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Happy Fangs, ‘Capricorn’

Happy Fangs is an apt name for this energetic punk trio from San Francisco. They’ve got a major edge, but a joyful sound, too, thanks to catchy rhythms and the bright sound of Rebecca Gone Bad’s lead vocal. The project was recorded mainly in Sacramento studio The Dock by engineer/co-producer Lance Jackman, who captured that lead vocal with a Telefunken CU-29 Copperhead through a Chameleon 7602 pre. But all of their songs begin with drum tracking.

“The drum recording sessions got split into two chunks,” Jackman says. “The first time I used a Spectrasonics sidecar that we have just for the drums, and the second time we used a Daking board that’s a little dirtier. The Dock has really high ceilings and a big stairwell at one end. I like to set up for room mics [in this case, Blue Baby Bottles] in the studio, and in the stairwell [Peluso P-28s]; those stairwell mics give all of it a lot of room.”

A guitarist himself, Jackman spent a long time choosing guitar tones with Happy Fangs guitarist Mr. Cobra. “That’s the only real instrumentation pushing the music, so we try to make it as big as possible,” says Jackman, who miked up Mr. Cobra’s Fender Twin Reverb and Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier amps with a 57, through either pre’s in the Daking board or a Chandler LTD Germanium outboard mic pre.

“Some low-end stuff was to a Sennheiser 421 through a Universal Audio 6176,” Jackman says. “We spent a lot of time getting tones from the amps; it really didn’t take a lot to get a good sound recorded.”

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