SeagateCreative Interviews The Preatures at SXSW

During this past SXSW, we had a chance to corner Jack Moffitt from The Preatures to talk about gear, the creative flow and what makes a good partner.

SeagateCreative: When you look for a collaborator to help on a project what kind of person do you look for, and how do you hope they help in the creative process?

Preatures: Working with anyone is hit and miss, but if you have simpatico it’s amazing. Knowing how to be a partner – when to give and when to give more, it takes a certain kind of sensitivity. In partnerships there’s always someone leading and someone supporting, and a good partnership knows how to exchange and confirm. I think knowing how to keep things light is a great skill in any partner, reading everything and moving with it, enabling and shaking down the ideas.

SeagateCreative: Which piece of gear is your favorite for sparking creativity?

Preatures: I love and despise gear in equal measure. People lean on gear for ideas that have no direction, but then some ideas become invincible because of a piece of gear that takes it further.

Personally I love mixing consoles, I love the SSL E-Series desks, and I’ve always felt free of barriers on them. They can be pigs… they’re all different, they get distorted and cranky and inconsistent. But principally I need an acoustic guitar, have one around all the time (and I wish I did more often). The contact you have with it opens up so many options, it helps me organize my ideas and imagine further into them.

SeagateCreative: How do you use hard drives in your creative work?

Preatures: Every day, everything has a digital storage component. I backup sessions to them, I transport them, I archive work onto them. They’re like the modern tome.

SeagateCreative: How has your choice of gear evolved since you first started in music?

Preatures: I go for things that have really simplistic functions, or are dedicated to something specific, like guitars. But you start to hear new sounds, realize you need to branch out, and find new tools to help achieve that.

I’ve always preferred Gibson guitars for their deft but weighty projection, but lately I’ve tried to pair mine with older and weirder guitars by Eko and Magnatone, old American department store catalogue guitars. Same with audio gear, I used to just use whatever was around with certain arrogance… ‘this will do’ kind of thing, but now I’m starting to revere certain kinds of amplifiers or microphones and desks for their character and ubiquities.

SeagateCreative: What’s your process in the studio? Walk us through the steps you took to record a favorite track.

Preatures: Studio work is a vacuum and saps energy from you, even if you don’t realize. There are lots of days when I get home after 16/17/18 hours and I’m wired, and other days where I leave and nothing happened.

You have to go in with a balance of vengeance to get something done, and open-mindedness because things can change tack in a second and you have a new and amazing opportunity to act on something great.

With Is This How You Feel? I went in knowing that the groove was amazing, and the ideas were there but not having a particular expectation other than to catch that vitality.

And then Izzi is latching on to an idea, changing the arrangement – admittedly I resisted the change because I felt a certain way about it, we butted heads and ground each other down and ended up with something really exciting… the spirit of all of that is inside the song. We did lots of things people are afraid of, like amps and drums right next to each other, vocals in the PA or singing to the track coming out of the studio monitors – I like that ‘wrongness’, it frees up your inhibitions. Anything that doesn’t negatively constrain a person or an idea, I’ll favor that approach.

Want more? Check out SeagateCreative for behind-the-scenes videos and tips from intriguing artists or watch our SeagateCreative playlist on YouTube and our Creative Professionals page.

Be sure to follow Preatures on these social channels:
Official Site
Facebook
Twitter

2014-04-14T10:20:05+00:00

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