Mike: “We did a release from our set up at home though, it’s basically Logic Pro X, an Apollo Quad Twin, and the Aston Origin. We have Kontakt and various other plugins to help shape what we’re doing. Now we’re in Nashville, we’ll typically outsource recording to producers and studios and let them handle it, but in order to get it to the studio we have to do some of that magic here, so we have to have the right tools.
It’s been fascinating, the Origin. It’s been really key in getting to the heart of what we need, especially on the song we released last year called ‘My America’. We did that release, and people are always shocked when I tell them we did at home. We put it up against all of other recordings, which were with expensive microphones, and you would never know that we were using a $300, $400 mic. It’s really just amazing what we were able to do at home using just the Origin. If we had not had that, or if we had a different mic, I just don’t think it would have worked.
Obviously the words are important in every style of music – but for that song they needed to cut through, we needed to hear what she was saying, and I feel like the Origin did a fantastic job of getting the message through.”
Our very first day in Nashville a friend of ours introduced us to this guy Justin Ebach, he was SESAC’s songwriter of the year… I gave him a call, he’s also a producer, I asked if we could do a tune. Val had just gotten off the Voice, we thought, ‘let’s do a song together and release it’, as people do when they get off the show. We get there and he uses a Spirit. We recorded our first single, ‘Love me When You’re Lonely’, with it and it came out incredible. I just happened to walk into that guy’s studio, use the Spirit, and fell in love with the Aston brand.”