Producer Milo Froideval spent a month in Detroit, working on pre-production with Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas before bringing the band to residential Sonic Ranch Studios (El Paso, Texas) to make their new album, Secret Evil. “It takes time to figure out the sounds because Jessica likes a lot of things: folk music, mountain records, Detroit influences, old surf rock,” says Froideval.
The band tracked to a Studer A827 analog tape machine in the facility’s Adobe Studio, where the control room is fitted with a vintage Neve 8088 console. “I love to do albums there,” Froideval says. “You get bright-sounding drums. It’s a really relaxed studio, and it has a natural [reverb chamber] beside it. Open the doors of the [chamber], and you have warm, natural reverb on all the instruments.”
Producer Milo Froideval (left) and engineer Manuel Calderon
Froideval and Sonic Ranch staff engineer Manuel Calderon recorded the band piece by piece in the Adobe Studio’s single large tracking room, where they built a makeshift booth for Hernandez to cut her vocals. “We set up panels and a little roof,” Froideval says. “She mainly sang into a Telefunken 47 and we used the [31102] preamp in the console and a Tube-Tech CL 1B compressor. In parallel, we had an RCA 77; that went through the Neve and a UREI 1176 as well. We blended those two to get a big sound.”
