2008.10.15 - EQTV - Brain Talks Chinese Democracy

Transcription:

Brain: Okay, so with Chinese Democracy which, I think this is the first time I'm telling the story in any kind of interview or anything, but... That was, its... I think I have the record for how long my drums have been set up in a studio, and I think it was five years the drums were set up at the Village Recorders in Los Angeles. My drums are up there for five years, I think it went through three different producers. It went through Sean Beavan, Roy Thomas Baker and then I guess Axl's the producer now. [chuckles] That's five years my drums were set up.

And basically how it started was Josh Freese was the drummer before and he had basically played on about 30 songs and he had left. Axl really liked my feel so he was like, "Well, I really like what Josh was playing, but I want your feel," and I was like, "Okay" so I'm gonna need songs and go in and re-play them. And it was like, "No, I really liked what Josh played but I want your feel," and I'm like, "What does that mean?" And Roy was the producer at that time and he's like, "Well, basically what you're gonna have to do is play exactly what Josh play, exactly note for note, but you play it." So I'm like... So, I'm gonna have to transcribe every like 30-something songs and I'm like, "Man, I'm not getting paid enough for this," so I'm like, "I don't mind doing that but you're gonna have to get someone else to transcribe it". So I went to the head transcriber at Sony Studios and I brought him two CDs worth of, like, 30 songs and I said, "Dude, I want note-for-note you to transcribe everything that's on this drum-wise." So about a month later he calls me and I get back, I go and pick it up at Sony Studios, I get, like, it must have been that thick [gesturing thickness approximately 35 cm] sheet music. And it was every song written out note-for-note and these were some seven-minute songs with, like, at the end Josh doing soloing, actually, like [gesturing solo drumming with sounds], like every note was written out and he had like the exact solo at the end of There Was A Time [?] that was like, literally... I don't know, like two minutes of that at the end, of Josh just going crazy all written out.

So basically I went in and we set up at the top of this, like, in the Village we decided to record... I went in and I heard the room in the Studio C and I was like, "Well, you know, this is cool but you know we're making, like, the Guns N' Roses album! Come on, we can't just be in the studio where, like, everybody else records. You got to have something better than this?" And the owner Jeff was like, "Well, we have an auditorium that used to be able to be a Masonic Temple upstairs," and I'm like, "There you go, now we're talking, you know, like Led Zeppelin, we're getting into something here." So we go to the top and it's all cold up there. It's like, you know, just really eerie feeling and I'm like, "This is it. This is where we got to record all the drums." So we basically ran everything up to the top of this, this, Village Recorders, and we set up the drums in this auditorium. And so it really just had a huge kind of bottom-ass [?] sound.

We set up all the drums in the corner and we literally put... when I open the charts they were like 1 page, 2 page, 3, 4, 5, like 6 pages and they wanted... Roy didn't want me to do it in sections so it wasn't like, "Okay, here's the verse," and I'm playing it. It's like, "No, you got to play it as one piece." So I'm like, "Dude! I got to, like, practice this and get..." So each song we had up, like, we had this huge, like, banner made where we could have the whole chart across. So I would look at from here [gesturing to one side] all the way to like, like [gesturing to the opposite side], almost like a 90 degrees, I would just see this huge chart. And I learned every song for, like, I don't know, maybe two weeks. Learned all the parts. I sat there and, like, got it down like it was orchestrated. I just practiced until I got it. Then I would say, "Roy", and while everybody down [?] to the studio, it's $2,000 a day in studio, which would just be sitting there, like, like, watching, like, cartoons or The Exorcist or something, there's like, well, I'm upstairs practicing and I would call downstairs and be like, "Yeah man, I think I got it so maybe we should try." Two weeks have gone by, I think I got it, we try to record, track it for two days until I got the perfect take. One song done. "Okay, let's start the next one." About seven to eight months later I was done and that's how that album was recorded.