Ron Rochondo (Ice Dragon)
SPB: How much recording time is spent purposefully making your music sound artfully dirty, and how much of it is pure happenstance?
Rochondo: I love this question, mainly because I think a lot of people think that we are just lazy about recording or don't know how to do it well and that is not the case at all. Do we have really expensive fancy gear? No. So a lot of it comes from using a 4-track and shitty mics and amps. But, you can get a really boring and "good" sounding record with a 4-track and shitty mics. And we don't need to be using the 4-track, we have a nice DAW as well. We choose to make our recordings sound artfully dirty because we hate the slicked up homogenized nonsense that most bands strive for. I sit down in my basement sometimes for an entire weekend trying to get a song to sound perfectly shitty. Haha. I like to think there's an art to that: getting the right balance of shitty blown out awfulness and listenability. That being said.... A lot of it does come from the fact that we record ourselves, in a basement, and we drink a lot. So there's the occasional "Oh shit I didn't have the guitar mic on that entire time man."
