Band: Forest Fires

Album: Hark! ...and other lost Transmissions

Studio: Our Glass Studio
(Producer Aaron Benson’s home studio)

Forest Fires is the side-project of The Everyday Visuals’ singer Christopher Pappas. Compared to The Visuals’ brand of layered, moody, chamber pop, Forest Fires still has some impressive layers while taking a more direct route with hushed lyrics, stark contrasts and unpredictable melodies and arrangements.

Pappas says, “I suppose [we wanted] sonically to keep it simple. I really wanted the songs to breathe and play out very naturally. The Visuals’ stuff tends to use production as a tool, almost another instrument. The idea of this project was to make the recording process as transparent as possible. To capture things as they are.”

Q&A with Chris Pappas and Producer/Engineer Aaron Benson

Brian King: Chris, did you have any reference points from other artists you gained inspirations from? You mentioned The Jayhawks’ album. Anything else?

CP: Perhaps growing up on it creates some sort of bias, but I really think you can’t beat the sounds of certain records of the 1960s/’70s. CSN&Y, Judee Sill, all the way to Marvin Gaye’s Whats Going On are records that I absolutely adore. I find the production so exposing - it relied so heavily on performance and songwriting over studio tricks and auto-tune. I find it more genuine.

AB: I think it was different for me in the sense that we took the Postal Service approach. There was only a few full day recording sessions in person, while the rest of it has been us passing hard drives back and forth or emailing a guitar idea to each other. It’s been kind of neat to work that way but real human interaction is a nice thing too.

BK: How was this different than other sessions? More laid back, difficult?

CP: The sessions were very easy. I really made an effort to keep things, as I said before, simple as can be. I didn’t want to put 20 guitar tracks on songs and I didn’t want to have a bunch of things that I couldn’t reproduce live.

BK: What was the general process? Chris, I know you recorded a lot at home. Was it easier this way? Did you have particular sounds you liked about your place?

CP: I loved recording this way; it was a great mix of working at my own pace, but also tracking with someone else outside of the project that I could bounce ideas off of.

BK: Sessions rarely go easy. Were there any obstacles in the process?

CP: I found that the birth of this project was that I had this extra material that I wanted to get out of my head and document it. So most of the album was already written. Aaron is very easy to work with - sorry to be so dull, but the process has been incredibly smooth.

AB: The only potential roadblock was after a full day of tracking overdubs. Chris had handed off the vocals he had spent days on to me, and I let the sessions sit over the weekend. When I opened everything back up, the vocals could not be located in the session. I had also transferred my same sessions to Chris’s computer, so I was worried if mine were corrupt that his would be too. Needless to say, they were fine on his computer, so I transferred them over again and quickly made a billion backups of the sessions.

“Behind The Sounds” with Aaron Benson

Q: What was the idea behind tracking certain guitar sounds on the album?

A: I think it all goes along with the idea of keeping things simple and organic. I wanted to mix this in a way that has an “analog” sound and use a lot of plate and spring reverbs along with actual room sounds to get that feel. The funny part being that a majority of the guitars were tracked through IK Multimedia’s Amplitube; it’s been the most organic guitar sound I’ve used, mainly because I don’t have 50 amps at my disposal.

Q: How did you get those roomy drum sounds?

A: No matter how dead you think a room might be, you can always benefit from a room mic. Chris had also mentioned that as a huge part of tracking vocals. Use the room to capture your sound and try different rooms out for their character. There’s definitely a time and place for close micing and isolation, but I always find that a room mic brings out the character in the sound and blends it all together. Even in small rooms, I like to find a reflective surface and place a mic facing it in a cardioids pattern. It picks up a lot of the reflections and tends to give it a bigger sound.

Q: What kind of tips can you offer in recording layered sounds but still getting an expansive sound?

A: The problem with a lot of tracks is finding room for them. As long as you focus on how things fit in the big picture and not on how they sound on their own, you can pack it all in to that stereo space and make things sound huge without all the clutter.

Location: Back Bay, Boston, MA

MySpace Address: www.myspace/theforestfires

Recording Budget: Almost free

Recording schedule: “When free time arises. Mostly a collaborative project where we are swapping hard drives and sessions back and forth. A few full day sessions for drums and bulk of keys/guitars.”

Time span of recording- how long did it take to record? Three months

Producer/Engineer: Aaron Benson and Christopher Pappas

General description of gear used:

“This is guerilla recording at its finest. I have a Digidesign MX002 Rack, some halfway decent mics, and whatever rooms we could set up in and not piss anybody off with the noise. This is primarily “in the box” with recording/mixing. We’ve been tracking it all to Pro Tools LE and trying to keep a very organic sound.” –Producer/Engineer, Aaron Benson