Don’t Pass Up Part One!
“In the beginning, I was playing out of a Fender amp with a Telecaster ’cause we’re like, ‘Well, we’re country; let’s do that,’” says Jeremiah Vanley, “and then the second album, we’re like, ‘Let’s try to make this more rock-focused and a little heavier,’ so I switched to a Marshall and got a Les Paul. Then I went even further and I’m playing a Wolfgang on the new album.”
“It was the same thing for me,” interjects Lance Vanley. “When we started out, it was playing through Fender Twang amps on a Telecaster, but then I thought, ‘This isn’t the sound that I hear in my head. When I hit that big chord, it’s not ringing out how I want it to ring out.’ Then I realized I really loved the Vox voicing of amplifiers, so I played through an AC-15 for a while. Now that I’ve moved over to digital, I run the Morgan AC-20, which is basically that British voice of the Vox that I love.”
Big guitars and driving drums have been key to the Treaty Oak identity, and to further refine the former, as well as track the album, Kimball flew in engineer Adrian Bushby from England.
“I’ve worked with him before and he’s killer at everything,” Kimball says, “but my favorite thing about Adrian is his guitar tone. We would have a rig for each guitar player in each ISO booth, and Adrian likes to blend at least two amps per guitar player at a time. On this one, we had set up three amps per player per ISO booth—basically a high-gain amp, like a Marshall, then a Fender-style amp and a Vox-style amp—and each amp has at least two mics on it. If it was a combo amp, we would mike the back as well. So we’re summing, basically, eight mics on the SSL down to a single channel in Pro Tools. Then Adrian comes back in the control room, blends the mics a little bit, and it sounds massive. You throw it up on the console and it sounds phenomenal.”
For bass, it was much the same. They would track DI simultaneously with an Audio Kitchen amp, a ’60s B15, and then a Marshall-style guitar amp, then blend all those together down to two channels in ProTools. The B15 would often be left alone so they would get more bottom end from that for the mix.
Canty’s vocal chain was an SM7, into a 1073 preamp, into a Pultec EQP-1A, into an 1176, into Pro Tools. Sometimes they would use “just a touch” of the SSL 4056 G Series compressors. The tracks sounded so good coming in that Kimball says he didn’t have to do a whole lot in the mix.
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“I was kind of mixing as we were tracking, so by the time it got to mix, I already had it fully put up. I don’t do a ton to the vocals; I’m just making sure the only things that are down the middle are getting out of the way. I would carve a little bass out to get Sam on top. A majority of the time, the guitars are hard left and right, and you’ve got kick and snare in the middle, but I try to always get Sam right on top.
“This is one of those bands where I assume that’s what the bands in the ’90s were like,” Kimball continues. “Bands that actually practiced and played together, and they were all really good musicians and brought something unique to the table. Just watching them create has been my favorite part because it blows my mind every time they come in and just lock in with each other.”
