxes that at the time
you thought were great, you look back on
as junk,” says Scott. “We had this ART
DR-X rack-mounted multi-effects pitch
thing — it broke. It just wouldn’t turn on.
And then pulling up [Vegas track] ‘High
Roller,’ that delay was from the DR-X.”
Ken Jordan, the member of the duo with
the dominant engineering background, cuts
in, trying to remember the signal flow: “I’ve
got my money on chorus . . . and there was
a chain of delays . . . it was like one order,
one row of effects . . . I think it was chorus
before the delay. . . .”
From Garage to Crystalwerks
For a duo whose big-beat sound is defined
by meticulous methods with gear, the working
environment matters. Divided by Night
emerges from a new workflow, new software
tools, and most importantly, a completely
new studio built around the tools that are
most significant to the Crystal sound. The
result is Crystalwerks, a professionally-built
North Hollywood studio fusing vintage analog
favorites with a Mac-based Pro Tools rig.
It’s a big shift from the home-brewed
sonic lair in which Crystal Method famously
constructed their first albums. “The first
three albums, the first piece of music that
we put out were recorded in our little studio
in a two-car garage north of Glendale,
CA,” says Scott. “It was a studio not well
put together, but put together with lots of
love and lots of passion for making music.
It was really great for us for a long time. We
slapped some drywall up and soundproofed
this ’50s-era garage — and dealt with fluctuations
of weather through the years. California
doesn’t get that hot, but in that
studio, it got pretty warm. Eventually we
put a window-mounted air conditioner in
the room adjacent to the studio.”
Ken laughs, “First we just tried to cool
the studio that was this big with all the
machinery with an air conditioner in a room
that was this big right next to it with the
door open.” It should come as no surprise,
then, that the new studio has its own
machine room for the hotter gear.
Of course, the duo that began in the
garage confesses that switching on your
dream studio for the first time can be intimidating.
Ken Jordan recalls that first day: “It
was overwhelming at the beginning,
because it’s such a great place — the aesthetic
is so good, the natural light. We had
pretty much all the gear we wanted —
except a hardware Jupiter-8! [Laughs.] And
it’s all hooked up, and it’s all ready to go.
Everything’s beautiful and everything
sounds pretty good. I kind of expected the
first day to walk in there and have music
just sort of pouring in. And that doesn’t
happen. There’s still a lot of work.”
Making the move was an important
process, says Scott: “It allowed us to think
bigger, to be more comfortable, to record
things better. It just gave us new energy and
new life. The building we have now is a big
jump in professional recording and setup.”
In addition to changing the physical surroundings,
the move also involved a software
switch, from MOTU Digital Performer
with TDM support (for Pro Tools plug-ins
and hardware) to a full-blown Digidesign
Pro Tools HD setup. They also gave up
their Mackie Digital 8-Bus Mixer, mixing
instead on a Digidesign D-command control
surface. That move was ultimately a
comfortable one, says Scott. “We were
learning Pro Tools, which isn’t that far from
[the Digital Performer setup] — we already
knew the plug-in side of it, the audio side of
it. Both being American companies, I think
that some of the choices that MOTU and
Digidesign made regarding their interfaces
and their MIDI are similar. Although for
years DP was a lot more advanced on the
MIDI side, Pro Tools has made many steps
to move to the forefront of MIDI implementation.
It did take us a little bit of time to get
used to the program itself.”
Aside from the software, says Scott,
they needed time to adapt to the room: “It’s
a much different room. We knew what
everything sounded like in the old room.
We kept the same monitors; we use PMC,
a company out of England. But it just took
a little while for us to get used to the way
the new room sounded.”
The Right Tools for the Job
Writing isn’t easy, concedes Scott: “I think
it’s hard for everyone. You just go in and
you try to start with a drum beat that you
like, or a bass line you hear in your head.
Or you get a new synth and just have to
make a tune with it — on ‘High Roller’ on
Vegas, for example, we really played
around with the first Nord Lead when it
came out.”
“Yeah,” laughs Ken. “We were so excited
to lock the arpeggiator to MIDI clock!”
Make no mistake about it: Ken and
Scott both love plugging in their toys to get
inspiration going. “On Vegas,” Scott says,
“we had distortion pedals and fuzz pedals
and tube pedals — you just throw everything
in there, so you get excited that way.
The same thing happened here.” Even surrounded
by many of their favorite vintage
hardware synths, they got additional creative
fuel from virtual emulations of instruments
they don’t (yet) own. “We got
excited going through some of the new
virtual instruments — Arturia having a
Yamaha CS-80 and an ARP 2600, and
GForce having an OSCar and an ARP
Odyssey, and we were intrigued the things
they did,” says Scott. “It’s not ever going to
be the same as real analog synths, but the
things that were different about it made it
fun to jump to those new programs. The
sound quality was great, and the updates,
as far as locking up LFOs and arpeggiators,
were exciting.”
“Don’t forget having every knob work!”
interrupts Ken.
“That was fun,” agrees Scott. “Getting in
and realizing, wow, now that we can lock
these things that we couldn’t lock before,
let’s take this idea that we once had on the
CS-80 and expand it here. Every bit, from
beats to bass lines to new sounds on
synths to things in our heads to amazing
songs that we’d hear from different artists
that were releasing new music – everything
is inspiring to us.”
That’s not to say there isn’t some sense
of economy in the Crystal Method’s production,
as is revealed on the album. “Even
if you have all that stuff available,” cautions
Ken, “if you think you have to use it all on
every track, you’re really screwed!”
The Crystal Method Sound
Divided by Night is slicker and more developed
than any album since Vegas. Oh, and
it’s faster, too. “Prior, we haden’t had a song
as fast as 155 beats per minute,” says Ken.
Regardless of tempo, moving forward is
what keeps the duo creatively energized.
“We’re more concerned with just moving
on,” Ken explains. “You can’t get trapped in
worrying about what people are going to
say: ‘How come you didn’t do what you did
last time?’ or ‘Damn it, you just did the
same thing you did last time!’ You can’t fight
that battle. You’re never going to win it in
your head, so you’ve got to progress.” The
result is an album very much in the Crystal
Method sound die-hard fans crave, but with
plenty of fresh ideas — all with the signature,
rock-influenced big-beat drums.
“We’ve always wanted to sound different
from our last record, says Scott. “A lot
of people were confused when we
released Tweekend. They wanted us to get
in there and have those 16-bar drum rolls
and use a lot of the same tricks. “There’s a
track called ‘Black Rainbows’ that’s more
four-on-the-floor, upbeat kinds of sounds,
expanding what we’re trying to do.”
“Black Rainbows” features the delicatelyfloating
sounds of Stefanie King Warfield’s
vocals, but against an animated percussive
landscape. “We’ve got a Roland TR-909
and these great drum machines from the
past,” Scott continues. “So we brought a lot
of those into the mix. Of course, we’ve
always tried to find the big kicks and snares
that give us that big-rock, dirty, organic, live
drum sound.” Add in a “gamut of collaboration”
as Ken puts it, and you have Divided
by Night. Those collaborations “worked out
pretty magically,” he says.
“When we’re making a record,” Ken
reflects, “we plan on it sounding good forever
— we’re concisouly not trying to say,
‘Hey, here’s this new sound, so let’s put it
all over the record.’ I think not pigeonholing
what we do has always served us well. We
are electronic, I guess, but we’ve never
tried to be breakbeat or trip-hop or big-beat
or any of those things.”
The duo’s signature sound, however, is all
over this record. “Certainly, you still hear
some of the overall grime, you still hear the
low end distortion and the real, you still hear a
lot of hard sort of rock and classic sort of rock
tones and sounds in everything we do, says
Ken. “There’s always contrast — the prettiest
of things and the dirtiest of things.”
Crystal Method’s Virtual Reality
The new Crystalwerks studio is the perfect fusion of digital and analog, vintage gear feeding into a high-end Pro Tools HD system.
Ken and Scott took advantage of non-historical, modern sound design features on software emulations as they did authentic sounds
from the hardware originals. “It was close to 50/50, if you really break it down,” says Scott. “Some songs are more geared toward
virtual synths; some toward the analog hardware. I think that we found on this record, we found that balance, where we appreciate
the sound and the warmth of a Memorymoog or a Yamaha CS-40 or an Andromeda, then we appreciate the convenience of some of
the newer Arturia, GForce, Korg, and Native Instruments plug-ins.” Here are some of Scott’s favorites:
Korg Mono/Poly
(from Korg’s Legacy Analog Edition 2007)
GForce Virtual String Machine
GForce Oddity
GForce ImpOSCar