Brett on recording Against The Grain

“Against The Grain was the third record recorded at the original Westbeach Recorders location over on Vista del Mar. On this record we started to sort of expand our songwriting a little bit and started to sort of also expand recording techniques a little bit. We did things like the breakdown section at the end of Anesthesia, and then the screams in the song for Get Off. I experimented a little bit with some effects and echoes, a little more than I had done before. I guess you have to really pay attention to even notice now but back then to do anything like that on a punk rock record was super controversial and we started to just branch out a little bit, so I’m pretty happy with the sound on that record. As were Suffer and No Control, we put that record through my old Soundcraft 2400 console, which had a great sound for guitars and drums. I had these little compressors called Dynamites that I used for the snare and the kick drum and lots of 57s and 87s and a dozen microphones. At least I’d throw the guitars in a little closet. The studio itself was a house. It was a tiny little – not even a house, it was like a little duplex – and so we turned it into a recording studio but we didn’t have any iso booths so the guitar sound was derived by putting a halfstack into a tiny coat closet and throwing a mic on it and filling the coat closet with dampening foam. So that’s what we used to do back then. It gave a really tight close guitar sound."