I recently got to chat with Tweaker mastermind Chris Vrenna. we talked about everything from his new album, his studio secrets, his views on modern music and american idol. Chris is one of the coolest and most down to earth musicians ive ever talked to. He had zero ego and answered every question i asked like we were old pals.

Chris Vrenna is recognized as one of the top producer/remixers in the music world, having worked with artists including U2 , P.O.D., GAVIN ROSSDALE, as well as COLD, NELLY FURTADO, WEEZER, David Bowie, Xzibit, and Rob Zombie amongst many others. In addition to his current recording incarnation TWEAKER, Vrenna was one of the founding members of Nine Inch Nails. His new Tweaker album is available for pre-order now via www.tweaker.net and will be out on 4/20.

Damion: so hows the live band setup coming?
CV:we had tried to do a ya know, we were going to try to do a tweaker tour for the first record, but ya know, 9/11 and everything that could go wrong went wrong so that never got off the ground, although me and Clint and Paul(our bass player) we actually did get it together conceptually and half way musically so we’re just expanding upon that, we added a fourth player cause the new record, well, the first records more electro loops. it was more doable by 3 people cause I could just trigger more stuff and with the new record, the writing is much better I think, haha. more band sounding, we just needed and decided to add a forth guy musically

Damion: hopefully that will take some strain off you guys.
CV:it actually does, because I have to, well half the songs off the new record, I don’t have to worry about triggering anything, i’m just playing drums. which is just really fun and then there’s half the songs that the background arps like the verse of truth is or sleepwalking away, it starts off with all the little arps all those types of things, I break those up and sample them and then I trigger them all as loops.

Damion: when you trigger the loop, is it a continuous thing or more of a recycle style?
CV:i try to break the phrases into 2 bar sections if possible, and without it looping, our goal is…..I don’t want to play to tape, I don’t wanna…..just walk out and hit play and you just wank over the top just seems whatever, so the goal is that everything is generated live, which provides us an opportunity to improvise and change stuff if we want to. so the way I do the looping thing is I sample em into 2 bar phrases and once you hit the pad, its just open and goes. once it gets to the end of its 2 bars or whatever, it doesn’t loop, it just stops, its like every couple bars I have to re-trigger, but the cool thing about doing that is that I have more control. if there’s a section of the song that (that locks you into a tempo obviously, but whoopy whoopy) and also having to retrigger it every couple bars, if the band drifts a little bit, drifts off the loops a little bit, every couple bars I gotta re-trigger it anyways which basically relocks the tempo. and since everyone in the band are monster players anyway there’s not a lot of, haha, i’m not talking about myself but those other guys , but you know the drift is, it doesn’t really drift. but you know, I try not to have any phrases too long, so that things can drift too far, and if a section is going really cool and we’re in a jam section, as long as I keep hitting that pad every 2 bars and we’re all digging it and we look at each other and go lets do another 8…..we can do another 8 so there’s room to experiment that way. set the loop off and if your in the middle of the loop, you can do chokes and go to breakdowns that you didn’t really plan on but I felt like doing, just weird stuff like that, cues to keep it live.

Damion:You’ve worked with a lot of artists over the years, What do you look for when taking on projects to produce or remix?
CV:different things for producing than remixing, I mean remixing, since their usually already established things, its basically, do I like the band or do I like the song, so that’s always pretty easy, and the thing about remixing, the hard works already been done! the bands already written the song and they’ve already produced the song and the songs already been out, they just hand you all the parts and say, eh, mix it up and turn this into something different would ya? but its super duper fun. but for producing, you know, most of the bands I’ve produced are smaller, newer bands, that type of thing, and for there, if I get where they’re going stylistically, and there’s been productions I’ve turned down, although its flattering, I also realize i’m probably the wrong guy for what their actually looking for at the end of the day, so to try and see if i’m actually the right guy and then what I actually think of the band and their vibe and their songs and style and that whole thing and can I help them?….can I really offer them some form of direction?

Damion:With the amount of software and equipment these days, do you find it raises the bar for musicians to release a better product with less filler material?
CV:um…no, actually if anything I think its almost the opposite, I think all the software and the persuasivness of cheap and or free cracked software and all that kind of stuff, if anything, I think its actually made music…..its not like music all of a sudden got better because everyone went out and bought reason or ableton live or apples garage band, the lowest denominator of all that style of stuff, if anything I think its made music more….its made music to me at least almost worst just because, I hear it on TV commercials more than anywhere else, but you’ll see a TV commercial for a bra or some sort of automobile, and I hear a beat or keyboard thing and i’m like UH! that’s loop 12 on preset…and I hear it and there’s a few of them I totally recognize, its made it so easy that nobody takes time which is what it takes to develop, design, start from scratch, create their own stuff, its just too easy to grab acid and anyone of the $20.00 loops and throw it in there and there ya go, hip-hop 01. which is kinda of sad, I mean I know what all that software’s trying to be but to me it hasn’t really helped. for the new tweaker record, I used some software stuff, there’s a few pieces I really really like , but in general my room is filled floor to ceiling of hardware keyboards and I kinda made a conscious decision for tweaker, for the record to go that way, cause everybody and his brother can go buy or has this crappy piece of pc software, but no-ones plunking down 3grand to buy this one weird synth, i’m going to get that one weird synth, and i’m going to have fun with that! so I’ve actually gone more the opposite way and gone way more hardware than software.

Damion: growing up, you were probably one of the first people to have a 4 track pro tools system.
CV:i did actually, when the digital audio thing got started, which was opcode studio vision, trent got it and he actually had the 2 track one way back in the day and then we got the 4 track and then he kept adding those 442 interfaces and built it up and then got a PT3 rig, when I left the band it was still PT3 NUBUS! that’s how long I’ve been out of the band now

everybody is like “I can do 48 platinum reverbs in logic running this with that” and i’m like, yeah but you cant write a song! you don’t know how to program a drum beat! who gives a crap!

Damion :i find it funny i’m going thru music forums and people bitch “oh I can only get 40 tracks out of my p3!”
CV: and that’s another whole thing, the whole software thing, everybody is like I can do 48 platinum reverbs in logic running this with that and i’m like, yeah but you cant write a song! you don’t know how to program a drum beat! who gives a crap, I still run a mixplus and I get capped at 64 voices, I mean fuck, look at the white stripes, 8 track! everybody’s gotten so caught in what technology can do that everybody kinda forgot it doesn’t matter what technology can do, its what can you do? and what that is, is write a song that says something, be emotional with your lyrics, come up a production sound that doesn’t sound like every other guy who just bought acid and thinks he’s going to become a techno BT DJ, there’s lots of bands out there, I mean look at radiohead, i mean we all wish we could be radiohead , you can be the white stripes, you can be the yeah yeah yeah’s

Damion:the yeah yeah yeah’s are a great band!
CV:yeah! really cool, another band with no bass player, weird trend, hahaha. you can be the postal service, their getting a lot of airplay down here right now a quirky weird little electro thing on subpop. but totally cool, its all about forgetting what your gear can do, its what can you do? it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any gear at all! so anyways, there’s my soapbox

Damion:ok, real brief, just because I know you’ve talked about this in the past and I just want to bring it up because I think you have one of the coolest quotes about it, do you see any disadvantages from having so many options to choose from? particularly about distortion. (in a past interview Chris had remarked about bands coming over and asking for distortion and Chris would reply, well, I have about 100 ways to distort stuff so which do you want?)
CV:(laughs)yeah yeah, my famous distortion thing. I mean, I do, I get option anxiety all the time, I was tired after band rehearsal but Clint and I were working on this game score we’re writing right now (area 51 for midway. tabula rasa for nc soft) and he just wanted a pad, just any synth pad, a stringy sort of vibe, and 10 minutes later I was just like uhhh, lets just go get a glass of wine, I cant even think right now, but its true, there are so many choices and that was another thing, the first nails record was made on a Mac plus with a emax 1….no an emax 2 keyboard and a prophet VS, that was it! that was all the gear trent owned and man, I can run an emax, I can run an emax..with….JEEZ I can run an emax, cause that’s all we had, doing tricks like putting something on tape and double speeding the tape and then sampling it and then playing it up 3 octaves so the whole, what would have taken your entire memory bank goes *makes rewinding noise* and then you map it there and tune it down 2 octaves so that its back to normal and of course it sounds like crap, because its been pitched so far down but that made it kind of cool too, but you just learn tricks to get around your gear! that was one thing we did for the new tweaker record as well, we wrote the whole record first…period, we had 1 heavy guitar tone on the mesa, 1 clean guitar tone on pod, 1 clean bass tone on bass pod, I had 1 pad, just a nice generic pad the one I couldn’t find last night! a piano, 1 bank of faux live drum samples because I was going to go play it all anyways, but I like to map out what i’m going to play on midi first just to get my ideas down, and then setup the drums and the mics and go record it later, but we had the 1 mapped bank of drums and 1 synth bass patch, just like a nice round sine wavy sort of thing and that was it, cause we we’re like alright, we don’t wanna sit here and get bogged down and, what should the kick drum sound like? what kind of pad, do we want a choir? a string, a synth? its like NO! if it works…. if the songs or the chord movements work if the drum beats are catchy and the chord movements are emotional who cares if its a crappy tone for now, we’ll know if its going to work when it works, so we did that for the entire record just to get rid of all that option anxiety!

Damion:That actually covered a lot of my next question, the new album definitely seems stripped down as far as electronically, but there’s more of a band vibe, did you and Clint set any limits during the songwriting or recording phase?
CV:well, there were no limits except for what we just talked about just because we wanted to concentrate cause the first record, just coming off nails and everything I was kinda sick of playing drums and I was trying to establish myself as programming guy and all that stuff, the music I was listening to at that time was all just experimental electronic, like aphex twin, autechre, all that weird kinda stuff. I was really intrigued by how you could make something catchy whether its a beat or a little hook or whatever, but make it with noises and take away everything else, so that was kinda the focus of the first record but, in the last few years, doing more productions and stuff and maybe my own tastes of what I’ve been listening to cause you know, we’re always all excited about what we’re into at the time, I kinda got back into it, man I miss bands! everything’s so produced now, so manufactured, i’m addicted to American idol, but you gotta admit if American idol was the only way for people to get deals, nirvana would have never happened! I mean, yeah, their great session singers and that’s all those people ever are, not to insult any of them, but Kurt Cobain could be completely out of tune the whole time but man, he could write a fucking song that could make you cry! and that’s rare! so for this record, A: there were a few main goals and plus I got Clint in my life now which I didn’t have first time around so goal #1 was I wanted to play drums again and #2 just with twerpy electronics somehow emotionally doesn’t really connect with me anymore, I mean it does and I get it, but for the average listener, like for how many years did rolling stone have a cover saying ELECTRONICA THE NEXT BIG THING! every year for 5 years until we realized its not going to be!

Instead of spending the whole night looking for one cool sound and then going, what should we write with this sound?? and its like, well that seems ass backwards! try to approach it like a band would almost approach it, write your shit first and then go produce your shit after! I mean, cause production, you cant polish a turd ya know?

Damion: now its kinda switched back to the 70′s rehash bands
CV:Yeah, kinda and I really like songs, writing songs, so the focus for this record was more songs, less noodleing. base everything around, get back to my roots, my instruments, my drums and let me just play! not to make it sound like a band per say, but try to go for some emotional connection and that’s just kinda the way it came out so those were kinda the main ground rules. and then we came up with the writing set that I told you about, just because for the first couple times trying to write, spend a whole night looking for the perfect 808 kick drum.,or listen, what a cool bass patch, what do we want to write with it? rather than write a funky bass line first and then finding a sound that works cool, instead of spending the whole night looking for one cool sound and then going, what should we write with this sound?? and its like, well that seems ass backwards! try to approach it like a band would almost approach it, write your shit first and then go produce your shit after! I mean, cause production, you cant polish a turd ya know?

Damion:Ok, going completely away from everything we’ve talked about since the beginning of the interview, what was some of the gear that was vital to the creation of 2AM?
CV:OH GOD…….well first there was my new live drum set I bought…

Damion: what’d you upgrade to?
CV:i left pearl and went to Yamaha and I bought a jazz size recording custom silver sparkle classic, 18in kick, 10in rack, 14in floor, a total jazz size cause I have a very small tracking room, its actually kind of a overdub room there’s not really anything but drums in there. I rented a couple kits and put some different sizes in there just to see, you put a 22in kick in that small room and there’s not enough distance for the waveform to get going before you hit a wall. we had Bill Kennedy over here who I’ve worked with a lot over the years, engineer/producer. and he’d come over for a couple days and we’d be like ok, lets put a pzm mic here…lets try this, well what do we have lying around already and just trying to do super-lo-budget home thing. after that pro tools, cause everything goes to pro tools and I use Pro Tools exclusively, I do all my midi sequencing within tools I do everything within pro tools.

Damion: now what about the andromeda or v-synth?
CV:I have both *laughs* the andromeda got heavy play, that’s just a really beautiful synth. the V-synth, I got just towards the end so it made some appearances here and there did some sampling in and out of it and some of the weird drum sounds you hear are like the stuff id sample into there and that you can process and play with. lets see, there was a time that I almost got rid of, I have a microwave XT, the big orange rack guy, I was going to sell it and I was going to pare down my rig at one point, there was just too much shit and sometimes i’m like, what haven’t I turned on in 6 months and whatever I haven’t turned on in 6 months i’m just going to sell and strip down a bit. and then I used it for something and I was like God! I cant believe I was going to sell this thing so that ended up becoming a lot, a lot of the pads actually on the record are the microwave, but I do a lot of stacking and stuff too. we pretty much do everything direct guitar wise, we have like every direct guitar box known to man! the tri-axis is just the best for heavy stuff and that’s pretty much the whole, ya know, we did everything and tried not to over think it and also I didn’t want to do editing, that’s like my other new bitch anymore cause man, you hear stuff on the radio and its so chopped in pro tools man, its like just cause you can chop and put every single hit the drummer did directly on the grid and beat detective the living life out of it and then you found a place to put in better samples, we try to keep everything performance oriented so a lot of times the productions that are based on electronics, you have all your electronics first and then the drummer plays and you have to chop the drums to match the programming, you cant have loops and drummers flaming it, its just horrible! so once id get all the programming done and then I went and played, I would play to the track and A: I would get an entire chorus, like the whole 16 bars and i’d play it till I got 16 bars I liked, in general if I could play the, id play a whole song , I mean, I could do a few takes in comp ….giant sections and whatever, that sort of thing and then go back and take the programming that was already in there that I was kinda playing too and go chop the programming and line it up to me and my performance, that way the programming is moving with me and then everything would be played to that. you’ll hear slop on the record and the record moves back and flows, the little things that people do sometimes they’ll rush, all the percussion stuff I just went and bought tons of handheld percussion and set up a mike and sat in a room like on the track “pure genius” and that’s me, on a mic, with a instrument…playing it. we tried to play with tweaker so slowly so twerpy and electronic, we tried to actually infuse as much life into it as possible, as much humanity cause that’s what I guess the ultimate moral of the story is whether your some blippy weird band on warp records or…OR! your a million dollar nu metal rock production, the one thing that’s missing for all of it anymore is humanity. its either been programmed out or chopped in pro tools and autotuned….. my wife’s the beat reporter for American idle for US weekly, and she’s covering this whole will hung thing, you know that guy right? *insert a few minutes while Chris brings me up to speed until I realize I DO know the will hung guy from American idle* she got the first 4 tracks cause she had to go interview him and all this kinda stuff for the reporting and we all listened to it, and its like, well, what made him so funny was that he was so horrible and once again, its in pro tools and its like, its still not good, but at least what’s made it endearing has been ripped out. OK! moving on, hahaha

Damion:Ok, i’m going to take you back a few years, you helped a little Neo-victorian chamber rock group called Rasputina, how did you approach the programming with Rasputina and what’s it like working with Melora (Creager)?
CV:well, first, meloras a fricking genios…in my book…I think shes so talented, I love her song writing style. I like her quirky style and everything else, she was really fun and she knows what she wants and she knows what shes doing and I like that, but as far as all the programming and stuff goes, we just approached each song differently, we’d lay down scratchs of the cellos parts and a guide vocal to a click and then just kinda worked on each one differently, she definitely wanted, her first record was the live drum thing, a kinda bombastic garabe sound on that record, she definitely wanted to go more electronic sounding, although there’s some live drums and stuff on our record, we definitely wanted to lean more in the 808, kinda weird soundscapey sort of stuff and just going song by song, I pretty much had creative control over it, she would just sit there with me and i’d just start riffing idea’s and sounds and stuff like that…

Damion:kinda like a mini-jam session…
CV:kinda, yeah, shed be like ah! that’s really cool man! or could we do something with a little distortion? so it was kinda back and forth and each song is kinda a story.

Damion:Personally I love that album
CV:Yeah, me too, its one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on, I still listen to it once in a while.

Damion:Do you find any problems working out of your home?
CV:yes and no, once or twice a year I start looking online for a rental space to just move out of the house just because I get frustrated sometimes at home. I guess the biggest plus is you don’t have to go anywhere, and LA’s such a fricking nightmare, like days like today, I got up early and I can get a couple hours of work done while i’m drinking my coffee before interviews and i’m going to work as soon as my last interview is over cause we’re trying to get this peice written tonight and you can chop 2 or 3 hours out of your day driving back and forth from your house to where ever your going. its mostly just a discipline thing, if your really not in the mood to work, and you know you got gamecube, your wife and the television 2 walls away from you its a lot easier to go eh, i’m going to go take an hour, i’m not really feeling it i’m going to go watch a TV show for an hour and pretty soon your like, eh, i’m not going to go back in there. but you just have to develop alot of self discipline. doing tweaker, we’d work on that in the middle of the night usually around 2am so that, just being able to be at home and kinda relaxed, the studio opens on to the deck and our garden and everything’s back there so you can leave the back patio door open and have the screen door closed, hear the nighttime sounds, and it sometimes becomes more inspiring…and sometimes not. and just the industry and the way things are, everything now needs to be done cheaper than before and faster than before so having everything right there, your overhead is drastically reduced, so all in all its worked out good, although after we finish this huge game score we’re in the middle of (area 51 for midway. tabula rasa for nc soft), i’m going to empty it out and we’re gonna redecorate. clints sick of looking at it, i’m sick of looking at it, just the way the walls are all padded down and everything, we’re going to take a few days when we finish this new project, we’re going to empty all the gear out, we’re going to paint, try some new lighting just make it look like a new room.

Damion:how difficult is it to switch gears between working on something like alice and then coming back to a tweaker album.
CV:um…a good question, sometimes it can be good, its getting kinda hard actually, my threshold is 3 I’ve learned, I can juggle 3 things mentally, like for the last couple years, there’d be some sort of game score thing going on, a remix. or a production and a remix and trying to work on tweaker or pick any 3 and I can do pretty well switching gears, but the minute I get a call about a fourth job whether or not its even started or anything, then I melt down, I just cant compartmentalize that many things anymore. one thing that I’ve been learning about myself, I think everythings kinda like a self leaning process I guess that’s what life is but the other thing I’ve learned is I cant do it on the same day, that is the other thing. so if I got a day where i’m working on a track all day, if I get the mix done at 5 or 6oclock lets say for a game thing or a TV thing or whatever it is or a remix, I cant finish that and then go ok cool, lets go work on that and then go to tweaker, my days over. even like yesterday it happened to me, we do 4 hour band rehearsal which ended up being like a 6 hour day, ya know, take a lunch break. we’re writing songs so I try and go down there early and just do whatever, then try to take an hour and a half off, take a shower and get some food and then go work on a game thing, my ears were ringing from the P.A, i’m a little sore because yesterday’s test was learning sleepwalking away which is my hardest song, its all those toms and all that pounding and it was like Clint came over and it was 10 minutes trying to find that pad sound for him and I was like ya know, I cant do this right now, i’m just fryed, my ears are fryed, my brains fryed. so i can switch, I just can’t switch nessicarily on the same day anymore, but that’s ok, you wake up the next morning, ok…fresh day.

Damion:Because there’s a lot of people that are going to be introduced to the new album because some of the people that you worked with, they don’t really know how the vocal collabortations worked, I know you imported pro tools sessions between the artists, any particular artist that you were really happy to work with and I know your a huge cure fan so care to comment on working with robert smith?
CV: A: who isnt a huge cure fan and followup b: oh my god, robert’s on the record, the cool thing about the vocal stuff is yeah, it was all done that way, but every tweaker record’s got a concept. the quick steps are send music, rough music of the insturmentals once their fully recorded, pretty much like you hear them on the record, but not mixed or anything. send those to manager or artist and wait for response of yes i’m interested then b: what song, which of those music pieces did I send you were inspiring to you? I like to give them choices because there all so different so let them pick something that really resonated with them and then they’d pick it and we’d have the conceptional discussion and i’d show them what the album cover is going to look like and I tell them the story of the record and I describe thematically to them what I want them to sing about and after that its all up to them how they spit it back to me. then pro tools sessions get sent to wherever cause everyone has their own home studio so they all do it in their home studio and then they send it back, a couple artists who were like, hey when I get a scratch run, can I send you an mp3 just to check it out to see what you think? get some feedback while i’m going thru it, so there was dialog like that. will oldham actually did his vocal in my house cause he was in town, he was opening for bjork all last summer….

Damion: Very cool.
CV:so yeah, it was cool, he played the hollywood bowl here so while he was in town with her, opening for her, he had a couple days off in LA so he was working on it on the road and then we came to the house so he and I just did it together, that was the only one that was done that way. I love them all, I approach vocalist’s that I like, I like hip-hop and I like rock, but rapping and screaming isnt what tweaker’s about, its other emotions. I like singers who sing, who actually do that sort of stuff so the cool thing about it is when I get those pro tools sessions back and you import the vocal and hit spacebar for the first time, its kinda like when I get to become a fan myself and actually get to hear that, and its really kind of a great feeling ya know, hearing people you approached cause your a fan of, and then hearing what they did with your music that to me is just really cool and exciting.

Damion: Speaking of the cover art, Joe Sorren did the last albums cover work and he did this album as well, anything you want to say about that?
CV: just that, the first painting, the Elliott painting on the first record, when I found that painting and it meant so much to me and it become the character for the entire record, the whole concept for the first record and thru all that and having to deal with Joe, he and I had became friends, so when it came time for the new record the first thing was I wanted to keep some sort of consistancy, I mean that is a problem with project records like tweaker is what holds a band together is the singer, and that band thing so they can change their art whenever they want, the singer can sing about any subject matter he wants or she wants from song to song because its the same singer singing it and that’s what holds it together, so for tweaker, having different vocalists for every song and every record, just different people involved all the time you never really grasp well…what is this project? so I tried to create some kind of cohesion and a bigger picture than just a bunch of random songs, that’s why I do the concepts, it just kinda happened naturally anyways but if you have 8 singers singing about the same subject matter then the subject matter is what kinda holds it together, if that makes sense and the same with Joes work, visually I wanted to keep a thread, keep a cohesivness that can become visually apart of tweaker or what tweaker stands for, that kinda stuff, there was really no other option for me mentally, I was just like, I gotta get Joe! I gotta get another painting from Joe! and found that the painting called adaption, I was on his website looking thru, he had just put up his back catalog of everything, like a gallery, and I found it and I was like, oh my god, tweakers nighttime record and there’s almost my same character in the same sweater with the same typewriter…. at night! and I was like oh my god, its as if he actually made that painting specifially for the record….and that paintings a few years old!

Damion: thats cool it worked out that way!
CV:so I sent him an email and it was totally one of the coincidences that your like, Wow, I couldn’t have chosen better than that, or you couldn’t have made me a painting that nailed it all together plus I just like the title of it, adaptation, its a new sound, with Clint and everything’s growing and changing so it just worked.

Damion: Ok, just a few more questions then I promise i’ll let you go, what kind of mistakes do you see new engineers and beginning musicians making?
CV:oh man, good question, um, well i’ll do a shorter version of a previous answer. stuff we were talking about, don’t de-humanize the music, I know if your coming up, the only peice of software to learn is Protools, I know people at home are using Digital performer and logic and cubase and stuff, but you don’t walk into a $2000 a day studio in LA or NY or chicago or miami…. its Pro tools! pro tools hd sitting where the 2in machine used to sit, and so that’s the one that everybody is learning, whether you use it as a tape deck and editor, sequencer , full DAW or any combination of anything that it can do, but going back to what I was saying ,its like people are learning it but a lot of them aren’t musically minded so they learn, well, heres how I can put every single thing on the grid perfectly and once again just kinda de-humanizing the music a little bit, so that’s the biggest mistake I see, just because you can, you don’t have to.

Damion: Any Remixes or B-sides for 2AM?
CV:we’re just starting to talk about it right now,so none at the moment, but its something we will definitely, i’d like to, cause I love remixing and I know once again, its kinda becoming a lost art a little bit….slightly. but I like it, the first record we had the linolium single so i’d like to see something like that….absolutly, but nothing concrete.

Damion: this one might make you cringe a little bit, another tweaker remix contest?
CV:ah! I loved the first one, and yes for the record, I did listen to everyone of those myself! AND did it all myself, cause people didn’t believe, they were like there’s no way Chris is going to take all that time, its like no,i did! I mean…um…..sure, why not ya know? it was fun the first time, if somebody wants to do another contest like it was run the first time, sure!

Damion: Awesome, Ok last question, anything you want to say that you always hope interviewers ask you or any bands that you want to promote?
CV:oh my god….um as far as bands I want to promote, two of my friends bands, first Scarling, jessika whos on sympothy for the record industry, their record just came out, I produced the record for them, it was one of those ones we all did on weekends on our free time cause with the way the world, but the record I think turned out fantastic and her live band is just smoking, kinda my bloody valentine-y, a little bit of the jack off jill thing, but not quite, not so screamy and my budys in A.I, nick who sang sleepwalking away is in a band called A.I. that I produced that was on dreamworks and with dreamworks going under the band got dropped, so they just finished a E.P of new material an their starting to shop a new deal as we speak which I think will go very well for them and we’ll do a new record and I just really like what they do and their 3 guys and they can play and their just sick musicians! and I like his vocals, everybody thinks he’s a girl, so their doing stuff that I really like a lot too, those would be the 2.

Damion: Any plug for Teargas and Plateglass?
CV:that record comes out shortly, really cool, really dark! I really like it a lot, id like them to do a tweaker remix! god, teargas remixes one of the more somber tweaker songs, that….whew that would be just too much!

Damion: Well, thank you so much for giving me so much of your time! love the new album, cant say enough good things about it, have a good day!

-Damion (void)

Pro AudioUnit and VST plugins