The Transmissions at LA’s Rollercoaster Recording

by Christian Bienne

The Transmissions have beamed crystalline strains of guitar, delicate sentimentality and barebones rhythms owing to stark militants like Wire and Gang of Four from their home in LA’s brisk psychedelic indie pop sandbox for years. This month, we join them in Dave Newton’s Rollercoaster Recording Studio as they venture into the world of click tracks...

We have always written our songs as something to be played live at shows first, and when we feel they are starting to work as compositions, we try to capture the peak version. But we’ve always wanted to try writing for the studio — perfecting the song there before even debuting it to an audience. This project is the closest we’ve come to that.

Though we had played these songs out for a couple of months to get our performance down, we had already begun planning to eventually work with a click track, which we’ve never done before. Click tracks can make you lose the spontaneous live feeling (i.e. surges in tempo and meter), but this time we wanted to capture that cleaner, tighter sound that goes with a click. It can also make the engineers job much easier down the road with editing!

We originally recorded a scratch vocal/guitar version of all the songs to a click track, hoping to build on that as we went. But after having the bass player and drummer practice to these versions, things starting feeling a bit shaky and we started to fear lackluster versions. We had set aside time to practice to those click tracks for several weeks, but it is a lot harder than we thought. The compromise we came up with was to play in the studio live all together and use the click in certain sections of each song to keep us steady.

It wasn’t all for naught, though — having a band spend even a few weeks with a click track is a great way to reign everyone in a bit even after you’ve taken the click away. Using it in the studio in certain sections kept us tight in a way that lends itself more to precise studio production work. I certainly don’t think a click track is a rule that must be followed, but if employed well and learned as a performance skill through much practice, I feel using a click track in the studio is an indispensable tool to making the best studio versions of your songs that you can.

www.thetransmissions.com