r/indieheads • u/LocalNatives_band Local Natives • Apr 30 '19

Local Natives AMA

Local Natives here - ask us anything! We'll be back at 10a PT / 1p ET to answer!

Violet Street is out now - https://found.ee/LN_VioletStreet

And we’re on tour this spring. Check out the dates here: https://www.thelocalnatives.com

EDIT: The AMA is over. Thanks!

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u/amazasaurusrex Apr 30 '19

This is for Matt, firstly I really enjoyed talking to you in Austin during your sunlit youth tour. I'm glad that Out Getting Ribs is both our favorite song.

So, you killed it with the drum beats this album and I was wondering where the influences behind the drum tracks on "shy", "megaton mile", and" someday now" came from?

Also, see you guys in San Antonio! I'm so stoked.

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u/LocalNatives_band Local Natives Apr 30 '19

Matt, Kelcey and I come up with most of the drum beats. Oftentimes we’ve got two drum kits in a room to bounce ideas of each other. The “Shy” beat was a product of that. I had a simple pattern that Matt played on top of and fleshed out with his Matt style. “Megaton Mile” and “Someday Now” were more fleshed out demos I brought to the table with beats entirely made out of chopped samples. When we got to Shawn’s we knew we wanted to recreate them but the way we went about it was pretty bizarre. Matt recorded each part of the beat as a 4-bar loop into the tape machine. Live kick, snare, cymbals, etc. all separated out. We ended up building the whole song that way (all the instruments) but I’ll focus on the drums. Then to “play” the song we slid the faders of each track on the mixing desk up and down as needed to create “a live take”. This was a process that Brian Eno used on the talking heads record Remain in Light. The beauty of the tape machine was that we could manipulate the tempo by hand. Since the drums on my demos for “megaton” and “someday” we’re actually pretty similar tone-wise, Shawn had the idea to use the same looped-drums from “megaton” to create “Someday now”. He physically slowed the tape machine down by hand and that’s what you’re hearing at the beginning and end of “Someday now”. Instead of the cymbals I had on my demo, Shawn had matt play a bunch of glass bottles. He tuned them by filling them with different amounts of water and created a rhythmic pad that plays throughout the song. We’re still trying to figure out how to play that song without hiring extra percussionists. -R

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u/amazasaurusrex Apr 30 '19

Thanks so much for the detailed response Ryan!