Life Is Dub is now available exclusively on vinyl for Record Store Day. Swing by yr local Shop today to nab a copy.
Only 1500 copies pressed. Find participating Shops here.
New versions produced by Dan Carey. Read about Dan's experience making the album below.
DAN CAREY, PRODUCER OF LIFE IS DUB, ON MAKING THE ALBUM:
life is dub was a lot of fun to make. i came up with a method, and stuck to it fairly closely.
this is how it was done:
i approached each track one by one, finishing each before moving on to the next so i could feel how the record was developing. for each song i first decided whether to drop the tempo to half-time or keep the original. i was keen to have a mixture of dubby sounding stuff and experimental bangers, so i tried to alternate between the two.
1. for the half time ones: i would listen to the click track and vocal, and play a new live drum track, recorded with 3 mics - kick, snare, hat. then play a live bass guitar. all of these were recorded with very extreme EQ settings on the pultech, to get deep bass and sharp miss that lend themselves to dubbing. then i would go through the original song parts and select two or three that fit with the new rhythm track. then i would sample a maximum of 6 sounds from the rest of the multitrack, and put them into an mpc program and play that along with the new track .
at this point i would have a new multitrack that contained between 12 and 16 tracks, which i would speed out individually on the analog board, each channel having sends to: a space echo, a bel bd80 delay, an orban spring, an eventide h3000. then i would do exactly 3 passes of a live dub, which were recorded straight to stereo 1/4" tape.
the 3 mixes would all be quite different, and tend to get more adventurous. i felt it was good to stop at 3 to avoid getting lost. having said that, at this point , sometimes i would have a drop of mushroom oil so see how that affected things. then i would choose my favourite bits from each dub, and edit them together.
2. for the up-tempo ones: i would keep the kick drum and snare drum from the original drum track and program an electronic beat around those using and mpc and electron. i would then sync up the modular system, and feed elements from the original track into the modular - process them and output to create kind of twisted versions for the new multi.
with the tracks that we're running at their original temp, i would use a lot of the lead guitar and keyboard tracks guitar tracks running along the whole song. i'd usually add a bit of jupiter 8 then i'd follow the same process of the live mix on the board , again printing 3 mixes and choosing the best bits.
i was fairly isolated doing this partly because i had set aside a 2 week process to do it but got covid at the end of the first week . the stranger sounding ones were done towards the end.