But on eight on its own, you could turn it on and off, so it was really cool for recording kick drums and encoding the Dolby and then playing it back without it and trying to get weird shit going on.” The main one is it has switchable Dolby on channels one through four and then five through eight. “And it has a lot of weird little features. “It’s the best–sounding thing,” Carney enthuses. Thickfreakness, meanwhile, was recorded on a Tascam 388 combination quarter–inch reel–to–reel recorder and mixer. But I thought I hated the way high fidelity sounded because I thought that’s what hi–fi was.” I thought, y’know, this Akai is like the pinnacle of fidelity - I didn’t really know that it wasn’t. “So we ended up plugging things into guitar amps, remiking, reamping stuff that was what we were referring to, I guess. “Yeah, because I just remember the first time I used the Korg or the Akai how clear everything was, but at the same time how unflattering it was,” says the drummer. The band liked to call their approach at this time “medium fidelity”. ”For the recording of The Big Come Up, Carney upgraded from his Korg D12 to an Akai DPS16. That’s the kind of stuff we were doing, ’cause we had no outboard gear or any effects. “Y’know, like, Dan would do a guitar overdub and I would take a 57 by the mic cord and just spin it around in front of the amp like a propeller, to phase it. “We both were just really into trying different things,” says Carney. Together, however, the Black Keys learned quickly, through a combination of understanding exactly the sound they were trying to achieve - a raw, gritty take on blues–rock - and playful experimentation. “Pat put his name on the records as a producer, just ’cause he saw that on records and thought, I’ll put ‘Produced By’ Neither of us knew what the hell a producer was.” Comeuppances “Neither of us knew what we were doing,” Auerbach laughs. We realised that we’d been producing ourselves all along.” We didn’t even know what producing was until we worked with a producer. “I think at the time we didn’t really know what the terminology was. “I mean, I would say technically I didn’t produce those records,” Carney stresses. Both members of the Black Keys are now individually renowned as producers of other artists (of which more later) and say that the drummer’s producer status on their initial albums was the result more of youthful innocence than any grand scheme. “And that became our demo and that’s when the band started, ’cause we just had so much fun recording.”įor The Big Come Up and its 2003 successor Thickfreakness, Carney took a producer credit. “I just set up the mics and we recorded a bunch of songs,” Carney remembers. Instead, Carney and Auerbach began playing together, instigating the formation of the Black Keys. Fatefully for the two, the other members of Auerbach’s group didn’t turn up. The pair first starting working together when Carney, already a recording enthusiast, invited singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach down to his home studio to record the latter’s rock covers band on his Korg D12 digital workstation. Their commercial progress has been mirrored by their recording history, which began with the two jamming in 2001 in the basement of drummer Patrick Carney’s house to create their 2002 debut The Big Come Up and which this year saw them complete their eighth album Turn Blue at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The Black Keys have built a career on a shared love of studio experimentation.įrom their high–school beginnings in Akron, Ohio, to their current standing as one of the most successful rock bands in the world, the Black Keys’ career has been a long, slow climb. The Black Keys: Dan Auerbach (left) and Patrick Carney at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Studio in Nashville.
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