from KEYBOARD MAGAZINE, MARCH 1994 TRENT REZNOR by Greg Rule "Maybe keyboards are considered unfashionable these days, but I don't give a f..." Trent Reznor isn't one to mince words. Since bursting onto the scene in 1989 with his Nine Inch Nails platinum debut _Pretty Hate Machine_, he's proceeded to shock, offend, and, yes, amaze us with his twisted brilliance. In his hands, vintage synths, guitars and raw samples become harsh, yet ingeniously crafted electro-metal landscapes. Once-recognizable instruments are digitally stomped, scratched, and mangled into noisy byproducts using Digidesign Turbosynth and other, more fiendish sample-editing techniques - ultimateley to be layered with Reznor's own tortured voice. Even though he makes no bones about his high-tech allegiance, Trent Reznor has surged to the forefront in a technology-hating genre. "I think keyboards have been given a bad rap in rock music", he says with disgust. "The Pearl Jams and whoever, that's not what I'm about. I like keyboards. I like technology. This is who I am." In mid-1992, after a real estate deal in New Orleans fell through, Reznor flew to L.A. in hopes of finding the ultimate home studio site. And boy did he ever ... the infamous "Charlie Manson" Tate mansion. Considering his affinity for things abnormal, the match wasn't sur- prising. What _was_ surprising, was the fact that he picked the place unknowingly. "On a whim, I came out to Los Angeles," he says, sprawled across a sofa at the Record Plant in Hollywood. "It was a whirlwind tour: I looked at maybe 15 houses in one day, and at that time I had no idea one of them was the Tate house. No one brought that to my attention, even though they should have." After closing the deal, and driving halfway across the U.S. from his digs in New Orleans, Reznor wasted little time in transforming the spooky confines into a high-tech showcase. Rooms that once witnessed the deeds of Sir Charles were now home to a new breed of dementia. _The Downward Spiral_(Interscope), the result of his Tate tenure, is aggressive, rude, inventive, and unpredictable. The lyrics are cold, and packed with references to such items as pain, sex, and disease. From the opening cut, "Mr. Self Destruct", a jagged aural assault reminicent of "Wish", to "Closer", an electro-groove laden with 808 drums and watery bass lines, Reznor's vision is distorted, unnerving, and altogether brilliant. "This was a difficult record to make", he grimaces. "I didn't have a definite idea of how it should sound. I mean, I had a theme lyrically and vibe-wise, but musically I wanted to put more emphasis on textures and mood, and not rely on the same bag of tricks. I had to develop a whole new palette of sounds to work with. "Another thing that delayed this record was me learning how to write again", he continues, "deciding what I wanted to do. I didn't want to make another _Broken_(Interscope). I didn't want to box Nine Inch Nails into: 'Make every song harder than the last one, meaner, tougher.' I think that's a trap. Thatr's not really what Nine Inch Nails is about. And I didn't want to go completeley back to the _Pretty Hate Machine_ style: percolating synth stuff. But I realized that when I sat down and started noodling around with ideas, I was much more inspired to sit at a keyboard than I was with a guitar." A closet noodler Reznor isn't; he was classically trained on piano as a kid. And even though he doesn't like tooting his own horn, his studio chops aren't too shabby either. As a teen, he logged time as an employee of a Cleveland, Ohio recording facility, an association that eventually led to the formation of Nine Inch Nails. Those unfamiliar with Reznor's past work might want to check out his hellish electronic stylings on _Pretty Hate Machine_ and it's six-song follow-up, _Broken_. "With _Broken_", he explains, "I wanted to do something a lot harder than I did on _Pretty Hate Machine_. I wanted it to be a blast of destruction." _Broken_ was made in secret because, according to Reznor, "we were in the midst of a legal tangle with TVT, our old record label." His signing to TVT (a.k.a. TV Toons, the company that brought us soundtrack compilations from the likes of _Gilligan's Island_), served to launch Nine Inch Nails' music. But in retrospect, the pairing of personalities couldn't have been more disjointed. Today, Reznor is all ready to kiss the studio world goodbye and get back to the altered reality of life on the road. A tour of Europe kicks off in April, followed by an extensive swing through the states. _Keyboard_ spent a day with Reznor at the Record Plant recently and learned firsthand about the aches, pains, bumps, and bruises associated with a do-it yourself record. KB: Why did you decide to make this record at home? TR: I wanted to fine-tune my engineering skills; That's one thing we've allways lacked in the Nine Inch Nails inner circle. I figured if I had a studio around, I'd inevitably figure out how to do it. And also, for the first time, we had the resources to do something right, so we ended up buying a big console and a couple of Studer machines because it was cheaper than renting, in the long run. KB: The project took considerable longer than anticipated. What happened? TR: We moved out here [to L.A.] on July 4, 1992. What we thought would take X amount of time to get a studio set up, ended up taking three times as long. As much as I enjoy equipment, fucking around with stuff, systems, and all that, there came a point when the whole focus was just to get the damn thing working and then learn it. Eventually I realized, "Okay, I'm sick of being in this room, now it's time to write an album." So I started writing, and by Christmas I had about four songs that I thought were decent. KB: Were there many gear snafus or other problems associated with working at home? TR: There were a couple peices of gear crucial to the way the studio worked at the house. One of them was a [Timeline] Micro-Lynx synchronizer. It syncs the two Studers, [Digidesign] Pro Tools, and everything. To be honest, It didn't work. Ten times a day we'd have to turn it off, unplug every cable, plug 'em back in, turn it back on, call the company, and, "Guess what? It doesn't work." There were many times when I thought, "Am I the only person in the world who's ever tried to hook these two pieces of gear, that they say work together, together?" So between that, and the terrible automation on the Amek board that we had, things would grind to a halt. I cannot tolerate equipment fucking up when you're trying to write a song, when you're on a roll. When you're in a [commercial] studio and something breaks, someone is usually there to fix it. When you're in a house, you're lying on your back under the board, scratching your head, trying to figure out what the fuck. I mean, we can get people, but it might mean five hours of waiting around. One danger of having a full studio in your house is: What do you focus on? I could spend, and have spent, a month just sampling things. so now, when it comes time to pull up a drum bank, it's all cool sounds that I've created, rather than leftovers from things I've used before. We spent a lot of time sampling and processing the sounds through different things. That way, when the actual writing and arranging moment came ... when you went to reach for that bank of sounds, they were inspiring, instead of, "Fuck, I'm in the middle of writing a song, but I really should spend a couple of days getting all new Oberheim sounds." KB: What were some of the things that you sampled? TR: My assistant, Chris Vrenna, probably went through 3,000 movies listening to them without watching them. Not to find the cliche spoken dialog sample, but just to hear sounds. He'd through them on DAT, then I'd listen to them -- I didn't know where they came from -- and I'd cut 'em up into little segments and process them further through Turbosynth or whatever. We compiled almost ten optical disks of "things" like that. We'd do a new song: "Okay, what's the mood?" "It's Grim." so we'd put up a bank, find a sound, set it aside. Another thing I did was ... a guy came to tune our studio and he had one of those real-time frequency/noise-generator things. So I sampled it. I think there's something strangeley musical about noise. If you take a high frequency and pitch it way down to where it's aliasing, you've got a pretty cool thing. You layer that in the mix, and suddenly it becomes thicker, even though sometimes you can't necessarily hear it. A song like "Mr. Self Destruct", obviously you're going to hear it, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner running through the whole thing. But a lot of times it just thickens things up without being noticed as, "Oh he's just layering some noise in there." KB: Let's get into the components of the record. Your drum tracks sound like a mixture of machines, samples, and maybe a bit of live drumming. TR: Everything was programmed. My idea of a drum is a button on a drum machine. When I hear a real drum kit...when someone hits a kick drum, it doesn't sound to me like what I think a kick drum is. Any time I've been faced with, "Let's try miking up the drums", well, you put a mike up close, you put another one here, 300 mikes, gates, bullshit, overheads, bring 'em up and listen to it and it doesn't sound at all like it did in the room. It sounds like a "record-sounding drum kit". It doesn't sound like being in the room with live ringy drums. You read these interviews where producers will say, "It sounds like you're in the room with the band." No it doesn't. Nirvana's record doesn't sound like you're in the room with them. It might sound sloppy, and it sounds interesting, but it's not what it sounds like in the room, to me, anyway. So we were experimenting with just two mikes, PZMs usually. We ended up taking a drum kit into about 25 different rooms---from sneaking into live rooms at A&M Studios, to bathrooms to living rooms to a garage, to outdoors. We didn't close-mike anything, just put mikes in the same position about the same distance away from the drums, then hit each drum at several velocities and recorded them on a DAT machine. Then we sampled them all in stereo with velocity splitting on the Akai S1100s. I noticed that when you sat down and played those on a keyboard, they sounded exactly the way they sounded in the room: shitty, ringy, you know. When I programmed them, an even when they were perfectly quantized, they didn't sound like a drum machine. And that, in itself, lent a strange, unexpected vibe to the thing. So on a few songs, we used that. I purposeley made the drum programming very rigid, so that maybe someone will listen to it and think, "Is that a machine? Nah, can't be. No machine sounds _that_ shitty." I like the idea of hearing a record and thinking, "That's guitar, bass, and drums," and then, on further inspection, "Wait a second, that's not what it appears to be". So that was one thing we did. And then sometimes, it was cool to say, "Well let's see what these drums would sound like in the bathroom." So we'd load another disk and use it with the same sequence."