Dec 1990-Mar 1991 – Smart Studios

## Dec 1990-Mar 1991 - Smart Studios, Madison, WI

Produced by Butch Vig and Billy Corgan

* Blue
* Bury Me
* Crush
* Daydream
* I Am One
* I'm Going Crazy
* Jesus Loves His Babies
* Pulseczar
* Rhinoceros
* Siva
* Slunk
* Snail
* Suffer
* Tristessa
* Why Am I So Tired
* Window Paine
* **Chump (Slunk with Jimmy vocals)**
* *La Dolly Vita*
* *Razor*

Proper recording sessions for Gish. A number of songs were recorded aside from the ten album tracks and the eleventh hidden track (which was recorded live in the monitor room): "Slunk", "Blue" and "Jesus Loves His Babies" were outtakes intended for b-sides in 1991, although the later never appeared on a release; "Chump" is an alternate mix of "Slunk" which featured Jimmy on vocals, found as filler on various bootleg tapes; "Pulseczar" dates from these sessions, meant as a demo but appearing on Earphoria; likewise on Earphoria, "Why Am I So Tired" is noted as a live in-studio demo, thus it's probable that James and D'Arcy's parts are in tact (James is probably the guitar panned left); a new version of "La Dolly Vita" was attempted but abandoned; "Razor" was recorded, but remains unreleased.

Recording Gish was done in spurts. "We would drive up to Madison for four days at a time — or six days at a time. We had no money, so Jimmy and I were staying with some really nice college girls who let us stay in their house for free. That gave us a little more money for the record. The studio was $500 a day, and that was with Butch included. If my memory serves me correctly, it took us 41 days to record the album and seventeen days to mix."

“Billy was very ambitious,” Vig remembers. “He wanted to make
everything sound amazing and see how far he could take it; really spend
time on the production and the performances. For me that was a godsend
because I was used to doing records for all the indie labels and we only
 had budgets for three or four days.”

The band loaded into the
studio with a modest amount of gear, most of which can be seen in their
first few videos. On stage, the band’s signature sound was rooted in
Corgan and Iha’s mid-’70s Strat/’87 Les Paul combination, but the
recording centered around Corgan’s rig: An early ’80s Marshall JCM 800
2203, known as the “Soul Head,” run through Marshall 1960A cabinets, all
 purchased off “some stoner guy” in Chicago for $800. The KT88 tubes in
the JCM produce a round, creamy tone that, when used in conjunction with
 an ADA MP-1 tube preamp, produced the Gish tone. Using the low input
side of the JCM, Corgan would turn the master volume all the way up, and
 then use the preamp’s volume to make micro adjustments. A host of
effects, from the Fender Blender to the Phase 100, were folded in for
extra fuzz and sweep comb filtering. The bass parts were recorded with
Wretzky’s black Fender P-Bass—dubbed the “Rat Bass” for the scattering
of white rat stickers all over the face—and played through a Trace
Elliot AH300SM.

“Billy was ‘green’ only in the sense that he
didn’t necessarily have handson experience, but he knew what he wanted,”
 Vig continues. “He’s a big fan of Queen and ELO, and those records had
big produced sounds, and as much as he didn’t know maybe from an
engineering standpoint how to do it, I think sonically what he heard in
his head, he understood.”

The band would collectively hash out the
 arrangements through exhaustive rehearsals, but when it came time to
record, Corgan laid down the majority of the parts. This oft-talked
about procedure became a standard practice.

“As good as D’arcy and
 James are, it was just going to sound better if Billy played it,” says
Vig. “I think it probably caused some friction, but it was something
they dealt with and accepted in the band.”

The drums were the one
component of the Smashing Pumpkins that Corgan could not reproduce. A
jazz drummer by trade, Jimmy Chamberlin paired swing and subtlety with a
 thunderous intensity reminiscent of legends like Keith Moon and John
Bonham. Chamberlin has been a Yamaha endorsee since 1993, but back then
his setup was a Pearl DLX Series kit with a 16x22-inch kick and a Yamaha
 steel snare. As Chamberlin remembers, the kit was miked with Sennheiser
 421s on the toms, Shure SM57s on the snare, an AKG D112/Electro-Voice
RE20 combo on the kick, and AKG C414s as overheads.

At the time,
Vig didn’t have a tremendous amount of money to make significant
cosmetic changes to Smart, but the shape of the studio’s live room—all
odd angles and no parallel walls—made for an incredible sound, inspiring
 the live feel of the band’s studio performance. Gish was recorded onto a
 two-inch, 24-track Otari MX80, but few things were recorded through the
 studio’s newly acquired 56-input customized Harrison console (Vig
relied largely on outboard Summit and API preamps) though he says that
Harrison’s versatile EQ section and exceptional high- and low-pass
filters made it easier to quickly carve out pockets in the mix for
Corgan’s unique tone. When all was said and done, Gish cost around
$20,000 to produce, and took just over 30 days to record.

“For me
that was the equivalent of making a Steely Dan record,” laughs Vig who,
two months after wrapping production on Gish, traveled to Los Angeles to
 record Nirvana’s Nevermind. “Having that luxury to spend hours on a
guitar tone or tuning the drums or working on harmonies and textural
things . . . I was over the moon to think I had found a comradein- arms
who wanted to push me, and who really wanted me to push him.”

**Billy Corgan:** Butch Vig loves vocals, so when I was
sitting in Smart Studios, circa 1990, and I was cranking the guitar, he
was looking at me like, "Yeah, every guitar player wants to crank the
guitar." And I'm saying, "No, you don't understand. The guitars need to
sit here for a reason." I wasn't turning up the guitars ‘cause I'm a
guitar player, I was telling him, "This is the best way." Then I, of
course, put what we call "Pumkinizer" around my vocals and then buried
my vocal, like Exile on Main Street. He was looking at me like, "Wait a
second." He pulled the faders down and said, "This is where the guitars
should be, and this is where the vocals should be." I said, "That sounds
 boring." I put the faders back up, and I pulled the voice back up.
"That's the sound. That's the sound." So I was saying that. And he was
looking at me going, "Wait, you're the songwriter. You're the singer.
You're the guitar player. Who am I talking to?" I was trying to say to
him, "This is the producer talking." It's hard to have credibility in
that moment, because they ultimately assume that you're like every other
 musician who wants to hear their part, their way.

**Butch Vig:** We'd go in the studio for 14 or 15 hours a
day and just go to battle as co-producers. It wasn't like we were yelling at each other, but we were constantly trying to up the ante. I'd

say, "Well, you can probably do that better." Or he'd say, "I don't think that sounds right. You can get a better sound on this." So we were just constantly pushing each other. I loved that. I respected that.

**Jimmy Chamberlin:** "I Am One" was really begat out of
 a drum machine beat that Billy had come up with that was really almost impossible to play on a drum kit. It's just one of those things where somebody writes something on a drum machine with absolutely no idea of
hand-and-foot proximity, and then says, "Hey, what do you think about
this?" "Oh, it sounds great" "Well, can you play it?" "Well, I can come
back in a week and play it, but in order to play it faithfully I've
gotta do a single paradiddle on my floor tom, and then bring my left
hand..." There's a pedagogical component to learning that. The genesis
of moving my big [floor] tom over to the left was just trying to
assimilate that beat.

**Billy Corgan:** If you go back and listen to "I Am
One," and the drum balance on the toms, those are not geeked up; those
are him hitting the drums. That's the concussiveness of the way he's
playing coming through the room mics. Oftentimes when you hear drummers
play, and then you see them live, they don't have the same power because
 they're aided by the studio balance. That is actually true to Jimmy's
balance; what you hear is how Jimmy sounded in the room.

Return to Gish

1. ↑ Billy Corgan, Gish Remaster liner notes, November 2011
2. ↑ Richard Thomas, "Signal To Noise: The Sonic Diary Of The Smashing Pumpkins", Electronic Musician, October 1st, 2008
3. ↑ Jake Brown, "Smashing Pumpkins: A Studio History", Tape-Op, Sept/Oct 2016