Happy Birthday Matt Wallace!
Happy birthday to the sixth member of Faith No More, legendary producer Matt Wallace.
Producer Matt Wallace Opens Up About His Work With Faith No
More, the Replacements + More
Music history abounds with notable examples of bands who
worked with the same producer on a string of key releases. In many cases, the
producer’s name has become more or less synonymous with the band’s, with
perhaps none more well-known than “Fifth Beatle” George Martin. In the case of
Faith No More, no one is better positioned to provide a comprehensive overview
of the San Francisco quintet’s history than producer-engineer Matt Wallace,
whose history with the band dates back to its embryonic stages, long before it
had even settled on its name.
Wallace has since worked in various capacities on five out
of seven FNM albums, including their first since reuniting, this year’s Sol
Invictus. He recently sat down for a lengthy (8:00 am!) chat with us that left
no stone unturned. As Faith No More’s victory lap of North American arenas
winds down, we thought it’d be the perfect time to look back on the band’s
colorful story.
Faith No More Producer Matt Wallace Tells the Stories Behind
the Albums
When Faith No More returned with Sol Invictus earlier this
year, they brought with them massive expectations based on their back catalog.
The album ended up receiving wide acclaim, including our four-star review, in
which AllMusic editor Mark Deming asserts that the album "truly adds to
the strength of the group's legacy rather than diluting it."
Matt Wallace definitely knows that back catalog and legacy
better than most: he produced the band's first demo in his parents' garage, ran
sound on their first live show, worked with them through the commercial success
of The Real Thing and critically-lauded Angel Dust. He pursued other musical
avenues through the 90s and 00s, including producing Maroon 5's mega-smash
debut Songs About Jane and is currently in the studio with 3 Doors Down, but he
managed to return to his roots by teaming back up with Faith No More to assist
with the mixing on Sol Invictus. We talked with Wallace about watching the band
grow, how members came and went, his unexpected reaction the first time he
heard The Real Thing, and what it was like to dive headfirst into the
mainstream pop world after working with a more challenging band.
READ MORE
Faith No More Followers | 03.09.2016
"Sometimes, as you’re working on a project, you are really excited and think that it’s the best music and recording in the universe. Then, a year or two later, you feel that you have grown past it and that your new music is so much better. But, after some decades go by, the band and I can finally listen to it almost like we are the audience that we made that record for. There is enough time and distance for us to actually appreciate what we did so many years ago.
WCAL was also the first time that we were able to record Jim Martin as part of the band. I believe that all of the previous demos done on 8-track the guitars were played by Joe Pie or Bill Gould. So, it was the first time that the hard rock/metal balance was added to the group to achieve the vision of their sound. Jim brought a lot of power weight to the sound of the band and balanced out the melodic, classically trained keyboards that Roddy played.
Again, it was a turning point because the band finally had the time and resources to create a world within an album."
Faith No More Followers | 03.09.2016
"Sometimes, as you’re working on a project, you are really excited and think that it’s the best music and recording in the universe. Then, a year or two later, you feel that you have grown past it and that your new music is so much better. But, after some decades go by, the band and I can finally listen to it almost like we are the audience that we made that record for. There is enough time and distance for us to actually appreciate what we did so many years ago.
WCAL was also the first time that we were able to record Jim Martin as part of the band. I believe that all of the previous demos done on 8-track the guitars were played by Joe Pie or Bill Gould. So, it was the first time that the hard rock/metal balance was added to the group to achieve the vision of their sound. Jim brought a lot of power weight to the sound of the band and balanced out the melodic, classically trained keyboards that Roddy played.
Again, it was a turning point because the band finally had the time and resources to create a world within an album."
Classic Track - Epic
In
early 1989, Matt Wallace almost quit being an engineer/producer. Nearly in
tears, he called his mom to ask how to get into real estate. Wallace’s
“failure” was producing, engineering and mixing Faith No More’s third album,
The Real Thing, which went on to hit Number 11 in the U.S. and sell more than 4
million copies worldwide.
“I mastered that record with John Golden at K Disc
Mastering [in Hollywood],” Wallace said. “It just sounded so bad on my home
stereo and my car stereo. It was so high-endy and there was so much
compression. I just thought I sucked and I didn’t know what the hell I was
doing. Then lo and behold, on radio and MTV it killed. It was a perfect
confluence of sounds and sketchy recording where it really jumped out of the
speakers. It was just one of those happy accidents.”
Perhaps Wallace, who had
about six years of producing records under his belt at the time, was just being
his own worst critic, as many of us are apt to be. Either way, it would be
about a year later when the serendipity of The Real Thing took full effect, as
the album’s second single, “Epic,” blew kids’ minds just as completely as the
piano blew up at the end of its iconic video.
Anyone of MTV-watching age in
1990 remembers the “Epic” video, which aired incessantly for a stretch.
Although Faith No More was a somewhat established band with a minor alternative
hit in “We Care a Lot,” the fresh combination of metal, funk and hip-hop in
“Epic” seemingly came from out of nowhere, mixing different sounds of the day
that should have been unmixable and making it sound natural. From the
long-haired rapping white boy to the grandiose guitar solo to the dramatic
piano outro while a fish out of water struggled for life in the video, “Epic”
was powerfully weird and weirdly powerful. The single went Gold and hit Number
9 in the U.S., the band’s biggest hit.
Even though Wallace couldn’t predict the
album and single’s eventual success when he was having his existential moment,
he could have graded himself on a curve based on what he had to work with for
the album. The Real Thing came from somewhat humble beginnings, but not as
humble as Wallace and Faith No More’s true beginning.
“I started with those
guys in 1982 in my parents’ garage,” Wallace said. “This tiny little suburban
garage studio I put together.” During Wallace’s senior year at UC Berkeley, he
was attending classes two days a week and making 8-track records in the garage
four days a week. The first 7-inch as Faith No Man, including bassist Billy
Gould and drummer Mike Bordin, was one of about 40 records Wallace produced at
his folks’ house or at his studio after he moved it to neighboring Oakland.
With personnel changes, the band became Faith No More, adding Roddy Bottom on
keyboards, Jim Martin on guitar and vocalist Chuck Mosley. Wallace produced
their first album We Care a Lot (1985) over two three-day weekends—including
mixing—at the 24-track Prairie Sun studios in Sonoma County, California, and
then Introduce Yourself (1987) was recorded at Studio D in Sausalito and at
Ground Control in Korea Town in Los Angeles.
For The Real Thing, the band and
Wallace spent some time rehearsing the songs without lyrics or a singer in L.A.
before heading back to the Bay Area to record at Studio D Recording in
Sausalito. New singer Mike Patton had about two weeks to write lyrics before
the sessions started.
Not only was Patton short on time, but Wallace and the
band were short on gear. They had Bordin’s Yamaha drum kit and Wallace’s
Slingerland Radio King snare drum, Gould’s Gibson Grabber bass going through a
Peavey guitar head, Martin’s Gibson Flying V guitar and half-stack Marshall
amp, Bottom’s E-mu Emax keyboard and the studio’s piano. “We had no options,”
Wallace said. “That was it.”
Wallace recorded to a 24-track Studer A800 tape
machine, through what he called “a really fantastic board,” a Trident A-Range
console. They started off tracking the songs with a full band, mostly just to
get the drums down. Wallace would then do razor blade edits before beginning
overdubs, and he figures they overdubbed just about everything except the
drums. Wallace miked the drums with a Shure SM57 on the snare, an AKG C 451 or
452 under the snare, an AKG D12 on the kick, Sennheiser MD 421s on the toms,
Shure SM81s as overheads, an AKG C24 about six feet away from the drums and a
pair of omnidirectionals—maybe AKG 414s—as distant room mics.
“I have to say 90
to 95 percent of that drum sound is Mike Bordin’s contact with the drums,”
Wallace said. “He plays in a unique way; it’s really a wrist thing. His toms
are very flat, and he always had bigger tom-toms than you’re ‘supposed’ to
have.”
Wallace put a bit of compression on the snare, kick and the close room
mics, and then a lot of compression on the distant room mics. “That’s where you
get that amazing drum ambience and room ambience,” he said. “I had those
separated out so in the mix I could blend them as needed. To me, the Faith No
More sound is really the distance between Mike’s snare drum and the compressed
room sound and the distance between the distorted, solid-state bass amp and the
hallway, and then how much compression is on them.”
The speakers for the bass
were in a hallway with a 421 mic tight to the cabinet, a condenser mic in the
hallway and also a channel from a Countryman direct box. “Bill really attacks
the bass,” Wallace said. “His pick, his overdriving Peavey solid-state guitar
amp and the room ambience—it’s an aggressive sound, almost like you took a
Marshall guitar amp and pitched it down an octave.”
For the album, Wallace and
Martin spent at least a day trying around 26 mics in different positions and
placements to get as many guitar tones that they liked out of Martin’s single
guitar and amp. They recorded him in the only large iso room they used and
blocked off the gear with yellow police tape once they had the setups they
liked. Some of the mikings included a 414 tight to the speaker cone, a Shure
SM57 off the speaker’s edge, a 421 on the back and flipped out of phase for a
low thud, and some mics placed at distances. Their favorite tones were used for
multiple tracks on the album.
Even though Martin always wanted more metal to
the sound, every day he and Wallace would play the theme from Ennio Morricone’s
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, salute each other and start working on guitar.
“There’s nothing comparative sonically,” Wallace said, “but we wanted that
feeling of grandeur, size and panorama when we did Faith No More.”
“Epic”
specifically took two or three days in the studio to finish, including initial
tracking, edits and overdubs. They already had a great demo to work off of that
Gould made beforehand, which even included the piano outro. In the final
recording, the piano outro is Bottom playing the miked-up studio piano for the
melodic top end, and Gould playing plinky chords on the direct-recorded 8-bit
sampling Emax keyboard.
Gould’s impeccable composition and Martin’s blistering
guitar notwithstanding, one has to wonder if “Epic” would have been such a hit
without Patton’s esoteric lyrics, commanding presence and distinctive voice.
Wallace recalled that between takes, the vocally elastic Patton would switch
from the nasally, whiny voice from the chorus of “Epic” to a deep and rich
R&B-style crooning. Wallace wanted him to try that voice on the recording,
but Patton refused.
“Honestly, Patton was right, because that kind of
adolescent, bratty thing he did was absolutely right for that song,” Wallace
said. “If we had gone my way, I don’t think it would have connected like the
version we did. Patton was right in sticking to that irritating, kind of ‘f*ck
you’ vibe on his vocal. I think young people connected with it because he was
singing the way young people thought of the world, like, ‘no one understands
us.’”
Patton’s aggressively delivered verses influenced the choice of vocal
mic: a Neumann U 47 FET condenser, rather than a tube mic, because of the sonic
pressure he was putting into it. “I recorded Patton’s vocal through a dbx 166,
which is not a great compressor,” Wallace said. “It was a stereo/dual
compressor, so I’d run his vocal through one end of it as a compressor, back
into the other side of it as a limiter, and then to tape. So we
hyper-compressed him to tape and then during the mixing phase, I used that same
166 again on his vocals. So his vocal was compressed twice to tape, twice during
mixing, and then it went through the bus compressor. Not really hi-fi, but that
record had a sound that was very aggressive yet still melodic, and we really
went for something.”
They went for something, but “what… is… it?” That question
confounded almost everybody who heard “Epic,” a real love-it-or-hate-it type of
genre-bending track when it came out. Wallace said their associates at Warner
Bros. liked it but thought it would never receive radio play. It had a
radio-unfriendly 44-second instrumental interlude in the middle and a bit of a
raw mix.
“It was always a challenge to go through the frequencies and try to
make it so the bass and the electric guitar didn’t get in each other’s way,”
Wallace said. “Then I was trying to keep the keyboard at the upper midrange on
up, to keep it away from the guitar. Often times they would all play 100 percent
for a good portion of their songs, so I’d always have to do subtractive mixing
or subtractive equalization to try to find ways to weed things out.”
However,
when the label had Wallace do a radio remix version of “Epic” with more polish
and less instrumental, it went nowhere. “The remix has tremendous low end on it
and also has more hi-fi reverb,” Wallace said. “Honestly, it’s technically
better. It sounds more like, ‘now winning the Grammy for engineering, Matt
Wallace.’ But everyone still loves the original version, because it’s
scrappier. As much as I wish people had used that remix, by the time it got
out, radio had already jumped onboard the original album version. Honestly, the
original version just worked. It didn’t sound too pro.” Perhaps it was that
alternative hits in the era of “Epic” are like viral videos today: everyone
wants to make one but has no idea how to do it until it’s done.
Wallace went on
to produce Faith No More’s follow-up to The Real Thing and the band’s most
critically acclaimed album, Angel Dust, and he still hasn’t quit producing.
Among his many credits are the multiplatinum-selling Songs About Jane by Maroon
5, Train’s first album, Andy Grammer’s first album, two albums with O.A.R., and
he’s now working with young bands like Los Angelics, R5 and RapScallions. Faith
No More just released its first album in 18 years, Sol Invictus, on May 18,
which was mixed by Wallace and Bill Gould. The fish from the “Epic” video,
Morty, is retired and living in Lake Tahoe.
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