By Keith Walsh
It almost doesn’t need to be stated that engineers and producers have a lot of impact on a band’s sound. When it came to shaping a new sound for Austin’s Autumn Stay, songwriter and vocalist Danielle Blizzard and guitarist Stephen Douglas worked closely with multi-platinum awarded engineer and producer Kevin “131” Gutierrez of Austin’s Assembly Line Studios. I had the chance to speak with Gutierrez about the latest songs from the band, including their new single “Closer To The Edge.”
“Autumn Stay was a five-piece band and over the course of time, we started to say to them ‘what are you gonna do?’ explained Gutierrez. “They were almost like a nu metal-ish type of vibe, like heavy modern. So we’ve got to start thinking a little more forward thinking. Dani (Danielle) was saying, ‘you know, I like industrial, I like pop.” Gutierrez said that Autumn Stay guitarist Stephen Douglas echoed Blizzard’s thoughts, so he posed a question: “Well, then why aren’t you doing music like that? You know, you like goth, you like industrial, you like pop, you like the heaviest of heavy. Yeah, let’s do it. And so Dani was unequivocally, like ‘yeah. Yes.’”
Gutierrez told me that once a direction was decided upon, he, Blizzard and Douglas sent multiple recordings back and forth, and then came studio time crafting the new sound. A big part of the new sound is electronic drums and synthesizers, recorded using MIDI gear and synths inside of ProTools.
“Nexus 3 was the bass on this,” Gutierrez tells me. I asked what are his go-to synths in ProTools? He mentioned reFX Nexus 3, Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Sonic Academy’s Ana Synth, and said he’ll dial up a patch that sounds good for the track before getting into deeper sound shaping later. “It’s usually later in the process that the sound design starts to come. Because beginning it’s just ‘do we have a song?’ You can start and go down the rabbit hole, for me personally as a producer, the wrong way really fast…I’ve heard this so many times, you’ve got a cool sound, and you start to do cool things with it. And it’s cool sound design, but there’s no song. And you start to sound like a movie soundtrack .That’s a mistake that I think I’ve gotten better at over decades of doing this.”
Making The Beats
When programming drums Gutierrez plays a double role of beatmaker and programmer. “I think about it in three phases. One, ‘what’s the part?’ And then two, what would a live drummer sound like in a room? Which in this particular case, for electronica, doesn’t sound that great, right? The kick is puffy, the snare’s all ringy. The toms are kind of paddy sounding, but I want the the rooms (microphone ambience) so that would be great for like, an ambient alt record. So that’s phase two, but on an electronica record, that’s probably not as heavy hitting. So phase three would be taking those live sounds and then just adding triggers to them like you would a real drummer.”
I asked Gutierrez what the drum triggering workflow looked like. “I use Steven Slate Trigger.” he said. “It’s basically a drum replacement tool. Let’s say you’ve got drums that you like the room of, but it sounds just ambient, open. And the kick drum sounds like a real drummer playing a real kick drum. But it doesn’t sound heavy yet. Same thing for the snare.” When first inputting, he said “I don’t even care what the kick and snare sound like, because I’m just going to take those tracks and I’ve got a program called Trigger and then it can replace those kick drums and the snare drums, one by one and make them to be whatever sound I want them to be.”
‘A Turning Point’
The process of arriving at an overall sound that the three of them agreed on “was just a lot of trial and error,” Gutierrez told me. “I think we had eight or nine pieces, and as a producer I was just ‘we could make this cool, but I don’t think we have ‘the one.’ After a couple of months, Gutierrez said. “we had the chorus to ‘Closer To The Edge,’ that’s the one that makes me move. And so that’s how it started with Dani’s idea there, and then we just started working. She started with some verse ideas, and then chorus ideas, and then we started to make things explode, and she just brought it to life from there.”
Gutierrez explained how this third single by Autumn Stay is a sign that more musical variety lays ahead for the band. “Closer To The Edge’ was really the turning point for Autumn Stay with Dani and Stephen,” he said. “We literally went back and forth for months with ‘what is this going to be? Let’s try little bits and pieces.’ Sometimes our conversations were five minutes, sometimes they’d be and hour, hour and a half. The end result is four minutes, but all those ideas just to try to put them together was the work of moving them back and forth. Really I’m just a mirror.”
“By saying ‘let’s try something more forward thinking other than just putting out another modern nu metal track,'” Gutierrez explained, “I mean is there electronica in there? Could you be trance, industrial, goth, electro? Now, with this stuff, I feel like you could do anything. She could put out a pop song, she could put out something goth-y and it wouldn’t be shocking to the listeners. She could put out an industrial track, she could do some more heavy stuff. Or what’s most interesting to me, is just combining all those elements and putting them into one song. That’s what’s way more interesting to me as listener because that’s what I want to hear.” Gutierrez said new songs by Autumn Stay are on the way.
Gutierrez has recorded and mixed works by Johnny Cash, Billy Corgan, Paul McCartney (Austin City Limits performance), Bret Michaels, Shinedown, Raven, Believer and Deceased. He went platinum for his work with Shinedown and on the “Twilight” soundtrack. “Closer To The Edge” was mastered by Chris Athens, who has worked with artists ranging from Ozzy Osbourne to Drake, to Bring Me To The Horizon.
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