“Chatter & Buzz” featuring Micropixie | pc muñoz
Single: “Chatter & Buzz” featuring Micropixie
Album: pc muñoz’s Grab Bag (Talking House Records)
Dates: Recorded and mixed from Thanksgiving of 2006 to mid-2008 at Talking House Studios in San Francisco
Producer: pc muñoz
Engineer: Justin Lieberman and Willie Samuels
Mixer: Justin Lieberman
Mastering Engineer: Willie Samuels at Talking House Studios
Other Projects: Artist/Producer/Musician pc muñoz has worked alongside TS Leach, Elephone, Ingrid Chavez, and Joan Jeanrenaud, among others.
Studio Consoles: Solid State Logic 9000K (Studio A) and Digidesign D-Command ICON (Studio B)
Studio Monitors: Genelec 8050A and 1035B main monitors
Studio Workstation: Digidesign Pro Tools|HD
Vocal Microphone: Neumann M 149
Vocal Microphone Pre-amp: Martech MSS-10
Select Vocal Processing: Neve 33609 compressor Producers’s Diary
Experimental songwriter pc muñoz — one of six producers that make up the whole of Talking House Productions in San Francisco — recently released the trippy pc muñoz’s Grab Bag, a record of mostly spoken word jams featuring sounds you haven’t heard in some time, if ever.
For the interestingly catchy “Chatter and Buzz” featuring female vocalist Micropixie, muñoz finally finished the track after leaving it alone for quite some time. “I originally had a whole other vocal where I sang the whole thing,” he recalls. “I think that’s why I had left it on the shelf. I wasn’t quite happy with it all. Upon revisiting it, I had the drummer (Adam Goodhue) come in and play on it along with some bass and freaky guitar. I then had Micropixie come in and add her vocal.”
pc muñoz The track was built from a unique base; a hypnotic, alternating two-note figure on the marimbula, “a bass calimba,” explains muñoz. Its earthy-yet-electronic feel developed from there. “It gives the track an atonal quality, making it a sort of keyless funk. From there, I added a cajon drum — steady fours to give it backbeat — and ride cymbal. The instrument that sounds like a marimba is a tongue drum, a Mayan instrument. Then, through parts of the song, I hit this plank, a piece of wood, with random knocks and sounds. Finally, the synthesizer is a Roland from the ’80s, which I tweaked out; in mixing, Justin tweaked it even further. It ended up being the hook, but I had added it just for texture.”
For muñoz’s distinctive voice, engineer employed a Neumann M 149 with a Martech MSS-10 microphone pre-amp and vintage Neve 33609 compressor serving as a signal chain straight to Pro Tools|HD. “The Neumann M 149 works really well for the kind of speak-singing that I do and the timbre of my voice,” explains muñoz. “There’s a certain inflection that I want to capture in speak-singing; that mic does a really good job of capturing it, and we’ve been very consistent in using it.”
