March-August 1995 – Pumpkinland and Chicago Recording Company

The March-August 1995 recording sessions at Pumpkinland and Chicago Recording Company were massive, proper for the massive Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album. Sessions initially began at the band's rehearsal space Pumpkinland, largely tracking the songs live. Sessions were later moved to Chicago Recording Company for further tracking and overdubs. Many songs were recorded, aside from the 28 album tracks: "Cherry", "God", "Set The Ray To Jerry", "Tonite Reprise", "Tribute to Johnny" and "Ugly" were all released as b-sides; snippets of "Knuckles", "Speed", "Star Song" and "Zoom" all appeared in the "Pastichio Medley". The full-length "In the Arms of Sheep", a rough vocal version of "Muzzle", "One and Two" with a Billy Corgan lead vocal, two takes of "Envelope Woman", two takes of "X.Y.U.", an instrumental "Cupid de Locke", an alternate take of "Where Boys Fear To Tread" and a full-length "The Tracer" leaked as MP3s on the internet in 2010.

Background
"People don’t always articulate their expectations," says Corgan. "I think whenever we would work with producers, they would do their best to try and balance those forces between what somebody would want, what I would want, and what was best for the record."

Before a single note was recorded, Corgan knew he wanted the next release to be a double album. Flood and Alan Moulder, friends since their early days at the prestigious Trident Studios in London, were tapped to co-produce. The band began rehearsing at Pumpkinland, their Chicago recording space, and Corgan began funneling cassette demos to Flood for review. Roughly two-thirds of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was tracked at Pumpkinland on an Otari MTR-90 MKII, while the remaining portion was tracked at the Chicago Recording Company on Studer A820s.

"I love recording at 15 ips NAB, but with Dolby SR, because it just adds a whole different dimension to the sound," says Flood. "Apart from the obvious benefits of Dolby, if you tweak the Dolby unit really, really well, it's a bit like adding an Aphex and a dbx sub-harmonic bass enhancer on every channel. Also, the way that tape changes the sound or modifies the sound, 15 ips is technically not correct, but I find it to be so musical, particularly on the bottom end. This was very much a conscious decision, and very much a part of the album’s sound."

Another conscious decision was to change up the manner in which the group recorded. In the past, the band had only used one room to track, which of course meant only one thing could be going on at a time. Hours spent waiting for one person to finish up their part led to frustration. For Mellon Collie, Flood would generally work with Corgan in the A room on the Otari and an MCI board, while Moulder worked with Wretzky and Iha in the B room on a Pro Tools rig slaved to both TASCAM DA-88 digital recorders and two-inch tape. The combination of analog and digital opened up a world of recording possibilities, and played to the creative strengths of Mellon Collie's adventurous spirit. A track like "Thru the Eyes of Ruby", which contains approximately 70 guitar tracks,. would have been nearly impossible to do with tape alone. Likewise, "Porcelina of the Vast Oceans" contains roughly six sections that were all recorded at different times with different instrument and microphone configurations and then fused together—another beneficial byproduct of editing in Pro Tools.

"Flood felt like the band he would see live wasn’t really captured on record," says Corgan. "So a lot of Mellon Collie was tracked by the band at deafening volumes. I mean deafening. There was so much SPL in the room that it was physically uncomfortable. Your ears, your emotional resistance, would wear down."

Flood also discovered that Corgan was a much better singer pitch-wise when he didn't use headphones, so he switched Corgan up to a Shure SM58 and had him sing in front of open speakers.

"My experience with U2 taught me that a lot of things you’d expect to become problematic with monitors in the room aren’t, and by careful use of screening, by positioning the monitors and what you put in the monitors you can actually get a lot of benefits," says Flood. "For instance, Jimmy used to love having the kick drum and a bit of snare going through his wedges, which were directly behind him. So if you've got a kit that’s lacking a bit of bottom end, you pump the kick and the snare through the wedges and you start to tweak them to get extra weight. We also developed this system whereby we had what was called 'rehearsal mode' and 'tape mode.' In rehearsal mode, everybody was on the floor, the amps were blaring, and you wouldn’t have to worry about spills. We had the speakers inside these big coffin flight cases in the back of the room and miked them close up, then miked them about six feet away. Then we’d close the lid. When you were tracking in tape mode, everybody could flick over at the flick of a footswitch and their amps would be quietly purring away in the corner. When you’d give a little bit back to them in their own respective monitors, automatically the sound of the room cut right back and you’d get the vibe of four people playing on top of each other."

Having thrashed out the basics of the album in a month and a half at their own rehearsal facility in the band's native Chicago, the Pumpkins moved into a proper recording studio. Or rather, two of them. Moulder and Iha in one room, Flood and Corgan in the other, the days were crammed with constant dicking around with guitar sounds.

The main difference between Siamese Dream was very methodically recorded: drums, bass, guitar, vocals, everything was overdubbed. But on this record everything varied from song to song. We did anything from overdub overload to-"Thru the Eyes of Ruby" has something like 25 separate guitar tracks-to actually recording all live at the same time as a band. The time in our practice space was well spent, cos we didn't have to feel self conscious and we didn't have the clock ticking over our heads we just got the band rocking!

Although Iha wrote the music for two of Siamese Dream's most memorable tracks, "Soma" and "Mayonaise" ("I get my George Harrison allocation!"), the record seemed very much the work of one man. Corgan's perfectionism looms above everything, while the lyricist played 90 percent of the guitar solos. This time Corgan and Iha lead guitar split is closer to 50/50, and the whole record has a looser spontaneous ambiance. "I think that the fact that we had two rooms going gave us the scope to say whatever works, works," muses Iha. "It was studied, but it was less perfectionistic. And we were less inclined to revert to a formula-like here's the Big muff pedal and let's triple track it. This time it was, Oh one guitar sounds okay let's go with that. I used the Digitech Whammy pedal a lot on the record, and I used an E-bow a lot too, which is something we haven't used for five years or something. Flood helped a lot. His thing is not going for the perfect take but the take that feels best. There was less technical obsessiveness and more feeling-which was totally refreshing. And the producers kept everyone busy. Flood would ask Jimmy (Chamberlin drums) to come in a little earlier, just so they could work on a bunch of drum loops before the rest of the band arrived. I'd go and check out D'arcy recording her bass and them later on I would just fuck around with the guitar. It was just 'funner', and we ended up learning a lot of cockney slang and discovering Reeves and Mortimer."

Equipment
Guitar and amplification choices were the key differences between Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie. For the bass, Wretzky switched up from the P-Bass to a '60s-era Fender Jazz Bass reissue with Ampeg and Mesa Boogie amps. For Corgan, what sounded great about the Siamese fuzz pedal setup in the studio made it sound horrible live. He still had his Marshall 1960A cabinets, but Corgan shifted to a Mesa Boogie Strategy 500 and a Marshall JMP-1 preamp (Corgan also notes that he used an Alesis 3630 to drive extra gain into a Marshall). As the ultimate goal for Mellon Collie was to capture the band’s live, unbridled sound, Corgan largely used this touring rig to record.

For the drums, Chamberlin's core Mellon Collie kit was a Yamaha Maple Custom with a 16x22-inch kick, a 22-inch ride, 18-inch and 19-inch Zildjian A Custom crashes, 22-inch swish knockers, and 10-inch and 15-inch fast crashes. Because of his big band background, he frequently changed out his snares, building his kit around the snare and the ride as opposed to the kick. The familiar drum rolls all throughout "Tonight, Tonight" can be attributed to Jimmy’s classic 5 1/2x14-inch Ludwig Supra-Phonic.

"From there I go to microphones as far as how I want the drums to sit dimensionally in the track," Chamberlin informs. "If I want the drums up front and aggressive, I’ll use a lot of AKG C 414s so they sit in front of things dimensionally. If I want the drums to sit in a rhythm section configuration, I’ll lean back towards the 414s and maybe some Shure SM98s. Then maybe go for Shure 12As on the bigger drums."