Mary Eliza - Spider

Mary Eliza’s record, Spider was entirely recorded, mixed, and mastered here at Trace Horse. This blog post is a brief summary of how we made it.

Pre-Production: After Mary and I had in-depth conversations about some of the sonic landscapes we wanted on her album, she sent me voice memos of all of the songs she wanted to record. I set aside time to listen to them all in the control room with minimal distractions. Listening to her and her guitar allowed me to really tap into the emotional centers of each song. I took notes for every song with whatever ideas I had for instrumentation, layering, and tempo.

Production & Recording: To help me bring Mary’s songs to life, I tapped my good friend and very talented multi-instrumentalist, Jake Finch. Jake, Mary, and I would all record the basic backing track at the same time. Mary would be playing her acoustic and singing a scratch vocal, Jake would be on drums, and I would either be on bass or piano. Once the three of us landed on the parts we wanted to play, we’d start chasing takes until we hit “the one.” After that, we would move onto guitars, synths, organs, shakers, or whatever overdubs we were thinking for that particular song.

Jake didn’t get his e-bow until his last day, and we had so much fun using that texture to fill out space on certain songs. We also made sure to indulge in even more ambitious overdub elements. For example, for “Slow Mover,” Jake, Mary, and I all went outside to record samples of birds chirping behind the studio. I then stacked those recordings into my SP-404, and I create a grainy loop of bird-calls that acts as a grounding texture at different points throughout that song. In “Spider,” I took influence from some of the industrial sound design featured in the original Silent Hill video game. I wanted an eerie, almost metallic sounding loop to be pushed in the background under Mary’s voice and the piano. To achieve this, I created a short drum fill with various samples. I then played that fill from the speaker in my phone while I held my phone up to the pickup of an electric guitar. That guitar was plugged into an amp in the keyboard room, and I used the piano mics as room mics to capture the programming being played from my phone, to the guitar pickup, to the amp. I really like how it turned out! In “Fire,” the really distorted and intense electric guitars during the chorus are actually Mary’s acoustic guitar sent through an amp! Turning her intimate and delicate instrument into a thunderous roar felt quite fitting for that song in particular.

The very last thing we recorded for the album were the final vocals. I wanted Mary to have the full instrumentation for each song, so her voice would act as the final missing piece.

Engineering: The album was tracked through our Neve 8014 with minimal or no EQ on most channels. Drums featured a D12 & FET47 on kick, AT4033a & c451e on snare, e22’s on Toms, and Coles as overheads. The bass was recorded DI through a REDDI, and Mary’s guitar was recorded with a KM84. I always left up a Royer 121 in the tracking room, and the majority of acoustic overdubs were recorded through that mic. Jake and I would often perform parts at the same time. Scratch vocals were recorded through an sE-V7 in the ISO booth, and final vocals were recorded with a Lucas CS-4 in the tracking room. For one song on the record, we actually decided to use the scratch vocal take as the take that would be on the record. See if you can figure out which one it is!

Mixing & Mastering: I automated the album in the box and used a lot of plugins for effects, but I did send out stems to the console for final summing and some gentle EQ moves. The bus of the Neve was then fed into our Burl AD Bomber, and I would capture the mix back in ProTools. Then I would email my mixes to Mary, and she would give me her notes. I would make changes based on her notes, and we repeated this process until we had mixes that made us both feel great. Mastering and final sequencing was done at the very (of course), and we officially finished the album!

Credits:

All songs written and performed by mary eliza

Jake Finch: percussion, guitar, organ, piano, ebow, accordion, bass, background vocals

Ryan Sobb: lead guitar on “Spider”

Preston Cochran: Producer, Engineer, Mixer, Mastering Engineer, guitar, piano, bass, sampling, background vocals

Spider was released January 17th 2025. It is available on streaming services & Bandcamp.