Production Notes: Ryvoli’s “In The First Place”

This. Fucking. Song.

Every album has a song that puts up a fight and has to be wrestled to the ground. In The First Place is the one for this album.

I loved this song immediately when I heard it on the demo and it was clear that it was the most "single-y" and "upbeat." I use those terms loosely here but in the context of bummer folk, this song’s a banger!

We started this song on day two of recording at Portside in Alabama. Day one was Oleika Sunset which was exciting and made it feel like this project was going to be smooth sailing.

I swear production is like childbirth or something. Not that I know what that's like but making albums is something I keep doing over and over and then when I’m doing it I’m wondering why I’m putting myself through it. Okay, I guess that’s not really like childbirth but, you know, moms forget the pain of it or something which is why they might have multiple kids. Whatever. You get it. Moving on!

Anyway, this was day two. So Sam, Jenn, JP, and I sat down with some acoustic guitars in the Betty Boop milkshake bar at the studio. We were all caffeinated and ready to rock. We started by charting it out and making a few small chord changes. Chris Bethea was getting set up while we were doing that.

We then went into the studio with my idea of trying to play it live. We'd started Oleika live without a click so I thought we should try that again on this song. We didn't listen to any reference tracks or anything. We walked into the studio cocky and confident because of the day before. Or at least that's how I was feeling.

Pride goes before the fall

JP dialed in Sam's guitar sound that you hear on the final. It was a funky Harmony parlor guitar with a rubber bridge and weird magnetic pickup through a Fender Deluxe Reverb. Madison Cunningham has one you can hear here.

I jumped behind the drums, Jenn got on the piano and we sat Sam dead center in the room with a mic for her scratch vocal. We tried playing through the song and after stumbling through the first take one, we should've stopped. We should've regrouped and gotten a plan together. But remember: I was all pumped up and ready to rock so I made everyone suffer through four or five more limp, directionless takes until somebody finally cried 'uncle' and we stopped.

First, we didn't have a direction.

Second, Sam was uncomfortable singing and playing at the same time. She was playing a guitar she'd never played before and we'd changed enough chords that she was having to stare at a chart to play her own song. And even though we could re-record her vocal, she was in her head about screwing up the guitar because she was focusing on leading us through the song.

It was a lot to ask of her (sorry, Sam!) To be clear: I only realized this in hindsight.

Expectations can be a bitch sometimes

I keep re-learning this lesson in every area of my life. My expectations for the day were:

This is going to be smooth, easy, and magical like day one.
We are going to track the song live without a click.

For whatever reason on this day, when those things didn't happen I got pissed. I didn't stop and go, "Hmm, perhaps we should try a different approach?"

The imposter syndrome was creeping into my head big time at this point. After my two years off from production, this failed attempt was all the evidence my inner voice needed to prove that I shouldn’t be producing anymore.

I remember having to take a walk outside to try and clear my head. That didn't do anything so I tried to do some Transcendental Meditation crouched in an iso booth to calm down. That didn't work either.

At some point, we re-grouped and decided to take a different approach. We were going to try having Sam play her guitar part by herself without a click. Then she'd sing her vocal and we'd build the track up from there.

Mind you, we still didn't have a direction for this song. We were going to have her play and then figure it out.

Once she finished, JP and I went in and attempted to play what we had been playing before. It suuuuuucked.

I can't remember how far we got with overdubs but there came a point where Bethea turned to us and said "This is never going to work and we're going to be fighting the loose timing of this guitar the whole time."

If I'd been in a better mood, maybe I would've said it earlier but the stress of getting a full song done each day was clouding my judgment.

I was "take blind.". All I wanted was this song to be "in the bag." Side note: Sam and Jenn think it's hilarious that I use this phrase whenever we reach a milestone in the process.

Bethea was right. This song needed tightness, drive, and a steady tempo. The only way to get that is either with a click or a well-rehearsed live band take. We didn't rehearse before this so we opted to start over with a click track and piecemeal the track together.

Third Time’s The Charm

Dinner time regroup in the other side of the Betty Boop Diner.

At this point, it was dinner time and we'd been banging our head's against the wall since 10a with nothing to show for it. Now we were starting over for the 3rd time today! Sam was extra bummed with this idea because she was happy with her vocal performance to the non-click version.

After a few minutes of being bummed out, we sat down and started rifling through reference tracks, hunting for a direction. This is what we should have done at 10a.

No Direction Home

And yet here was the problem with this song all along, I didn’t do my homework in pre-production to discover that the girls didn’t have a clear direction for this song. If I had, this song’s production process probably would have been a lot less painful. With all of the other songs, the girls were like "oh, we want it to kind of feel like this with a touch of that and evoke this emotion."

I can work with that.

I'm a production agnostic. I mean, I have preferences and opinions but I want to help people with their vision way more than I want to realize mine. My ideas kind of bore me since they’re mine. When I’ve decided the direction for things, I get to the end and go, “yep, that’s what it sounded like in my head.”

Booooooring!

It's way more fun to realize other people's visions because there are happy accidents along the way. Everyone gets to the end and is surprised by the result, including me.

If you don't have a direction, I'm not comfortable giving you one. Because I could make you dozens of different versions of a song but which one are you going to like? It really sucks making a full version of a song and then the artist goes, “nope.” It's better to know the direction upfront and then to make minor course corrections along the way.

But this one didn’t have a clear direction or reference and we were flying by the seat of our pants. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing ...unless you're in a time crunch like we thought we were at the time. (We initially thought we had one day per song. We ended up doing a lot more work after this week in Alabama.)

So even though we were doing the right thing in trying to find a jumping-off point, we never fully found one. Even now that the song is done and released, it is the result of us stumbling through the dark for months until it sounded like something everyone liked.

Click Woes

At this point since we were going to be on a click, we had to decide on a fixed tempo. So first we pulled up the live take and tapped out the tempo. We had Sam sing and play to that in the control room. To her, it felt right and to me, it felt way too slow.

So then we began the process of nudging it 1 and 2 Beats Per Minute (BPM) towards the middle of our two tempos until we found a tempo that was a compromise ...meaning neither of us were 100% happy with it.

The final feels good to me (and to Sam too!) but it's always a struggle with click tracks.

If you're caffeinated when you set the tempo, it'll feel blazing fast in the evening.

If you set it in the evening or after lunch, it feels too slow the next day at breakfast.

You can't win.

After we decided upon the tempo, we put some arpeggiated synths and paddy keyboards on there. It's always good to put something down before you record to a click. Playing to a stock Pro Tools click is the least inspiring thing ever.

Sometimes I’ll make loops out of kicks and snares with delays on them to emphasize certain parts of the bar, record to that, and then mute them.

Sam played her guitar and sang her vocal again plus some doubles. JP added the fingerpicking acoustics and a simple electric line. I put on a live kick drum and some marching snares. Mitch did some digeridoo and Seth played some cello.

Seth Murphy, Cellist — Seth Murphy looking like the majestic, cello angel that he is.

Recording Chaos!

I remember at the end of the week we all stayed up late and went crazy. We opened up each song and gave ourselves half an hour to throw overdubs on in the hopes that something would stick.

Sometimes you need to approach an overdub thoughtfully but sometimes it’s better to go off instinct. I find that setting a timer is helpful for that. The clock ticking kind of puts you in hyperdrive and doesn’t give you time to overthink. Kyle Jahnke and I used to do that with rough mixes. Half an hour per song. Go!

One of the cool overdubs that made it on this song was Jenn and I sitting on the floor playing a snare drum with the snares off. Jenn played with mallets and I brushed it with a broomstick simultaneously. It felt like we were in a drum circle trance. Super fun!

Bethea had gone home before this chaos, so Mitch was recording everything. He patched in an 1176 and set it to stun. This part made it on the final track and is a unique sound that we would’ve never come up with using the left side of our brains.

In case it isn't obvious, In The First Place didn't sound anywhere close to being a finished song or even a workable bed for a song when we left Alabama.

Picking Up The Pieces Back At Home

Back at home, we were still searching for some kind of direction. The girls and I sent different ideas and reference tracks back and forth. At some point, I sent what we had to Kyle Jahnke (Penny and Sparrow) and asked what he thought and if he heard anything. Kyle has such a great ear for production and he's exactly the kind of person you need in your corner when you get stuck.

He and I concocted the plan that he would come down for the day, eat tacos, hang out and try some drum parts on a few different songs. It was a good excuse to get together since we hadn't seen each other since COVID started and we always have a good time recording.

I still didn't have a functional studio at this point, so Mitch brought some of his stuff down to my living room. He cobbled things together on a card table and we were in business.

Kyle played on a few songs and they went down smoothly but this song still had some fight left in it. Kyle tried a bunch of different approaches and some of them made the final cut.

The backbeat cross-stick flam and the egg shaker in the chorus are his. But even while he was playing those parts, I could tell he was just as stumped as we were. At this moment, I was ready to cut this song from the album.

Kyle keeps The song alive!

But then, right before we dragged this song’s Pro Tools file into the trash and shut down the makeshift studio for the day, Kyle asked Mitch to throw up a mic for a scratch vocal idea. He sang this high "ooh" part in the chorus and the chorus totally opened up.

He sang it as a placeholder for the girls to replace but it ended up on there. They didn't want to re-do it because it sounded great as is.

I had been so focused on the rhythm not feeling right that I wasn't even thinking about any of the other parts. That one overdub saved this song from the production graveyard as far as I'm concerned.

I can't remember if Kyle suggested I send it to Alex Page for strings next or not. That's pretty much what we always do on Penny & Sparrow albums. Take it as far as we can and then when we get stumped, send it to Alex! Perhaps because I was recording with Kyle, that naturally seemed like the next step.

That's exactly what we did on this track and Alex came through like he always does. He bought a new mic for this album (Mojave MA-200!), locked himself in his office, and came out with all the string awesomeness you hear on this track.

Here’s Alex recording his violin at Capitol Recording Studios in LA …not for our project but this picture is awesome.

When it came back it felt 85% done.

Then the girls came down to San Antonio for the final session. We added Jenn's harmonies, the programmed kick drum, and my bass part and it was finished with tracking. We did have to do quite a bit of moving around of all the things we recorded to create an arrangement that felt right but with that, we’d made it!

One Last Gasp

Mitch did his fixes and then Bethea started mixing...

...and this song reared its ugly head for one last fight! This song had the most mix revisions of any the songs on the album. Most of it was trying to get the side-chaining right.

Side-chaining, like we used it on this song, is a pop/EDM production technique. Each time the programmed kick drum hits, it drops the level of the pad for a split second. It gives the track this kind of hypnotic, pulsing feel. There was a lot of turning the side-chaining up and down to find the sweet spot.

Then after we'd all signed off on the mix, Andy and Bethea had another idea. They were doing some vocals together, listened to the track, and thought we should cut the string intro. It was the same triumphant string part you hear at the end. That was a great call. Not having those strings at the beginning of the song set a better tone, so we went for it.

And that's it! I have PTSD for sure but some songs are worth fighting for.

Happy listening!

Chris