Foo Fighters:
The Foo
Fighters history, Grammy record awards, albums and more stuffs. Foo fighters as
one of the successful bands of all around the world.
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• Dave Grohl (guitar and vocals).
• Taylor Hawkins (drums, percussion)
• Nate Mendel (bass)
• Chris Shiflett (guitar, vocals)
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Foo Fighters
released a debut album written and recorded entirely by leader Dave Grohl --
at that point known only as the powerhouse drummer for Nirvana -- in the
summer of 1995, few would have guessed that the group would wind up as the
one band to survive the '90s alt-rock explosion unscathed. Other bands burned
brighter but they flamed out, breaking up after scoring a hit or two, but the
Foos steadily racked up success after success, filling up stadiums around the
world while staying on top of the charts all the way into the second decade
of the new millennium.
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Album “Big me”
Throughout 1996, Foo Fighters supported the album
with an extensive tour, enjoying a crossover hit with "Big Me" that
spring. Late in the year, the group began recording its second album with
producer Gil Norton. During the sessions, William Goldsmith left the band due
to creative tensions.Before the records release, Goldsmith was replaced by
Taylor Hawkins, who had previously drummed with Alanis Morissette.
One by One, the group's most polished
production, appeared in late 2002, followed by 2005's In Your Honor, which
narrowly missed the top of Billboard's album chart. After releasing a live
album titled Skin and Bones in 2006, the band returned to Norton's studio and
started constructing a dozen fractured, eclectic rock songs to be released in
2007 under the name Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace.
Grammy Awards
Wasting Light finished as a successfully of the Foo fighters band, debuting at number one on the Billboard charts, and taking gold
in the U.S. and also garnering another four Grammy Awards. In the wake of
Wasting Light, several other Foo projects emerged from a limited-edition
compilation called Medium Rare released for Record Store Day 2011; a documentary
of the band called Back and Forth -- and the group toured the album into 2012
Planning
the seventh Foo Fighters album, Dave Grohlrealised he was bored of the band's
typical recording process. Even though the group own 606 Studios, a top‑flight
recording facility in Northridge, Los Angeles, Grohl is still a punk
rocker at heart, and found himself hankering for a grittier, wholly
analogue approach to recording. One night in his HOTEL ROOM
in Melbourne, while on tour with Them
Crooked Vultures (his extra‑curricular trio with Josh Homme and John Paul
Jones), he hatched a plan to return to recording basics for what was to
become Wasting Light.
Twenty years on from the landmark recording of Nevermind,
Wasting Light sees Grohl reunited with that album's producer, Butch Vig and
— for the first time since Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994 — his former
Nirvana bandmate, bassist KristNovoselic. Two strict conditions were imposed
upon the making of Wasting Light: Grohl insisted that it had to be recorded
entirely to tape and, if that wasn't enough of a headache‑provoking
scenario for Vig, entirely in the Foos' frontman's two‑cargarage at his home in
Encino.
The album's 11 songs were tracked
sequentially, and Taylor Hawkins' drum setup would change accordingly
— but always within the confines of Dave Grohl'sgarage!"I thought,” Grohl says,
"rather than just record the album in the most expensive studio with the
most state‑of‑the‑art equipment, what if Butch and I were to get back
together after 20 years and dust off the tape machines and put them in my
garage? We've recorded an album somewhere where no‑one has ever
recorded before. We've not gone to the studio where Zeppelin made In
Through The Out Door, we've gone into my garage. The only person that's
recorded in my garage before is me for shitty demos that I've done for the last
two records.”
For his part, Butch Vig took some convincing. "Well, the
first day we sat down and talked about it,” the producer laughs, "he
dropped one bombshell: 'I wanna do it in my garage.' I thought, Well, he's
probably got a pretty nice garage. So we went down to his house and opened
it up — and it's just a shitty little rectangular room, about 18 feet by
20 feet or something. Hard, dry wall. It just sounded like a trashy
garage. But we put up a drum kit and four mics and Dave started playing
and it sounded good. Really intense, because the room is small and the sound pressure
was just super‑crushing loud. Then he dropped the second bombshell: 'I want to
do it on tape.' I was like, 'OK...' — in my head, thinking what we'll do
is we'll probably record on tape and then dump it into Pro Tools.”
"Butch said,” Grohl remembers, "'If we run into any
real trouble we can always dump it into Pro Tools.' I said, 'No nonono,
dude. No fucking computers. Not one computer. None.' Personally, I've
always preferred using tape, because I like the sound of human performance.
I don't like the mechanical, perfectionist attitude to making music. He
said, 'Y'know, I'm gonna have to get out my razor blade for editing.'
I said, 'I've seen you do it before, I know you can do it.'”
"So I thought about that a little bit,” Vig
continues, "and said, 'Well why can't we do that? That's how I learnt
how to make records.' I just tried to make my head go back in time
a little bit. I said to him, 'That means you guys have to be razor‑sharp
tight. You've gotta be so well rehearsed, 'cause I can't fix anything.
I can't paste drum fills and choruses around. This is gonna be
a record about performance, about how you guys play.'”
The full Wasting Light production team,
from left: Foosfrontman Dave Grohl, former Nirvana bassist KristNolosevic,
engineer James R Brown, mix engineer Alan Moulder and producer Butch Vig.
In preparing for the
tracking of Wasting Light, engineer James R. Brown travelled to Grohl's house
in Encino to make some exploratory recordings with a Studer A827 24‑track
recorder and a rack of Neve preamps pulled from 606 Studios' old BCM10.
"I threw up eight microphones, just to get a feel for what we
were gonna be DEALING with,” says Brown. "We did three‑hour,
16‑track demos of a handful of tunes, including 'Dear Rosemary'.
I told Butch we weren't going to have any problem with top end!”
Satisfied with the test recordings and readying themselves to
set up a control room in the study upstairs from Grohl's garage (running
cables up the outside wall), the team brought in another Studer A827 to enable
them to run 48 tracks, and ordered an API 1608 desk, with an extension board
bringing it up to 32 channels. Monitoring was done through Vig's Barefoot
MM27s. "The primary concern was space,” Brown says. "Along with that,
we knew that there was a very good chance that it was gonna end up on 48‑track
analogue. API are very honest, musical‑sounding boards.”
"I love APIs,” says Vig. "I think they have
a really punchy sound. The EQ is not subtle. When you wanna boost some mid‑range
or high‑end or bottom, you hear it right away. I can hear the sound of
that board in the sound of the record.”
In keeping with the self‑imposed remit, all the outboard used
during tracking was analogue, including Manley Massive Passive and GML 8200
EQs, plus compression from a Dramastic Audio Obisidian, two Universal
Audio LA3As and two Chandler Little Devils. "All analogue,” Vig confirms.
"For preamps, mostly we used the APIs, but there were also the rack Neves
they stole from 606.”
Butch says working conditions in the makeshift control room were
fine, since it has a high ceiling which helped it not to feel unreasonably
crowded once filled with both equipment and people. "I mean, trust
me, it was crowded,” he laughs. "Dave did some of the vocals sitting right
next to me. But a lot of the overdubs we did in this little room right
next to the study — this maybe eight‑foot by six‑foot area we made into an iso
booth. We put a sliding glass door on it. Dave could go in there and
sing, and also we had some amps in there.”
As well as the main garage space,
a small additional room was used as an isolation booth for tracking
amplifiers and vocals.
A plan was quickly
formulated to record each track, top to tail, in a week, with drum tracks
recorded on a Monday morning and a rough mix done by Friday evening.
"We stuck to that,” says Vig, "and it was good because each song kinda
had its own life. Once we were focused on a song for a week, that's
pretty much all we did. In a way, you had a sense of completion. And
then we would change the drum sound out, change everything out.”
In terms of sonic treatment of the garage live room, there was
virtually none, other than two baffles positioned behind drummer Taylor
Hawkins' kit and another two placed at the door to cut down leaking noise.
"The two right behind Taylor were maybe four feet by four feet, just to
get rid of the reflections off the back wall that were coming into the drum
kit,” says Vig. "We put a carpet under the drums also. Initially, it
was so loud and bright with no carpet in it, and the cymbal bleed was killing
everything. It still was a very bright sound, but a little bit more
reined‑in.”
"To tame that space, we would've had to hang things
everywhere,” Brown points out. "And y'know, the brief going into it was
that Dave didn't want to do that. He wanted the record to have a trashy,
aggressive quality to it.”
Still, when it came to recording the first drum track, it
quickly became apparent that the cymbal bleed was still presenting a major
problem. "The cymbals are always a problem with the Foos,” Brown
says, "because they wash a lot and they hit them so hard. You have to
work quite hard trying to make sure it doesn't suck up all the ambience. We
swapped his main crash for a shorter-decay Zildjian cymbal with holes
drilled in it, and we turned the main ambience mics around to face the bottom
corners of the garage.”
Dave Grohl's self‑imposed regimen banned
all digital gear from the project. As there was no direct visual link between
control room and garage, a 42‑inch TV was set up for visual communication.As the team settled into a tracking routine,
a method developed involving Grohl standing in front of Hawkins' drums in
the garage, directing him while playing guitar through an amp located in the
upstairs isolation booth. "A lot of times with Taylor,” Vig says,
"instead of tape editing, we would just punch in. You can hear the punch‑ins
and punch‑outs if you put headphones on. Especially if you soloed the drums,
you would hear the cymbals change or the snare tuning change a little bit.
And sometimes we would fuck up — like James would punch in on
a chorus and he'd clip a snare or something and we'd play it back for
Taylor and go, 'Sorry, dude, you're gonna have to do it again.'
"Dave would just stand two feet away from him, just so they
could communicate, especially if we were trying to figure out drum fills or
some patterns that were not quite working. That way, there was an immediate
rapport between the two of them.” Due to the lack of visual contact between
makeshift live and control rooms, Grohl set up a spare 42‑inch TV hooked
up to two cameras — one situated in the garage, and another pointed at one
or other of the tape machines. "We'd flip between cameras,” says Vig.
"We could see Taylor drumming, but most of the time we had it on the tape
machine. About two weeks in, somebody suggested, 'Hey, you know what, we should
just put this feed up on the web site.' So if you went to the Foo Fighters
site, you would see the shot of a tape machine running, then rewinding,
then running.” Once everyone was satisfied with the drum take, a basic
four‑track mix consisting of kick, snare and a stereo track of toms
and overheads would be bounced onto the slave reel, which became the focus for
tracking.
Brought in to mix the project, Alan
Moulder (front) swiftly realised that he would be unable to recapture the same
energy in a conventional studio, and decamped to Grohl's house to work on
the same API desk as was used to record the album.
Turning to bass parts,
Nate Mendel would record his Lakland Bob Glaub Signature bass through an
Ashdown ABM 900 EVO II head with an Ashdown 8x10 cabinet. "He has
a bunch of basses, but he really likes those Lakland basses,” says Vig.
"I think we might have used a Fender on one song,
I think we tried a Gibson Ripper on one song. But he's very fluid, he
has a really good feel and that was almost more important sometimes than
the sound — how the performance felt on the song.”
With Grohl, Chris Shiflett and returning original member Pat
Smear, the Foo Fighters now have three guitarists who all, says Vig, offer
their distinctive sounds and styles. "They all kinda have different roles.
Dave is kind of the glue, he plays most of the rhythm stuff and locks in really
well with Taylor. Chris is an amazing musician and normally he would play the
riffy parts, the arpeggio parts, the lead breaks, things like that. Pat was the
'x' factor and sort of came up with all these gnarly guitar tones. The funny
thing is, for Pat's main rig we ended up using a Roland Jazz Chorus
[JC120] with these crazy pedals that would make the fillings in your
teeth fall out. He also did a lot of baritone guitar stuff, so he
would find this place lower than Chris and Dave to come up with his parts.
I think he also used a cheap Peavey on a couple of songs. Chris
and Dave have all these great vintage amps and then Pat has like the crudest
sound. It was perfect.
"Chris really likes Vox AC30s, though he used
a Marshall now and then. We tried this brand‑new amp by this small
boutique company Audio Kitchen and it sounded great — Chris used it on
a couple of songs and Dave used it on three or four songs. It's just got
a really cool tone. You don't necessarily have to turn it up loud to get
a saturated sound on it. All the controls are very interactive between the
tone and the boost and the bottom end. The guy who makes it sent us two — one
was called the Big Chopper and the other was called the Little Chopper, but
both great amps.”
In terms of amp miking, the workhorses were the trusty Shure SM7
and SM57, along with the Royer R121 and two RCA BK5 ribbon mics.
"I had the RCA mics sent out from Smart Studios. They're my favourite
ribbon mic because they have more high end than normal ribbon mics, but they
can also take a really intense sound pressure.”
When it came to Dave Grohl's vocals, the chain was a Bock
251 mic through a Neve 1073 preamp and Empirical Labs Distressor
compressor. The only exception was for the grainy, saturated vocal on 'White
Limo', which was captured by Grohl singing through an SM57 plugged directly into
a Rat distortion pedal and then into the Roland JC120. 'I Should Have
Known', meanwhile, features a blend between both sounds.
If anyone knows about grunge, it's Dave
Grohl, Butch Vig and KristNovoselic."We were doing everything on the slave reel,” Vig points out,
"so by the time we got all the guitars on there, there were usually only
four tracks left for vocals and two left for vocal bounces. So Dave would just
do these performances and we would work until we felt that we had four good
takes that could almost be considered a lead. With Dave, once he got
focused, the takes were very consistent. When we'd finish, I'd put all four
takes up and listen to them all at the same time, and you could hear how tight
it was. If he was off, phrasing‑wise, especially on a chorus, then we'd go
back in and do it. But really, though, it was so tight.
"Then I would usually comp it in chunks — use take two
for the first verse, take three for the chorus — and then we would record
a double. The cool thing about live doubling is there's no Auto‑Tune and
it's not perfect and because it's looser, it sounds better. It's sort of wider
and thicker‑sounding. Every now and then when we were bouncing, we'd have to
punch in a word. Or sometimes I'd have to do, like, ninja fades, slight
crossfades. It was a lot of work, but again I think when you hear it,
it has character. It feels like a performance. It doesn't feel like
something that was put together in a studio.”
In 13 weeks, allowing
for days off, the team tracked 11 songs. With tracking done, Vig and the Foo
Fighters brought in Alan Moulder (Smashing Pumpkins, the Killers, Them Crooked
Vultures) to oversee the mixing of Wasting Light at Chalice Studios in
Hollywood. Moulder had most recently mixed Them Crooked Vultures at the studio,
but admits he hadn't mixed off tape since the first Yeah YeahYeahs album, Fever
To Tell, in 2002.
"I was worried 'cause I'd got so used to mixing from
Pro Tools,” he admits. "I was slightly nervous about it, with it
being such a big record. But it was a relative challenge, and
I remembered there were things that were great about tape. It makes you work
in a different way. You don't get so bogged down because you can't keep
looping around the same sections. I really love what tape does to the
vocals, how it rounds them off. You don't get all the transients that pop out
and thump your compressor.”
Quickly, however, the mixing sessions hit a wall, when
Moulderrealised that he was struggling to improve upon or even match the rough
mixes from Grohl's garage. "James hadn't done anything in particular — it
just came off the API sounding like that. There was a certain top‑end
presence that when you threw it up on the SSL just wasn't there. Immediately it
sounded a bit cloudier.”
This was good news for Dave Grohl who, keen to stick
to his original concept for the album, was actually itching to mix Wasting
Light back at the garage. For his part, impressing Vig, Moulder wasn't thrown
by this sudden development. "There seemed to be a theme and
a story to the record,” says Moulder, "and us being at Chalice didn't
seem to be part of it. The whole record was done punk rock‑style in the garage,
and it seemed a little odd to go from that to this other studio in
Hollywood.”
"There's a lot of mixers I know who would not
want to do that,” Vig stresses, "who would not want to go to manually mix
in this room where there's no acoustic treatment. But he did, and at points,
Alan, myself, James and Dave were squeezed in at the console because we needed
eight hands on the board to do a mix. Each mix became a performance.
And of course, we didn't have inputs for 48 tracks, so we mixed off the 'B'
reel. So the drums are all the second generation, pre‑mixed bounce. That's just
the way it was.”
Bending the analogue‑only rule slightly, a sprinkling of
digital reverb was added to the mixes from an Eventide 2016. At the same time,
two Lexicon PCM42s were used for delays, along with an Eventide Eclipse used
for further vocal doubling. Moulder would send mastering engineer Emily Lazar
(and co-mastering engineer Joe LaPorta, at The Lodge, New York) rough
mixes for advice on EQ. "She got back to us and said, 'The top end's
better than Chalice. Bottom end isn't.' There was probably more for her to do
on this than there would have been normally, but that's because we were in
a pretty untreated room.”
So, with job done,
were Moulder and Vig relieved to get back to Pro Tools? "Well,
I wouldn't say no to mixing from tape again,” the former offers,
diplomatically. "But I'm not throwing my Pro Tools out.”
"Y'know, I am glad to get back to Pro Tools,”
says the latter. "The thing is, the Foo Fighters are great players
and a lot of young bands I've worked with, it would've taken twice as
long just to get good performances.”
Despite the various trials along the way, though, both Vig and
the Foo Fighters are clearly very happy with the distinctively live‑sounding,
comparatively raw production of Wasting Light. "People say it sounds
honest, unlike anything they've heard lately,” Vig states. "I think
we're just used to hearing everything so tight and perfect and Auto‑Tuned these
days. That sounds great, but this sounds real somehow.”
"It was quite an experience,” Grohl concludes. "We
weren't letting anything slip through the cracks. It all had to be spot‑on
rock, y'know. I think everyone will agree that it was the most fun we've
ever had making an album. For the three of us to be together again, Butch and
Krist and I, it was a wonderful thing. It was more than making an
album.” .
Thanks to Dave Grohl's insistence on working
entirely in the analogue domain, Butch Vig had to very quickly reacquaint
himself with the methods of tape recording, trying to reawaken skills he hadn't
used in nearly 20 years. "I was a little nervous the first day,”
the producer admits. "We tracked the first song, and on the second or
third take, we got a really good one. But I didn't like one of the fills
on the end, so on another tape I had Taylor play something else and then
I went in and I got the razor blade and I did an old‑school tape
edit on two‑inch. Which was fine, even though my hands were a little
shaky.”
As it turned out, the difficulty with the
physical edits was not with Vig's shaky hands but with the quality of the tape
itself. "James Brown and I put the tape back on and a huge chunk
of the backing fell off the tape. We both freaked out. We were like, 'Oh my
God, is this tape so poorly made now that it doesn't stand up to a tape
edit?' It turns out that the splicing tape itself was too industrial.
I remembered that I used to use this kind of real thin, flimsy, light‑blue
editing tape — which was helpful because if you didn't like your edit, you
could very carefully take it apart. But they don't make it any more.”
In a slight panic, Vig called the chief
engineer at his Smart Studios in Wisconsin, who managed to unearth a roll
of the old editing tape in the basement. It was quickly Fed‑Exed to Grohl's
garage. "The difference these days,” Brown argues, "is the companies
who're producing recording tape are putting 40 percent more oxide on it, so
it's a lot more brittle. We had a week of worrying whether the tape
was going to last through the process.”
Still, Grohl remained adamant that the team
couldn't use Pro Tools even to back up the masters. Vig remembers, "Dave
looked at me and said, 'If you get a computer in here I'm gonna throw it
out the window.' So I said, 'OK, you've made your point, but I just want
you to know that I don't know how good this tape is. We could be recording
and we could be a month in and overdubbing on a song and all of
a sudden, the tape breaks or comes apart or the backing comes off.' And
Dave said, 'Then I guess we have to re‑record the song.' That's pretty
hardcore. But luckily none of the tapes broke. Once we started using that
lighter splicing tape, it was all fine.”
Other aspects of analogue recording, such as
controlling unwanted noise, found Vig employing long‑forgotten tricks.
"All these things started coming back to me, literally on the first song,”
he says. "There'd be a buzz on the guitar in these spots they weren't
playing in. I never really like to use noise gates, so I'd do it manually.
I'd have a fader set with a bit of tape on the top where the level
was, so I could throw the fader up whenever they were playing, and as soon
as they stopped I would pull it down really quick so it was like
a manual noise gate. We did it on everything we recorded.”
'Only I Should Have Known', the song
featuring KristNovoselic on accordion and bass, had to be re‑recorded from the
feet up. "We tracked it and I thought it sounded good,” Vig says.
"But Dave thought it sounded too 'parted‑out', like I'd worked out the
arrangement too much. He said, 'You're trying to make this into a radio
single, it's never gonna be a radio single.' I don't think I was
really trying to consciously turn it into a single. But that's how
I work, I try to get parts of the song really focused. And Dave said,
'I need this to sound really raw and primal,' so we went back and re‑tracked
that at the 11th hour, like, the last week in there. Taylor played much looser
— instead of worrying about the parts, he put crazier fills in that were
almost Keith Moon‑esque, and Krist played this crazy bass overdub in the
middle.”
"When Krist plugged his Gibson Ripper
into the Hi‑Watt amp,” Grohl recalls, thrilled, "he played the bass line
he came up with in his head and, I'm not kidding, it was so undeniably
KristNovoselic that Butch and I just looked at each other and laughed.”
I
Creating Day of the Dead altars is one of the most important Day of the Dead traditions.
