WATCH: Dave Grohl gives a tour of his home studio

Having recently finished work on the latest Foo Fighters’ album, at the moment tentatively titled Back & Forth, Dave Grohl recently gave NME a tour of the home studio in which he recorded the album. The studio which is made up of nothing more than his garage as a tracking room and a whole bunch of analogue gear, marks Grohl and the band’s choice to take a giant leap backward in terms of technology without a single computer being used in the entire recording and mixing process. The result, according to Dave and the few sneak peaks we’ve gotten, is the biggest sounding Foo Fighter’s record yet. Watch below, more after the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INFIOJQ8lmk

Working on the album with Butch Vig, the legendary producer of Nirvana‘s Nevermind, this album marking the first time Grohl has worked with Vig since, the album seems to be somewhat of a reaction against the more polished sound the band had on their previous album In Your Honor. Funnily enough the seeds of the idea seem to stem from the demos of that very album, which Dave recorded in his garage on a ‘super shitty’ drum kit, adding ‘“it was like a fucking Toys R Us drumset, but in this room it sounded like fucking Led Zeppelin.”

Not only recording without digital equipment, after taking the sessions into another studio to mix, Grohl decided that ‘it didn’t sound like it was in my garage any more’ and so took it back home and edited the whole thing manually, with each mix being performed manually on the 24 track mixing desk before being recorded over the half-inch tape machine.

Steve Albini said it back in 1987 on the back cover of Big Black‘s CD Songs About Fucking. ‘The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.’ With The Foo Fighters, one of the biggest bands in the world choosing to forgo all the glitter and pomp of multimillion dollar studios to instead record in a fucking garage, it would seem Albini, as he often is, is fucking right. Just watch this.

Listening to the sneak peaks of the album it would seem that Grohl time playing with Them Crooked Vultures, specifically time spent with Josh Homme has had a big impact on this album, as it’s all sounding a bit Queens Of The Stone Age and TCV, which if you ask me is a good thing compared to their previous work.

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