1992-08 Musician Magazine
Home Alone with They Might Be Giants: Getting the hothouse effect
By Peter Cronin, Musician, August 1992
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/35355201620
John Flansburgh's name is misspelled "Flansberg" throughout. For this transcription, the spelling has been corrected.
Home studios may be all the rage these days, but for John Flansburgh and John Linnell, the concept goes way back. "Even early on we were both interested in tape recording," says singer/accordionist Linnell. "When I was a kid the best I could do was to overdub back and forth between my little broken cassette deck and my sister's little broken cassette deck. Flansburgh was the kid who actually had a two-track that did the same thing that was sophisticated back then." The two exchanged songs by mail before hooking up on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early '80s and mutating into They Might Be Giants. Their twisted vignettes and super-nerd presence gained them a cult following and eventually a major label deal. But their music retains what Flansburgh calls the "hothouse" quality of the bedroom studio. Sitting in the sea of processors, wires and floppy disks that doubles as his apartment, he says, "If you do home recording and get used to writing that way, the songs never get that audience-tested, wind-tunnel aspect. Our stuff is not good-time rock 'n' roll; it's a more personal, hide-in-your-room kind of thing."
Flansburgh's room is dominated by a MACINTOSH IICI loaded with MARK OF THE UNICORN's Performer sequencing software with a 15" Radius monitor. "I recommend the big screen," he says. "You really move fast if you can open up a lot of windows and see everything going on, and it's black & white so it's not too expensive." All that digital info is fed through an OPCODE Studio 3 and then over to an OTARI MX5050 eight-track. TMBG own two Otaris and take them both on the road, one for onstage backing tracks and the other for a spare. "They're tanks," says Flansburgh, "but besides being durable they're gourmet decks with tremendous transparency and headroom."
The other key piece of gear in their setups is the CASIO FZ1 sampling keyboard; they're obsessed with that technology. "You can transport fragile musical ideas easily into a big studio," Flansburgh says, playing one of the band's trademark cheesy sax samples. "'Spider,' from our new album, is a good example. No engineer would let us record vocals that way because technically they're distorted. It's not a good recording, but it's got character." The vocals on "Dig My Grave" went through a rackmount CHANDLER Tube Driver in Linnell's studio/apartment down the street. "I also put my accordion through distortion effects," he says; "that always works."
In the hands of an average producer the songs might drown in their own cleverness, but the sonic twists that grow out of They Might Be Giants' homegrown approach keep them afloat. "When we started all we had for a drummer was an early Dr. Rhythm," says Flansburgh, "and at one point we replaced all the kick sounds on the machine by thumping a microphone with our thumb. That was the best kick we could get; it sounded like 'buff,' but at least it made the speaker move." Four releases later, the pair are at home in a pro facility or their living room, but there are times when there's no place like home. "When you do a demo there's often one element you can tell is the best secret part of the song," Flansburgh says, "and we go to great pains to preserve that in the studio. Sometimes I think there's a special angel that looks over home recording enthusiasts."