Chris Vrenna: For the Love of Hardware | ||
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Performance Over Programming Vrenna tried to keep the record as live-recorded—not programmed sounding— as possible due to his feelings about the over-perfecting of music these days. “Everything’s been sounding and is so chopped and perfected and auto-tuned lately, and I have a hard time believing that every drummer that’s been released in the last two years actually plays that rigid.” So Vrenna and Walsh purposefully went for the performance when producing the new Tweaker album.
No Time For Tweaking However, he admits that while working on TV, film and game projects, you don’t always have time to do too much sound and effect tweaking. “I can understand that in movies and commercials and game scores, because of the three game scores I’m working on right now, and this TV theme for this WB kids’ cartoon I did,” he says. “When you’re that swamped, you don’t have time to sit there for four hours going, ‘What if we turn the distortion on the filter? What if we throw on a pedal? Well...which pedal?’” says Vrenna. “But even if you’re doing things that way—just using the stock effects—there are ways to mix things and balance things. Leaning Toward Hardware “There are lots of patches in these keyboards where if I’m looking for something that’s got a vibe, then I’ll test out the different settings and go ‘Oooo wow...that’s nice.’ and I can then go move the filter up and down, but then I’ll think, ‘But, god...it’s perfect!’ I mean, if it’s under 17 layers of other stuff, then I don’t feel too bad about it,” he says.
But that’s one reason why Vrenna still gravitates toward hardware. “With people stealing software and VST plug-ins and the way that you can just buy .rex files and things for fifty bucks, it results in everything sounding the same,” he says. “Not everybody will go and kick down three grand for the Andromeda or $2000 for a V-Synth. So, I tend to think that if I spend all my money on hardware, at least it won’t sound like everybody else.” Gear Is No Substitute For Skill However, Vrenna asserts that just having more plug-ins, hardware and a bigger system is no substitute for talent and experience. “I’ve got this friend who was going, ‘I’ve got a 100 tracks going with 19 reverbs.’ And I was like, ‘So what? If you need all that to doctor up your crappy song, then you’ve got a lot more problems than simply making fun of how I only have 64 tracks to work with,’” he says. “If the core sucks, then all the extra software synths and plug-ins isn’t gonna make it any better,” says Vrenna. 
Next page: Scoring Games, Producing with Pro Tools |  |
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