Tell No Foxx

When I first met the band down in Bay Studio to hear the early demos of the tunes that went on to become the Silence EP I was totally blown away.
I am a big fan of artists that can blend heavily mangled electronica with great songwriting and a killer vocal – Bjork, Massive Attack, Fever Ray and Little Dragon come to mind – and the Foxxes have that going on in spades. I knew immediately I wanted to work with them.

As the songs were already in such excellent condition all I had to do really was help the band with getting their sounds where they wanted them to be. No music production required. For the first EP we recorded the vocals, guitars and bass in Bay Studio and then brought everything back to Whitespace, my mix/production studio in Dublin, to mix. Each song took longer than your average rock song to mix, as Luke likes to use a lot of different electronic sources, lots of odd plugins, and many different atmospheres in each song. My job was to retain the mood and key sounds of the demos while adding that professional modern sound. “Pure” in the Playlist is taken from this first EP.

Next up after the debut EP came the single “Dust”. After a period of investigating more poppy song structures, the band took what they had learned and put it through their foxxfilter , crafting one of the catchiest tunes I’ve heard in ages.

This time around I was purely mixing, as the band had set up a vocal station in their own studio and had recorded the vocals themselves. I had given them some pointers on how to go about this, because we knew I would be doing the mix down the line and we wanted everything to flow smoothly. I’ve got a nice library of virtual pianos, and some gorgeous bass synths, so we replaced the ones that Luke had used to get the song closer to the vision the band had. Again we paid lots of attention to our references (recent Massive Attack and Little Dragon for me) to get serious bang in the low end and a variety of reverb spaces with very different colours for the various parts in the song. It ended up being one of those tunes that sound like not much is going on, but there are many sounds, textures, and “treats for the ear” that reward repeat listens! Check Dust out in the TRACKLIST.

Luke uses Logic Pro 9 as his writing and demoing platform so it made my job more fun as I’m also a Logic user for mixing. For all the tunes, carving out space for the myriad sounds was a real challenge as we wanted to maintain a clear, crisp, threatening, modern sound without sacrificing tracks or sounds.

So – we didn’t go crazy on the tape saturation/analog emulation stuff that many bands look for. That’s not to say that analog gear and analog emulation software was not used – everything I tracked went through some combination of my SPL Goldmic, Joeeek, or Universal Audio preamps, and I was using the UAD Neve 88RS virtual chanel strip and the the UAD Studer 800 2″ 24 track tape emulation for all tracking. I even ran the electronic stuff from Luke through the same signal chain, as if everything went through a Neve and onto 2″ at 30ips on Quantegy 456 tape. It is a subtle effect, but you really notice it in mixing, as much less compression and surgical control is needed, particularly on the bass and sub stuff. We didn’t run hot to tape though, as we did not want to saturate and distort the takes. I use linear phase EQs (usually Logic Pro’s built in LPEQ) for surgical stuff like topping and tailing and pre-compressor EQ, and I like to mix it up with the “colour” EQS – SSL Channel EQ, API 550/560 series for guitars, the UAD Pultec and maybe the Softube Trident for vocals. I try not to compress things unnecessarily, although I’m a big fan of the double compression method for vocals with a large dynamic range.

Next up was Dust, my favourite song of theirs to date. This time the boys have eased off on the “radio rules”, no rush to a chorus, and the results are great – when that chorus finally comes around it hits you right in the chest. I’m a big Native Instruments Monark fan, so I re-patched his bass noise to get more growl and non-linearity. We needed to be very clinical in controlling the sub in this track to give it the impact it needs. Also there are different ambiences for the vocals, the various kits, and some individual hits, so we had to be clever in having some stereo spaces, some mono, and playing with them as the song moves along.

All in all they were very challenging mixes, but I’m proud of the results 🙂