Hey people,
This is an interview from last year from Sound on Sound.... Lots of pics of his gear as well. From May 2007.
My Chemical Romance: Black Parade
Some interesting quotes:
"The vast array of outboard gear in Lord-Alge's Resonate room is explained by his assertion that hardware effects still sound significantly better than plug-ins, plus the fact that he has most of his boxes permanently set to one setting and hard-wired to specific channels of his SSL. If he finds himself regularly using an additional setting, he tends to
buy another copy of the same box for that purpose." - must be nice... the old-skool version of "store preset..."
Re: Black Parade
"The drums were fairly straightforward: the comp had two snares, stereo toms, hi-hat, stereo overheads and stereo room. I replaced their kick with a clean and punchier kick sample and also added two snare samples — all samples were taken
from the track."
"When asked what his main ingredient is in achieving this apparent power and loudness, his answer might surprise some. "[...] most of all," he reveals with a smile, "I listen really quietly. When you've been doing this job for a while, you tend to listen at such a low volume that in order for it to hit you in the face, you have to really push it. I listen on [
Yamaha] NS10s, the original ones with the covers, plus an old Infinity 12-inch subwoofer that cost me $300, so I can hear the ultra-low end. Listening at low volumes prevents fatigue and you can hear better what's going on. When you turn things up, after a while all your moves become a smear. So when you're doing really critical moves, do them at a low level."
"Panning is something I'm not subtle with. It's either left, right, or centre. Absolutely. Unless you're panning an orchestra and you're trying to make it sound like real life, as we did on 'Black Parade'. But I try to make my panning extreme, so it jumps out at the sides."
"What will anger me is when someone tries to make my final mix 9dB louder by
L1-ing it to the wall, and flattens out my impact, just to make the CD louder. I will already have done all the compression and limiting that I think necessary."