Artist Interview: Jettatura
Dave Hill and James Rotondi Take a Two-Person Band Live
By Marsha Vdovin

Dave Hill and James Rotondi of Jettatura

Jettatura: the name rolls off the tongue. I find myself repeating it over and over with different intonations as I search for Lower Manhattan Studio, where I am to meet them. I wonder what the word means...

Upon meeting Dave Hill and James Rotondi, I am immediately struck by their warmth, intelligence and good looks. Together they seem to be a good team, complementary, not competing for airtime.

Tell me about Jettatura.
James: Jettatura is a project we started back in 1998 when we first met and began working together in Seattle, under the auspices of Michael Shreve and David Torn, two of our mentors. Jettatura has evolved over the last few years to be an instrumental project that draws on a lot of our influences and inspirations and goals in techno electronic music, jazz, acid jazz, free jazz, dub, etc. So it's sort of been a place where we can put a lot of our different musical impulses.

“I’m a big fan of the Pultec EQ, and I like the Fairchild a lot. That’s fun.”

What are the main applications you work with?
Dave: For Jettatura production, we generally use Live. We also use a ton of plug-ins. The UAD-1 suite plug-ins are fantastic for rounding out otherwise digital-sounding sounds and samples. Typically, we record James's guitar with, I think...

James: Most of the time we use the Roger Linn AdrenaLinn II, which is a really great device. From there, we'll use a lot of plug-ins to warm up the sound with kind of a more analog feel. Although we like our projects to sound modern, I think any engineer worth his salt is going to enjoy the kind of warm flavors you get from vintage emulations like the ones that the UAD-1 card supplies. So we tend to go for that to really make the thing sound bigger and warmer.

Dave: Definitely. I'm a big fan of the Pultec EQ, and I like the Fairchild a lot. That's fun.

Why don't you comment a little about your working method? Do you go into a studio together? Do you work separately and then bring the work together somehow? Work at home?
James: Typically, the way we work together depends on what we're trying to achieve at a given time. And although I would say that the project has been almost entirely a product of home studio work, there's no doubt than when we're tracking drums, we've generally gone into a studio with a Pro Tools system. As far as tracking drums is concerned, that's really the best way to do it if you want to use a lot of different mics. The home studio, the project studio, gives us the opportunity to take that material back and do our own guitar, bass, synthesizer tracks, samples, etc., in a home environment.

Dave: Yeah. Typically, we'll start with a few sample ideas, and I'll create a drum loop. Sometimes James comes up with a drum loop of some kind. We get inspired and start tracking a whole bunch of guitar tracks. I play engineer, and just start recording all kinds of odd sounds and bits from him in Live. One thing that's sort of interesting: I think we add a lot of sound design on top-we take stuff we do and re-emulate it somehow, to make it weird and dark and crazy. Like us. [Laughter.]

Video Clip: The Plate 140 and Pink Floyd

James: It's worth mentioning, in terms of our working methods, that at the core of it, Dave is a drummer, and I am a guitar player/bass player. So at the core of what we're doing is still good old drummer and guitar player thrashing out stuff. With modern methods and computer engineering, we're working in different ways because that's the medium. That's the medium that helps us do something that feels modern to us. And these are a lot of the kinds of sounds we're trying to get. But at the core of it is a drummer and guitar player working together as a band would. Trying to come up with riffs, trying to come up with something. But on top of that, we end up working a lot with Reason, with Live, and taking advantage of the various techniques and tricks that those programs offer to do something that's different, and that feels like modern music to us. Which is mostly what we listen to.

“If you want a good plate reverb sound, the Plate 140 is definitely the best thing I’ve heard.”

Dave: I think it's worth saying that how we really solidified working in Live was that we were trying to figure out a way to play live with just two of us. And we were saying, how do we play live with two people? And I had this contraption called a DrumKat, which is a drum MIDI trigger, and we figured out that we could trigger multiple loops of James, like basses, backup vocals-

James: Synthesizers-

Dave: Synthesizers, percussion parts that I would make, you name it. And we would play, and I would have an acoustic drum set, and then I would trigger scene changes in Live. What then happened was we started writing a lot of music on the fly-new music. We started rehearsing old stuff to get ready to play, and all of sudden we started going, hey, what was that? And we'd record in this weird rehearsal space where we were, and James would go out in the hallway, and there was a weird reverb that we liked. And all of a sudden we had a whole new batch of tunes born. So that was sort of inspiring, and an interesting way of just-you're tracking loops all the time, and you're putting together things, and sort of building this arrangement on the fly. That was a really exciting way to work, and sort of modern and different to us, growing up as traditional players. I was more of a jazz and a rock guy. Really not into a lot of electronics, until I found samplers later on. And James played jazz. You can talk about all the stuff you've done, but we're sort of more traditional musicians who kind of learned that, "Oh, we can engineer and geek out like the rest of the world."

James: Yeah. And we found also we can be a two-person band. People will say, how can you be a drummer-and-guitar-player band without being the White Stripes? Although we love that band, it has very little to do with what we're trying to do live. You might even say sometimes maybe we're overreaching, if anything. When we go out to play live, there's a lot of stuff that's coming from this sample scene that could be anywhere from six to ten samples layered on top of each other. So there's almost always a bass line that we recorded, a series of bass lines that I played that we have Dave triggering.

Dave: We'll run that to a bass amp, even. We'll actually run the bass track to a bass amp, so it's like a bass player on stage. It's like sitting-as a drummer, it feels really good. I'll have this bass amp here playing a bass loop, but then the percussion's going out through a stereo pair out to the mains.

James: Would different things happen if we had a real bass player there? Sure. But then again, different things happen because we don't have a real bass player.

Dave: Like consistency. [Laughter.]

James: We have a working system, and we have variables that take place on account of the fact that we're using these tools as our medium.

Why do you use Live instead of Pro Tools or Logic or one of the other DAWs?
Dave: The reason we use Ableton Live for our DAW, our performance, our recording, our multitracking, is because it's intuitive to us. It feels like a musical instrument, and we're able to be spontaneous and musical and move things around and not feel like we're in engineer mode. Sure, we think about that stuff, but I want to get stuff set up and work, and make music, and concentrate on recording parts and performances. And while I'm playing drums, or while I'm engineering, or while he's engineering and playing guitar, we find the work flow really appealing, and we're able to create stuff.

James Rotondi

James: For me, there's no program that allows you to work by improvising and then exploiting your improvisations the way that Ableton does. Because we're coming from this musician background-traditional musician, jazz, jazz-rock musician background-and yet we want to use motifs and figures, we don't want to just sit there and blow all day. Ableton, for my money, is the perfect way to embrace that side of your musicianship, and at the same time put yourself into a place where you have the flexibility to create what is essentially electronic music. Ableton seems to be made precisely for our kind of production.

Let's talk about the UAD-1.
James: If I had to point to a couple of my favorite UAD plug-ins, definitely the Plate 140 reverb would have to be one of them. It's based, of course, on the famous EMT-140 that was the only reverb used on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." It's hard to believe now, listening to that record, that all those ambiences, which are so natural sounding, were pretty much all created using the EMT-140. Although there were certainly natural room sounds on that record, the sense of space you get on that record is massively due to the EMT. So when UA put out the Plate 140, I was immediately psyched to check it out. It is an incredibly good-sounding reverb. Generally speaking, what I'll do is I'll use it as an insert effect, or I'll use it in a return to one of my auxiliary channels, so that I can apply it in different measures to any of the tracks in my piece. And I also find that depending on how much I choose to goose it for each individual track, I get a nice different quality, and I just get a really vivid sense of space. For all the good things that have been said about convolution reverbs, and they are great, I would really argue that if you want a good plate reverb sound, which is a very desirable sound to get, the Plate 140 is definitely the best thing I've heard.

“It’s a very dark, gloomy name, which is probably going to wind us both up in hell. ”

Dave: Nice. You also enjoy the DreamVerb.

Video Clip: Learning the Studio through UAD Plug-Ins

James: Very much. The Plate 140 is this wonderful, raw, '60s style plate reverb-great sound, but the DreamVerb is sort of this state-of-the-art, take-it-as-far-as-you-can-go sort of approach, in which you not only have control over the size of the acoustic space, or the regeneration and feedback of that reverb in the reverb time, but you actually go in where you have not only the shape of the space that you have control of, but you have control over the materials that you use, and you can mix those materials. Say you want a little bit of marble, a little bit of wood, and a little bit of open blue sky. You have all these kinds of options. To be able to craft a reverb with this many sort of organic parameters, not only is that interesting and useful, but it's just plain fun. And it has a great, great sound. You can easily kill hours tailoring your reverbs with this device.When would you choose the DreamVerb over the Plate 140?
James: I often use the Plate 140 on drums, because it gives drums that very believable sound. Some reverbs on drums sound studio-ized. Somehow the Plate 140 always sounds really genuine to me. It always sounds-

Dave: A little older. More mature.

James: A little older, yeah. I confess. It's something of a vintage sound, but that's a sound I particularly like.

Dave: We're dancing around the word retro, but we must say it.

James: Yeah. [Laughter.] I'll use it on drums, I'll use it on vocals. The DreamVerb is someplace I like to go to on guitars if I want to have special effects, if I have creepy backward samples. If I want to create some really haunting sounds, it's great for synthesizers.

Dave: Vocals.

James: Yeah. It's also great when you just want to try something really different. When you want to stretch your own imagination in regards to what's possible with reverb. Reverb is an interesting subject. What can you do with it? The materials, all these things count. So if you're interested in expanding your concept of what reverb is, DreamVerb allows you to sort of go as far as you can take it with numerous variables.

And Dave, what are some of your favorite UAD processors?
Dave: Like James, I enjoy the reverbs. We talked about when we apply stuff, too, and I think that's important. For us, we always track dry, and then apply effects after the fact. Just more control that way. You can change your mind countless times, and delay the release of your record for years. [Laughter.] So one of my favorite UAD plug-ins is the 1176 limiter, and it functions nicely as a compressor, as well. It just squashes things nice. I like that there's a minimal amount of controls. It sort of does what it needs to do a bit invisibly, and it of course is emulating the rackmount hardware version. I like that you can hold down the Shift key here and select all of the ratios at once, and really squash the crap out of drums and vocals and stuff. The Fairchild is also incredible, and the hardware is totally impossible to own, because I think there aren't that many of them, and they're like $7,000 or something. So that's kind of fun; you can like pretend that you have this boutique piece, and it sounds really nice and warm and round. Our mastering engineer Michael Fossenkemper runs a lot of things through a Pultec, just to warm up the general recording, and I was thinking about this and, oh, look, they're in the UAD bundle there. So I've started to use that a lot on drums, and different processes.

James: I use the Pultec EQ whenever I want drums to punch a little bit more, but I don't want them to be over-punchy. I don't want one of those sounds where the kick just glares at you and the snare is just totally in your face. I still want an organic, acoustic-style drum sound, but I want it to cut through the mix a little bit better, I want to feel it just a little bit more, I find that the Pultec EQ and compressors in the UAD-1 card really help me get that. They add just that nice, subtle shade of punch to the bottom where it doesn't click, it doesn't sound too flammy. It just kind of helps bring things out in the mix. I find that once I've used some of the UAD-1 compressor/limiter type of effects in my mix, when I'm ready to go to mastering, I'm in a much better position. I don't have sweat it so hard in the mastering. I'm not trying to pull out drum sounds or bass sounds in the mastering stage. They're already there. I just need to maybe give them a little bit of a shave here or there.

One thing I found really rewarding about the UAD-1 card, and I think which will be especially rewarding for the people-younger people who are just getting into studio recording... While you could argue whether or not emulating vintage gear is even something to be aspiring to in the first place. Why emulate vintage gear? Why not just have new interfaces that don't even give a nod to that vintage stuff? I would disagree, because I think, especially for younger users, the UAD-1 card is like a training class in how to use studio outboard gear. Where else can you have access to these kind of interfaces, and this kind of quality sound, and begin to understand how all these different outboard effects work together? I can't think of a better way to learn this stuff. When I was twenty years old, we didn't have an opportunity like this, to have this kind of studio at our disposal, with this kind of outboard gear. It would have been unheard of then. But there's so much to learn about compression, limiting, mastering, etc., and I think this gives you a really great opportunity to do that.

Dave: Definitely. I've learned a lot through engineering our music, and the different plug-ins have taught me a lot. Using the same tools that were used on all these records I was inspired by is a great thing. You can quickly start to tailor a drum sound with a round EQ or compressor that sounds to me like a Miles Davis recording or something that I was inspired by and some of the music that James and I found common ground on to become a project.

One more thing-where does the name Jettatura come from?
James: Well, like most bands, we were trying to come up with a name that worked for us, and I think we had a few working names that we didn't stick with. And I had been spending a lot of time in Italy, soaking up Italian culture, and I came across the word jettatura, which, seeing as we like things very dark, seemed suitably dark, because it is a name taken from Italian witchcraft, which is called stregaria in Italy. But the jettatura-a lot of people have heard of the malocchio, the evil eye, as they say in Italy. Well, the jettatura is the casting of the evil eye. So it's a very dark, gloomy name, which is probably going to wind us both up in hell. But in the meantime, we thought it was a catchy name for the band that sounded like it could be an Italian sports car or something. Which is pretty much the way we think of the band.

Video Clip: Exploring Reverb

Dave: Definitely.

James: Pretty much like a Maseratii or a Lamborghini, or something.

Dave: Absolutely. Yeah. Mauled-out Lamborghinis.

James: We think of the band basically as very fast and expensive.

Dave: Excellent point!

James: Well, that's what I mean. It's only expensive for us.

Listen to Jettatura at myspace.com/jettaturatheband.