What do animal collective use live

Avey Tare is rarely thought of primarily as a guitarist, but he shows off a rare glimpse of traditionalism here. A fun game to play is trying to figure out who is producing which sounds, as the group just looks like they're playing video games on stage, never acknowledging each other. The band has always been good at mixing disparate elements—light and dark, the trippy with the poppy—into something deceptively simple.

By the summer of , Animal Collective were experiencing mainstream success for the first time with the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion , but they had already been touring its songs for about two years. The group was really onto something during this period. Their shows felt like an exorcism, as if they were making music for a kind of ineffable power. Festival sets are rarely an opportunity to capture great live shows, although this one at Pitchfork Festival is an outlier—and much of it could be due to the way the show was recorded.

Millennials were entering the workforce for the first time, burdened by an economic meltdown. But looking at the music through the eyes of , Merriweather seems almost naive or mawkish. A lot of popular music today is just straight-up sad. The aughts indie-rock era is also being reevaluated on new terms. The lead-up to the album also created a bit of a brouhaha.

On Christmas Day , a rip of the album leaked, causing the band to push up the vinyl release of the album to January 6. But in a way, Merriweather served as somewhat of an accidental precursor to how albums would be rolled out in the streaming era. And honestly, the last 10 years has been swamped in reverb. The band brought the color back into music at a time when indie rock in particular was almost too serious, tightly recorded, and uncultured. This was how it was going to be from now on: samplers instead of guitars, vibes over rocking out.

It seemed like everyone was playing a stand-up kit with just a floor tom and a sampler, singing music with tons of delay. And I feel like it has. The thing with Animal Collective is that since each release sounds like a different band, fans come and go. Lots of people like the back-to-the-land nurture of Sung Tongs , or the crystal-palace fantasia of Feels more than Merriweather. In keeping with their spirit as primarily a live band, some members are more attached to the Merriweather songs in their touring form, when they were breaking apart and congealing into new forms each night.

You never really knew where one song started and one ended. Recently Weitz and Portner have been revisiting sets they recorded from We did an overhaul on it and built it up from scratch. Also it was the hardest song to fit on the record sonically because it's one of the sparsest songs, it's not nearly as dense as the others. Sometimes it sounded a bit empty or too straightforward.

It didn't have an interesting sonic personality, until we got to mixing. For epic closer 'Brother Sport', Allen found himself having to refer to the Collective's live version of the song to achieve exactly the right dynamic.

Matching that energy was really difficult. Noah would generally want to go all the way down the song a couple of times, then we would listen back and see what we liked and what we didn't like. With Dave we were a little more methodical. We would do a section and go back and listen and recut little parts. But there's two to four doubles of everything. So we'd get an initial pass that we liked and then we'd go back and do doubles and triples and quads.

Once tracking was completed, Allen and the band took a few months off to listen to the monitor mixes. To me that's such a great sign, because I usually don't do that.

Usually I do a record and I don't listen to it until I have to mix it. When it came to choosing a studio for mixing, Animal Collective decided to follow Allen, who figured that Chase Park Transduction in his native Athens, Georgia would be the perfect location.

For us, though, it's really important to go somewhere new. It kind of breaks us. It puts us in a mind set of not focusing on anything but making the record, and it's a new experience being in a new town, so that gives the record a really fresh feeling.

Working in studios or with engineers that we've worked with too many times over… just without thinking about it, you can slip into old habits. Plus, it's really private and really out of the way. Privacy was such a big thing for those guys that I felt it was the right place to be. They add a little clarity to a vocal extremely well. So we had those and a handful of [API] As that you could swap around.

But the mixing of this was done more by Ben — he'd take two or three hours to set up everything how he thought it should be and then we would come in and direct him from there. But those specific ideas are very, very abstract. So we might do a mix and someone might say, 'Y'know at three minutes and 42 seconds there's this one sound of a frog jumping in a pond and I really want it to sound like it's more wet.

For the band members, attention to detail, it seems, is paramount. We usually have an engineer that handles the desk. BW: "Ben [Allen], the engineer, was really good at finding the right EQ and sound for each of the parts. He was really good at anticipating the production, especially for percussion. They had a great hallway that we recorded a lot of the drums and stuff in. NL: "They had this huge metal wall that was in like a storage area and it sounded cool. A lot of the reverb on the album is actually from that hallway, especially on the percussion.

BW: "The owner wasn't there while we were recording but I heard that it was the last project and I wrote him an email. He'd never thought to record anything in that hallway so I told him to sample it up as an impulse response before they left. DP: "We wanted to put a lot more space on this record as we felt that Strawberry Jam, our last record, was a little cluttered and it was much harder to mix. We really planned out the sonic spectrum this time around and it made it easy for Ben too, as everything had its place.

DP: "Noah and I kind of start with a melody. For this record we just recorded some demos and sent them to Brian. We try to keep it as simple as possible because we know there's gonna be a lot more added.