Now a certified smash, the show is gearing up for its second season,
and the FOTC brain trust—partners-in-grime Jemaine Clement and Bret
McKenzie—have just released their first full-length album on the Sub Pop
label. Through it all, with the expert backing of record producer Mickey
Petralia and video editor James Thomas, the Conchords have relied on
Digidesign and Avid equipment to keep the party airborne.
“It’s been pretty crazy,” McKenzie says from Los Angeles, where he and
Clement have been holed up working on themes and musical sketches
for ten new half-hour episodes. “I think we were a real surprise to a lot
of people. It’s such a different experience now from when we were first
touring, when no one knew what our songs were about. We absolutely
never intended to create a television show out of the band—all the
songs and characters, and the style of the show, developed from us
performing live over the years.”
Although there’s always a shred of luck involved in any breakout
comedy hit, it’s easy to see why Flight of the Conchords struck such a
nerve with American audiences. The show is filmed in and around New
York—primarily on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and in some of the
more hipster-gritty enclaves across the river in Brooklyn—and the duo’s
deadpan, hilariously artless take on a starving musician’s existence is so
offbeat and left-field that it just works.
Plus, their songs are exceedingly clever, mercilessly incisive, and downright funny. From the absurdist Serge Gainsbourg-like ramblings and
cheesy bossa rhythms of “Foux du Fafa” to the side-splitting raps and
drum-machine beats of “Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous,” the Conchords can dish out multiple musical styles on cue to skewer their favorite
pop icons, including David Bowie, Prince, Barry White, and Hall & Oates.
When it comes to realizing the musical element of the show, FOTC turn
to studio genius Mickey Petralia, who has worked on albums for the
Butthole Surfers, John Cale, Luscious Jackson, and Beck, to name a few.
Petralia manned the controls for the Conchords’ Grammy-winning 2007
EP The Distant Future, and reprises his role on the new album, which
features more refined versions of several songs that have made it to
the TV screen in the music video segments written into each episode
of the show.
“Mickey has always been good at bringing life to our tracks,” Clement
says. “When we first started to record stuff ourselves, we thought we’d
put an album out, but it would always just seem lifeless, so we gave up
and went on traveling around and playing live. But with Mickey, all that
changed. He’s great at programming beats and helping us flesh things
out—and he’s really
funny, too,
so when
me and
Bret are
out of
joint, he
always
cheers
us up.”
“We absolutely never intended to
create a television show out of
the band—it all developed
from us performing live
over the years.”
Digging In with Demos
—Bret McKenzie,
Although some tracks on the
FOTC disc (most notably, the Pet Shop
Boys nod “Inner City Pressure” and the Prince-ly “Most
Beautiful Girl in the Room”) were created from scratch in the
studio, much of the material went through a demo phase first.
Petralia’s home studio, which is outfitted with Pro Tools|HD and a Digi
002, served as the creative laboratory for Clement and McKenzie to get
busy without any distractions.
“We used to do our demos on Mboxes,” McKenzie says. “On the road
though, it was always a different story. I had this bag full of cables, an
Mbox, and a microphone, but to be honest, I never really got anything done
on tour. Theoretically, it should have worked, but it seems that whenever
we’ve been touring, we’re too burnt out to get any proper demos done.”
Cruising Altitude
By Bill Murphy
Is there any reason why a pair of scraggly, guitar-toting New Zealanders should be
able to channel the nerdy quirks and quibbles of the downtown boho lifestyle in New
York City? No doubt that’s the question HBO execs were asking themselves when
the comedy series Flight of the Conchords made its quiet debut last year.
DIGIZINE
20
DIGIZINE
21
Now a certified smash, the show is gearing up for its second season,
and the FOTC brain trust—partners-in-grime Jemaine Clement and Bret
McKenzie—have just released their first full-length album on the Sub Pop
label. Through it all, with the expert backing of record producer Mickey
Petralia and video editor James Thomas, the Conchords have relied on
Digidesign and Avid equipment to keep the party airborne.
“It’s been pretty crazy,” McKenzie says from Los Angeles, where he and
Clement have been holed up working on themes and musical sketches
for ten new half-hour episodes. “I think we were a real surprise to a lot
of people. It’s such a different experience now from when we were first
touring, when no one knew what our songs were about. We absolutely
never intended to create a television show out of the band—all the
songs and characters, and the style of the show, developed from us
performing live over the years.”
Although there’s always a shred of luck involved in any breakout
comedy hit, it’s easy to see why Flight of the Conchords struck such a
nerve with American audiences. The show is filmed in and around New
York—primarily on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and in some of the
more hipster-gritty enclaves across the river in Brooklyn—and the duo’s
deadpan, hilariously artless take on a starving musician’s existence is so
offbeat and left-field that it just works.
Plus, their songs are exceedingly clever, mercilessly incisive, and downright funny. From the absurdist Serge Gainsbourg-like ramblings and
cheesy bossa rhythms of “Foux du Fafa” to the side-splitting raps and
drum-machine beats of “Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous,” the Conchords can dish out multiple musical styles on cue to skewer their favorite
pop icons, including David Bowie, Prince, Barry White, and Hall & Oates.
When it comes to realizing the musical element of the show, FOTC turn
to studio genius Mickey Petralia, who has worked on albums for the
Butthole Surfers, John Cale, Luscious Jackson, and Beck, to name a few.
Petralia manned the controls for the Conchords’ Grammy-winning 2007
EP The Distant Future, and reprises his role on the new album, which
features more refined versions of several songs that have made it to
the TV screen in the music video segments written into each episode
of the show.
“Mickey has always been good at bringing life to our tracks,” Clement
says. “When we first started to record stuff ourselves, we thought we’d
put an album out, but it would always just seem lifeless, so we gave up
and went on traveling around and playing live. But with Mickey, all that
changed. He’s great at programming beats and helping us flesh things
out—and he’s really
funny, too,
so when
me and
Bret are
out of
joint, he
always
cheers
us up.”
“We absolutely never intended to
create a television show out of
the band—it all developed
from us performing live
over the years.”
Digging In with Demos
—Bret McKenzie,
Although some tracks on the
FOTC disc (most notably, the Pet Shop
Boys nod “Inner City Pressure” and the Prince-ly “Most
Beautiful Girl in the Room”) were created from scratch in the
studio, much of the material went through a demo phase first.
Petralia’s home studio, which is outfitted with Pro Tools|HD and a Digi
002, served as the creative laboratory for Clement and McKenzie to get
busy without any distractions.
“We used to do our demos on Mboxes,” McKenzie says. “On the road
though, it was always a different story. I had this bag full of cables, an
Mbox, and a microphone, but to be honest, I never really got anything done
on tour. Theoretically, it should have worked, but it seems that whenever
we’ve been touring, we’re too burnt out to get any proper demos done.”
Cruising Altitude
By Bill Murphy
Is there any reason why a pair of scraggly, guitar-toting New Zealanders should be
able to channel the nerdy quirks and quibbles of the downtown boho lifestyle in New
York City? No doubt that’s the question HBO execs were asking themselves when
the comedy series Flight of the Conchords made its quiet debut last year.
DIGIZINE
20
DIGIZINE
21
This time around, the Conchords found themselves with a solid stretch of
time before shooting began in New York. The intention was to finish the
album with Petralia in California—a tall order that turned out to be a little
too tall. But the group was able to build up a solid stash of Pro Toolsready demos to work from.
“A lot of them revolved around beat boxes or little percussion rhythms
and loops that they had made,” Petralia recalls. “Then we’d just start
piling on. For the most part, I do all my beats, programming, and chopping in Pro Tools. I was a DJ before I got into this, and I have a pretty
vast vinyl collection, so once we get an idea of what we want tempowise, we’ll map something out with a beat box—just a click, a kick, and a
snare—and then I’ll go into the library and start pulling up beats. I think
we only used a straight loop on one song. Usually I would go in and
fine-tune and chop the hell out of it—a kick here, a snare there, a hi-hat
there—and build our own beat.”
On the rare occasions when the original demo survived all the way to the
mixing phase, it was primarily because Petralia couldn’t top the original
in-the-box arrangement with his arsenal of exotic analog outboard gear.
Case in point: “Business Time,” a faux-sexy funk grind backing Clement’s
insanely funny Lou Rawls-meets-Barry-White rap. The song was originally
released on The Distant Future, and is also folded into the new album.
“We’ve already started on the second season,” Petralia says, “and I’m
fully aware of the fact that we’re mixing as we’re going. That’s just the
nature of working with Pro Tools—you’re constantly building the mix as
you go—and the original rough mix we did on ‘Business Time’ really held
up. I tried all kinds of tricks with compression and EQ to break it out on
the console, and I still couldn’t get it to where I wanted it. So that blew
me away.”
DIGIZINE
22
With two separate music-recording workflows going—one for the TV
show (11 episodes in a tight five-month schedule) and one for the studio
album—Petralia and FOTC were busy, to say the least. Once an episode’s
camera rushes were digitized at the standard 14:1 Avid resolution and an
edit was turned over using versions of the pre-mixed music, QuickTime
and OMF files were exported to Petralia so he would have a locked
picture to follow for the music’s final mixes.
“Mickey would often show up on the dub stage with the finalized tracks,”
says James Thomas, the show’s main editor. “We would cut to another
version of the track before that, obviously, so the tempo and everything
would be the same, but they’d be working on the mix and the instrumentation right up until the day before the episode’s final mix was done.”
These time constraints meant a lot of frequent flyer miles for Petralia.
“They would be filming five days a week,” he recalls. “I would fly out for the
weekends, and we’d do music for the upcoming two weeks. We’d fine-tune
everything—vocals, synths, guitar parts—at Pilot, and then we’d have it on
the set on Monday for the show they were filming for that week.”
On Flight of the Conchords, many of the duo’s songs provide the grist
for music video departures from the storyline that usually occur twice
in each episode. The format offers a wide-open vehicle for visual
experimentation—particularly when the song itself is as suggestive as
“Inner City Pressure,” which came together after principal photography
was already underway.
Too Much Pressure
“We had an idea to do a song just about being poor,” Clement explains,
“because our characters in the show are poor. Originally, it was going
to have a Grandmaster Flash hip-hop feel, but then our director James
Bobin [best known for his work with Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G
Show] wanted to do a Pet Shop Boys kind of video. We had a look at it
and we liked the sound, and liked the subtle English rap as well.”
After the demo phase, FOTC continued work in Hot Pie Studios in
Pasadena, where Petralia is a partner. The studio is tricked out with the
latest Pro Tools HD software, a Digi 002, and a full load of Digidesign and
third-party plug-ins. Once filming began, music production headquarters
moved again, to New York’s Pilot Studios.
The video segment for the song appears in Episode 2, “Bret Gives Up
the Dream.” It’s a gritty nighttime street treatment of image melts,
sequenced by Bobin and Thomas, that makes use of such Sapphire
visual effects as BlurMotionCurves and SwishPan. From a sonic stand-
point, the song evolved over time to incorporate nuances that weren’t
in the TV version.
“We started with the loop and then overdubbed synth pads, synth bass,
and some percussion,” Petralia says. “But in the end we
thought it was
too derivative for the
show. We
wanted
to make
it a little
groovier
and organic,
with an electric
—Mickey Petralia,
bass. There’s a vocoder
Conchords music producer
in there as well. And the
guys are really particular
about getting their vocals just right, so
we tweaked those a few more times after
the show was cut.”
“I use Altiverb and the Digi
delays a lot for mixing. Sometimes
I’ll put really quick delays
on stuff just to give it
some room ambience.”
The Whole Wide Room
For all their success as a comedy duo, it’s sometimes easy to forget
that Clement and McKenzie are compelling songwriters. Perhaps no
other Flight of the Conchords song bears that out more than “Most
Beautiful Girl in the Room,” a blisteringly tongue-in-cheek acoustic
send-up of Prince that also conjures a bit of Midnite Vultures-era Beck.
“That was funny in the studio,” McKenzie recalls, “because Jemaine
and I are not particularly competent musicians. We can get it together
with the singing, but Prince is probably one of the hardest people to
emulate in the studio. So we would listen to our track, and then we’d
A/B it against a Prince track to see what the difference was. That was
probably one of the most disheartening experiences. We thought we
had a bit of a groove going, but flip to Prince and he made ours just
sound like this crude children’s rant!”
DIGIZINE
23
This time around, the Conchords found themselves with a solid stretch of
time before shooting began in New York. The intention was to finish the
album with Petralia in California—a tall order that turned out to be a little
too tall. But the group was able to build up a solid stash of Pro Toolsready demos to work from.
“A lot of them revolved around beat boxes or little percussion rhythms
and loops that they had made,” Petralia recalls. “Then we’d just start
piling on. For the most part, I do all my beats, programming, and chopping in Pro Tools. I was a DJ before I got into this, and I have a pretty
vast vinyl collection, so once we get an idea of what we want tempowise, we’ll map something out with a beat box—just a click, a kick, and a
snare—and then I’ll go into the library and start pulling up beats. I think
we only used a straight loop on one song. Usually I would go in and
fine-tune and chop the hell out of it—a kick here, a snare there, a hi-hat
there—and build our own beat.”
On the rare occasions when the original demo survived all the way to the
mixing phase, it was primarily because Petralia couldn’t top the original
in-the-box arrangement with his arsenal of exotic analog outboard gear.
Case in point: “Business Time,” a faux-sexy funk grind backing Clement’s
insanely funny Lou Rawls-meets-Barry-White rap. The song was originally
released on The Distant Future, and is also folded into the new album.
“We’ve already started on the second season,” Petralia says, “and I’m
fully aware of the fact that we’re mixing as we’re going. That’s just the
nature of working with Pro Tools—you’re constantly building the mix as
you go—and the original rough mix we did on ‘Business Time’ really held
up. I tried all kinds of tricks with compression and EQ to break it out on
the console, and I still couldn’t get it to where I wanted it. So that blew
me away.”
DIGIZINE
22
With two separate music-recording workflows going—one for the TV
show (11 episodes in a tight five-month schedule) and one for the studio
album—Petralia and FOTC were busy, to say the least. Once an episode’s
camera rushes were digitized at the standard 14:1 Avid resolution and an
edit was turned over using versions of the pre-mixed music, QuickTime
and OMF files were exported to Petralia so he would have a locked
picture to follow for the music’s final mixes.
“Mickey would often show up on the dub stage with the finalized tracks,”
says James Thomas, the show’s main editor. “We would cut to another
version of the track before that, obviously, so the tempo and everything
would be the same, but they’d be working on the mix and the instrumentation right up until the day before the episode’s final mix was done.”
These time constraints meant a lot of frequent flyer miles for Petralia.
“They would be filming five days a week,” he recalls. “I would fly out for the
weekends, and we’d do music for the upcoming two weeks. We’d fine-tune
everything—vocals, synths, guitar parts—at Pilot, and then we’d have it on
the set on Monday for the show they were filming for that week.”
On Flight of the Conchords, many of the duo’s songs provide the grist
for music video departures from the storyline that usually occur twice
in each episode. The format offers a wide-open vehicle for visual
experimentation—particularly when the song itself is as suggestive as
“Inner City Pressure,” which came together after principal photography
was already underway.
Too Much Pressure
“We had an idea to do a song just about being poor,” Clement explains,
“because our characters in the show are poor. Originally, it was going
to have a Grandmaster Flash hip-hop feel, but then our director James
Bobin [best known for his work with Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G
Show] wanted to do a Pet Shop Boys kind of video. We had a look at it
and we liked the sound, and liked the subtle English rap as well.”
After the demo phase, FOTC continued work in Hot Pie Studios in
Pasadena, where Petralia is a partner. The studio is tricked out with the
latest Pro Tools HD software, a Digi 002, and a full load of Digidesign and
third-party plug-ins. Once filming began, music production headquarters
moved again, to New York’s Pilot Studios.
The video segment for the song appears in Episode 2, “Bret Gives Up
the Dream.” It’s a gritty nighttime street treatment of image melts,
sequenced by Bobin and Thomas, that makes use of such Sapphire
visual effects as BlurMotionCurves and SwishPan. From a sonic stand-
point, the song evolved over time to incorporate nuances that weren’t
in the TV version.
“We started with the loop and then overdubbed synth pads, synth bass,
and some percussion,” Petralia says. “But in the end we
thought it was
too derivative for the
show. We
wanted
to make
it a little
groovier
and organic,
with an electric
—Mickey Petralia,
bass. There’s a vocoder
Conchords music producer
in there as well. And the
guys are really particular
about getting their vocals just right, so
we tweaked those a few more times after
the show was cut.”
“I use Altiverb and the Digi
delays a lot for mixing. Sometimes
I’ll put really quick delays
on stuff just to give it
some room ambience.”
The Whole Wide Room
For all their success as a comedy duo, it’s sometimes easy to forget
that Clement and McKenzie are compelling songwriters. Perhaps no
other Flight of the Conchords song bears that out more than “Most
Beautiful Girl in the Room,” a blisteringly tongue-in-cheek acoustic
send-up of Prince that also conjures a bit of Midnite Vultures-era Beck.
“That was funny in the studio,” McKenzie recalls, “because Jemaine
and I are not particularly competent musicians. We can get it together
with the singing, but Prince is probably one of the hardest people to
emulate in the studio. So we would listen to our track, and then we’d
A/B it against a Prince track to see what the difference was. That was
probably one of the most disheartening experiences. We thought we
had a bit of a groove going, but flip to Prince and he made ours just
sound like this crude children’s rant!”
DIGIZINE
23
Petralia helped nudge the song closer with some
instrumentation ideas and mixing tricks. “First we put
a really warm-sounding Al Green kit over the original
beat-box loop,” he says. “We wanted it to build, so we
made our own tom loop—a Timmy Thomas ‘Why Can’t
We Live Together’ kind of thing—and then at the end
we go to our kit. I’m really happy with the drums on
that one. I do a lot of drum bus compression, so I used
the Bomb Factory 1176 plug-in quite a bit.”
The song presented further challenges when Petralia
and FOTC split for Wellington, New Zealand, for the
album’s final mixing phase. “The studio was pretty
limited,” Petralia says, “but I use Altiverb and the Digi
delays a lot for mixing anyway. Sometimes I’ll put
really quick delays on stuff just to give it some room
ambience. When we originally tracked ‘Beautiful Girl,’
I basically had an SM57 mic on both Jemaine and
Bret, between their vocals and the guitar. The song
starts with the guitar in the room, and you can hear
the drums coming through the speakers and the air in
the acoustics, and it sounded really loose. The musical
elements changed a few times after that, but we really
liked that sound, so to re-create it I used one of the
Digi delays on Bret’s guitar.”
With work already started on season two, Flight of
the Conchords are looking forward to honing their
collaborative edge with Petralia. “The tunes were
getting better and better the longer we were in the
studio,” says McKenzie, “so I feel like now we’re in a
good position to hit a new bunch of tunes. We’ll probably have even more fun in the studio creating ideas.
‘Inner City Pressure’ was a song like that—I feel like it
opened us up in a way that the older songs didn’t.
We would never have done that song in a comedy
club, because it relied so much on the studio. So I
think this next round will be interesting.”
Cutting the Conchords
James Thomas got his start editing music videos in London
before moving into comedy with The 11 O’Clock Show, which
featured a then-unknown Ali G, played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
Years later, Thomas made the leap to film as an editor on
Cohen’s hit comedy Borat while pursuing a parallel
collaborative path with director James Bobin.
“The Conchords format is a hybrid of two things that I really
love doing: music video editing and comedy,” Thomas says.
“That’s why I was so interested in doing the gig. Bret and
Jemaine’s style of comedy is quite laconic, and their pace
dictates the pace of the show we put together.”
Working at the Avid Unity-based facility at Dakota Pictures
in North Hollywood, Thomas and co-editor Scott Davids went
slightly old-school on Flight of the Conchords: “We were editing on Media Composers,” he says.“ Scott and I had our own
workstations, along with two assistants. All the material was
shot at 24P [24 frames per second], but not in high definition.
That was dictated by the budget, but as it turns out it’s actually a very good choice for the show. Conchords is not sparkly,
spanking, or shiny—everything’s a bit rough around the edges.
It’s portraying a gritty New York existence, so that played into
the whole feel.”
As for visual effects, Thomas often finds himself going back to
Glow—which, as he describes it, “basically softens the look to
make the picture seem like ’70s porn.” He laughs. “It’s useful
because a lot of the Conchords songs have a very retro feel
to them. They’re stripped-down and very acoustic, not overly
orchestrated, and they’re directly parodying certain styles.
So we were conscious of that, and tried to reflect it with the
effects we used.”
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