The Polyphonic Spree  

With some twenty-three performers on stage, The Polyphonic Spree is a one-band horde tour. True to the group mentality, creator Tim DeLaughter insisted that his front-of-house engineer Adam Fisher and monitor engineer Chris Preston join him for this interview.  

Now that you’re eight years into it, have you developed a way of writing for this group? 
DeLaughter: Well, I definitely think more about the instrumentation than I did in the early days, when it was just, ‘Oh, it would be cool to have this on this part.’ Now I’m hearing the instrumentation at the same time. 

Is it true that you can’t get away with lyrics that are too small or too close in a band of this scope? Do you have to be big? 
DeLaughter: I’ve never really thought of it like that. This band is so theatrical; we can go wherever we want to. 

With a group this size, do you find yourself having to manage each individual’s investment in the project? It’s not as if the fans can easily identify each member. 

DeLaughter: I think that everyone in this group is such a personality, and the instruments are all over the map, that there’s plenty of space for people to shine. 

Is there a dimension of getting into character for your shows? There have to be nights where you just don’t feel like you can do it. 
DeLaughter: Well, we’ve been doing this for almost eight years, and there are definitely those times. But you may come into it thinking you’re not able to do it, but once you get going, the energy gets flowing and you’re in it; it’s legitimate. It’s awesome. 

[To Chris Preston] With the number of people you’ve got singing on stage, I’ve gotta believe the in-ears were a Godsend. 
CHRIS PRESTON: Well, the singers don’t have their in-ears yet; they’ll have them soon. I’m using in-ears to knock out amps. Whoever’s got an amp that puts us in a feedback situation… 

FISHER: Sub-par amps—the nice amps can stay onstage.  [Laughter] 

PRESTON: But when you have cello, violin and viola cranking it up to hear above a percussion kit, it’s good to have in-ears. 

From the front-of-house perspective, it must be difficult to get some of the less-conventional instruments to speak in a live rock context. 
FISHER: Well, it’s all about making everything fit in the spectrum of frequencies. If you’re going to subtract something from one instrument, it might be wise to add it to another. If I take some upper-mids out of a guitar so it’s not so thrashy to your ears, I’ll add that to the cello; the cello’s really low-end-y, and that just makes it come out more.  And Tim here loves the cello. Over everything else, he’s gotta hear the cello and the trombone. 

It’s so easy to make a CD, or post music on myspace. Is there too much music out there?  

FISHER: Well, it works both ways. That’s the whole point of rock-n-roll—to just grab some friends and make some music. Even if you’re just playing to ten friends in a basement, it’s great that some dude in China can listen to your music.   

I don’t think there can ever be enough bands, because the more bands you have, the more great bands will come out of it. 

We thank the band and Steven Frisbie, contributing writer, for this article. Look for the full interview in the next issue of On Tour with Shure. And check out the band’s site here. 
 

Hot Chip

 
You might think that once artists like UK’s five-man electropop Hot Chip attain a level of success (for instance, garnering Mixmag’s 2008 Album of The Year for Made in The Dark), they graduate from  “home recording” to uber-studio recording.  Not so. 

At Chicago’s Vic Theatre during the band’s recent US tour, Shure’s own Richard Sandrok caught up with Hot Chip’s Al Doyle.

 
You just did a Kraftwerk remix. What else did you guys listen to growing up?    Just a lot of classic pop music.  A lot of old singer/songwriters like Neil Young and Bob Dylan and then Prince and Stevie Wonder and people like that.  Old soul singers - Al Greene and Otis Redding and stuff, you know, big names.  

That's really what we were always interested in doing: making interesting, experimental, but very accessible records.  We're interested in making an album that's got a lot of range to it and fits different moods.   

Your current album was recorded in a number of locations, including your own home studio. How has the role of what had been historically been "pre-production" changed over the course of your career?
Well, nearly all of our recorded output has been in home studios, apart from this latest record (Made in the Dark) which has three songs recorded in, you know, not an amazing studio, but a pretty good professional studio where we could set up all of our amps and get a little bit of separation and just play together as a band.  We'd never done that before, apart from radio sessions and things that might have been recorded and re-released.   

Everything on The Warning, right up until mixing stage, was done in home studios, but quite well-equipped places.  I run another studio with Felix and we have a big room and a lot of gear in there and good equipment and we've got a vague knowledge of how to use it. We tried to get more of a live feel by not using so many loops.  Whenever we do a take, we'll try to do a take running across a song. It’s not the same as five dudes in a room, but still it helps to create the feel of people playing. 

You guys are fans of Beta 57s. Do you use those in the studio?
A lot of the vocals, certainly on The Warning, were recorded with a Beta 57.  I think a few on Made in the Dark were as well.   

We use them live, too. I don't think that Joe and I have got the strongest voices in the world, so sometimes it's good to just get that extra 'oomph' out of the 57. 

We use an SM7 on guitars and I have used it on vocals, but it's a really good mic for guitar.  Bass drums as well. 

How do songs in your live performances differ from what’s on the record? 
We don't worry too much about being slaves to the studio recordings.  We just use those as the starting-off point.  Often we're not playing them on the same instruments they were recorded on.  When we rehearse, we'll often add new things in that weren't on the recordings and they'll develop.   

“We don't worry too much about being slaves to the studio recordings.  We just use those as the starting-off point.”  

Actually some of the older tunes that we're playing now, even from our first album, Coming on Strong, or even from The Warning, have moved on so much from the original live recordings and even when we used to play them first of all out on the road that they've become these totally different things now which is really nice for us because it kind of keeps us interested.  And I think it's quite nice for the audience as well because if they know the recordings they're getting something slightly different on stage.  Even if people have seen us before and they see us again six months down the line it will probably be different again.  So I suppose that represents value for money in some way [laughs]. 


Was it your decision or EMI's to release Made in the Dark on vinyl? 
We were always going to have it on vinyl.  I think that whenever we're thinking of the artwork we're thinking about a twelve by twelve format and the nice, big package … you know, good quality cardstock and embossed things.  For people that are really in to it, to have that physical thing is really nice.  And people still seem to buy them.   

I think there is a certain percentage of our fans that are of that slightly older generation.  People that just like to have a little bit of vinyl on the shelf in their house or whatever.   So I'm glad that we can still do that.  I don't know how long it's going to last, but we want to keep doing that as long as we can. 

        
Our thanks to Hot Chip’s Al Doyle for spending quality time during an intense US tour to speak to Richard Sandrok and allowing Shure Notes to excerpt this interview from a longer On Tour With Shure piece. There's a lot of great information about the band on the Hot Chip site. 

Don’t forget to visit the Artists section of the Shure site for another perspective and a gear list for The Polyphonic Spree and Hot Chip.