LAYERS: Unpacking The Andrew Weathers Ensemble's "Hard, Ain't It Hard"

This week, we take a step way outside the usual LAYERS fare and delve into the folky vibes of Oakland’s Andrew Weathers and his ensemble. “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” by Oakland, California’s The Andrew Weathers Ensemble. Originally from North Carolina, the composer and instrumentalist recently released What Happens When We Stop on Full Spectrum Records. The album paints a rural picture of touring across the US with the lyrics comprised of reworked folk classics and instrumentals drawing inspiration from everything from sound collage to The Dream.

“Hard, Ain’t It Hard” is Weathers rendition of the Woody Guthrie classic, soaked in travel-weary wear and tear. Here, the booming vocals serve as the backbone while the ensemble’s improvisations subtly surround and build the track into something beautiful. Weathers and his crew combined a surprising amount of digital manipulation to achieve the unique sound, read below to hear him break it down:

What Happens When We Stop is made up of loosely-composed guitar pieces that I had the band improvise with. It’s a record about the players just as much as the technology. All of the lyrics, with the exception of one tune, come from American folk and blues songs – the text structures and shapes the improvisation.

The Ensemble is spread all over the country but I wanted to try my best to have everyone on this record. We did the first sessions at Michael O’Shea’s studio in Asheville, NC in order to get the east coast players in, now that I’m living in the Bay Area. We tracked everything live and built a majority of the album from those sessions. The rest was recorded around Oakland, at my small home studio and Mills College’s CCM, friends houses and coffee shops. I produce everything myself using Reaper, but most of my sound design is in AudioMulch, MaxMSP, and Reaktor. I make a point to not get locked into specific programs to avoid the tropes that software forces one into. Locking yourself into one piece of equipment is like locking yourself into a particular key – you can do a lot but the work turns homogenous once you look at it from a wider vantage point.

Guitar And Voice:

“Hard, Ain’t It Hard” is a reworking of a Woody Guthrie tune of the same name. The harmony of the song is more structured than my usual source material, so I left my guitar part open to improvisation more than I’m used to. I recorded the guitar and original vocal in the CCM’s studio late one night. I still play the first guitar I ever bought when I was about 15 or 16; it rattles and sometimes it’s a battle to keep it in tune. I recorded the tune with an extra verse at the end, but I felt like it was a little long-winded that way. I had one mic on the vocal, one at the 12th fret, one pointed at the body of the guitar just below the sound hole and one pointed at me from about six feet away. All four mics are faded in and out in the mix.

Processed Harmony Vocals:

I wanted the background vocal harmonies to sit somewhere between early country and The-Dream’s upbeat moments. There is autotune and pitch shifting on all of the vocals, and a little bit of reverb on the main vocal. I tend to use huge room sounds in very small amounts. I’m just using Reaper’s built in plug-ins for all of this. My friend Mel also sings in the chorus – I stopped by her apartment one day and she nailed several songs she had never heard before. I think you can hear her husband Aaron, who plays accordion on this track, making coffee at some point.

Second Guitar, Tenor Sax, Harp:

Next I added a second guitar, tenor sax and harp. Jacob added guitar that fits within the nooks and crannies of my playing. He is much better at guitar than me. All of the breathy sounds are Josh playing tenor sax – what I really loved about his take is that he blends with the later electronics in such a way that they become almost indistinguishable. Most of the edits are fairly simple, just done with volume automation and occasional cut and paste for riffs that I particularly liked.

Electronics, Accordion, ‘Famous Wedding’ Sample:

Erik Schoster plays most of the electronics that you hear on this record – he’s developed his own software called Pippi specifically for laptop improvisation. He played with us for a good portion of our tour this summer and fit in perfectly. He sent me audio of him improvising without hearing the tunes and I edited his work into the pieces. At the very end of the track you can hear a sample derived from an a capella version of a folk tune called ‘The Famous Wedding’, I made it mostly with granulation and filters in AudioMulch. The granulator there is pretty incredible, probably my favorite feature in the program. Also here are Aaron Oppenheim on accordion, Evelyn Davis on piano and Scott Siler on vibraphone. Their parts filled out the texture, basically covering the role that electronics take in my past work. That’s really the thing I love about moving between electronic and acoustic worlds.

Put them all together and here's what you get. The premiere of “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” by The Andrew Weathers Ensemble:

@justinstaple

Previously on LAYERS: Digging Deep Into Rare Times’ “No One’s Looking Out”