Cuff The Duke Help Jay-Z's Death Of Auto-Tune Campaign

09/25/09 12:44pm

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

Cuff The Duke's Way Down Here, their recently released fourth album, is a change in many ways for the band.

Firstly, it's their first release on their newly formed Noble Recording Co. label. The band were formerly with Hayden's Hardwood Records, but have parted ways from the label because Hayden wants to focus on starting a family. They decided to go it alone and hooked a distribution deal up with Universal.

Recording the album was much different for the band, too. They toured with Blue Rodeo in 2008 and stumbled into a chance to record at Blue Rodeo guitarist Greg Keelor's studio near Peterborough, Ont. while touring with the band.

"On that tour, we did three nights in a row in Peterborough at this small theatre, and after the first night he came up to us in the dressing room and said, 'Oh, what are you guys doing after the show?' and we said, 'Oh, we'll probably just go grab a hotel.' He said, 'You should come down to my farm 'cause I'm only 20 minutes away.'

"So we went, and that's when we really got to know him 'cause we hung out with him every night after the Peterborough shows. We hung out at his farm. So that's when he invited us to record, and it was kind of, uh... it was a great experience.

"We went out last summer at the end of August just for two days to kind of hang out and give it a whirl, and by the end of two days we had four songs and all four of those songs are on the album, so we just thought, 'Wow, this is amazing. He's so easy to work with.'"

Petti was particularly taken by the studio's old school vibe, which he describes as "totally 1968." The band spent most of the sessions for Way Down Here recording the album live-off-the-floor onto eight-track tape. This was a bit mind-bending at first, since, as Petti says, "a lot of people use eight tracks just to do drums."

The studio's vibe also contributed to what Petti says is Way Down Here's more "chilled" sound. The album has a warm, analog-like sound that recalls classic rock like Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Band.

Petti says the recording process is part of the reason for that sound. The band did little to no pre-production for the record, played their songs for each other just before recording them, took it as it came and used the opportunity to try new things in the studio.

"In some cases, I actually sang vocals right off the floor, which was the first time I'd ever done that," Petti says. "It was a little weird at first. For me, it was hard to sort of... not hard, but it was weird getting used to the fact that recording could be so easy, for lack of a better word, and that it could be so carefree. There's always like, well, 'I should never sing vocals while you're recording something else.'

"That's what Greg's all about. He's very much about capturing a moment and a sound and if the song calls for you to sing it while you do it, then that's how you should do it. It was kind of liberating for us as musicians to be like, 'Yeah, we can do this. We don't have to use Pro Tools and edit everything together and all that stuff.'"

Most of the songs on Way Down Here were recorded in mono, and the band had to be sure of what they were doing after they thought they'd completed a track. They began recording the drum tracks and built the songs from there, but recording to tape meant if they wanted to change the drums after having recorded other instruments, they'd have to redo the entire song.

That ensured top quality musicianship, and while that process might sound strange in today's world of digital recording and Auto Tune, Petti says that's how it used to be done, after all.

"Need You," the album's final track, is a perfect example of the recording process. Petti says the song's piano and organ parts are on the same track, and were recorded in the same room with just one microphone.

"We just played and we positioned the mic until the levels were right, and then we recorded it. So two guys had to get the take in one go, and if one of us fucked up we had to start over, you know?

"So it was fun to do that, too. It really kind of brought us together as a band. That song, there's tons of examples like that. There's lots of little bits where there's two things on one track, you know? So it was fun."

While that sounds a bit insane by today's recording standards, Petti says he's pleased with the results.

"You kind of really get a vibe. There's no click tracks and there's no editing from Pro Tools. It's just straight-up, good old fashioned recording.

"It sounds so good like that, and I didn't truly appreciate that until I actually did it.

"It's funny 'cause you go in a studio sometimes and you go, 'Oh, I want this Beatles sound,' and you're recording digitally and isolating all the sounds so that there's no bleed from everything else.

"And it's like, well, you're not going to sound like The Beatles, 'cause they didn't fuckin' do that. Or you're not gonna sound like CCR, whatever the bands in the '60s you're trying to emulate, you're not going to get it if you don't do it the way they did it."