‘When I first heard about the Clasp, I was intrigued but I’ll admit I was leery,’ says US songwriter/musician Brendan Benson. But a demo and field trial saw him move his solo album production into Clasp’s hybrid world of tape recording in a digital studio.
‘Chris Estes [Endless Analog President/Founder and Clasp inventor] showed my engineer Joe Costa and me how it worked and let us hang onto it for a few days,’ he confirms. ‘I must say, I was very impressed. It does exactly what it is supposed to, and its stability is rock-solid – it just doesn’t screw up. Joe had a crash-course in Clasp, and he was just as impressed as I was.
‘We ended up buying the unit and have been using it ever since. And Clasp is just so cool – there’s no latency. It’s just genius. I’m surprised no one thought of this sooner.’
Costa, who has also worked with Ben Folds and The Greenhornes, welcomed Clasp into his workflow for the Benson project, integrating analogue tape machines into the digital audio production workflow. ‘Clasp is a very innovative piece of hardware and software,’ he says. ‘Since you are recording to analogue and capturing it immediately, there’s no concern with high-end loss, from the tape passing over the heads time and time again during overdubs. You get the analogue tape benefits, but you still have all the computer benefits too.
‘Everything lined up perfectly like it was supposed to. Having no latency was impressive. Using this system is like instant gratification – we would be recording an overdub using the computer, and when we played it back, there was the analogue sound we were enjoying during tracking. Chris Estes really created something revolutionary here.’
‘The sound using Clasp and analogue tape is definitely noticeably better, compared to strictly-digital,’ Benson adds. ‘I’m always going for that warmer analogue sound. I understand why the digital tools are important, but there are so many analogue sounds that are musical and pleasing in a way that digital is not. Drums and cymbals are a great example – when you hit a cymbal, it kind of flaps around and it sort of sprays the sound, which is hard to pick up digitally. But on tape there’s this glue and natural compression that makes all the difference in the world.’
In terms of signal flow, Costa and Benson have the distinction of being the first people to use Clasp with a quarter-inch mono head stack machine. ‘We actually used three different tape machines so far,’ Costa says. ‘The initial sessions, before we had Clasp set up, were done with an MCI JH24 2-inch 24-track tape machine. I transferred those tracks into Pro Tools, and then, when we were setting up Clasp with Chris Estes for more tracking and overdubs, we had an MCI JH110 quarter-inch mono tape machine, along with Brendan’s MCI JH110 1-inch 8-track machine. Chris set up Clasp for both, and then we just kept going back and forth. Depending on what we were doing for an overdub, that would determine our tape machine. We ended up using the mono quarter-inch for anything that needed some saturation (guitars, analogue synths). You could push and push the level going to it, and it sounded better and better. However, most of the overdubs went to Brendan’s 1-inch 8 track. It’s an extremely smooth-sounding machine. It was definitely worth having both machines set up, because they each offered a unique character. And Clasp also gives you the option of running different tape speeds within the same session, but we stayed at 15ips. It is great to have that flexibility and an additional palette of colours to choose from.’
The album is set for release in late 2011 or early 2012.
More: www.endlessanalog.com
More: www.brendanbenson.com
