Mike Day’s drum performance and engineering on Cha Blasco’s “Broken Toys”
By the end of 2015, Mike Day and I had slowly been chipping away at putting together a full length album with Cha Blasco for about 10 months as we approached the final piece for the record which had been put on the back burner for the duration of production. The song was called “Broken Toys” and it was perhaps the strangest of the set of demos that Cha sent us. It sounded like a 16-bit video game funeral march with orchestra hits and snare rolls (which, as Mike says, sounds pretty cool when I put it that way!). Very slow tempo and a static arrangement that built up slowly but didn’t seem to hit a satisfying stride or conclusion. Vocals were great though.
We decided that approaching this song as a remix would likely be the best way to go. In this context, we’d just take the vocal (which was a beautiful performance by Linnea Sigurdson) and rework all the music. We felt comfortable making this decision mostly because Cha had been so wonderfully collaborative throughout the process with all the other songs for the record. He made it a very open positive environment to bounce ideas around even when we strayed quite a bit from the initial demos.
I put the vocals on a grid that would allow for following a tempo that felt right while Mike went into the live room behind the kit to start playing simple grooves along with Linnea’s performance. From there, I was able to take Mike’s tracks and create the foundation for how this song would groove. I even sampled his kick drum and turned it into the main chorus hook synth using Logic’s flex time and SoundToys Little Alterboy.
I recently talked with Mike about how we approached production on this song. Here’s an excerpt from that discussion:
MD: I believe we were in that big-ass empty room with the really tall ceilings at the old studio space and I had those Beyer M201s that we had pointed at the floor in X-Y and that birch Mapex snare was sounding really incredible. And I remember we just thought ‘let’s just track some ideas to the vocal.’ It was a really interesting one. The rhythmic pattern was definitely coming from the vocals. A lot of the inspiration was coming from the sound of the kit.
AB: That record was the first time we really explored having you as a session drummer. We always considered you to be a great guitar player and a great bass player but I kinda forgot that you also play drums! For us to explore you playing drums, this was such a perfect record for that. You ended up playing drums on half the record. This was the last song on the record’s production process so it felt a little more natural at that point since you’d already played on a bunch of the other songs.
MD: Yeah that’s absolutely true. I’ve always thought of my drumming as very utilitarian. Listening to Broken Toys again, I remember wanting to have a really solid backbone. I knew you were going to take whatever I did and build on that. I know that song is really very much a utilitarian approach for me in terms of having a solid backbone but staying out of the way. It’s funny listening to it again, in the first chorus, there’s no cymbals. We definitely built the song that way where there are sections where I’m just hitting the shells to keep it really really simple.
AB: For maximum manipulation options because what ended up happening was that we gated the hell out of it because that room sounded so good with the way you set up those room mics.
MD: Getting to the end of that song, I remember approaching it like I wanted it to sound like the song was starting to fall apart and it really works going down to being just drums and vocals at the very end. I remember being inspired by Kelli Scott.
MD: I really love Broken Toys. That ended up being my favorite song on the record. I really appreciate the collaborative nature with Cha in particular. He was always super into the collaborative ideas that really made songs like this work.
So here’s Broken Toys by Cha Blasco:
You can check out the rest of the record as well as his other releases through that Bandcamp player.