Chris Vrenna of Nine Inch Nails
Originally published in Rhythm Magazine on March 1, 1997
Forget, if you will, the masochistic rantings and misanthropic posturings that have made Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor a rock'n'roll icon. Now it's time for a little levity with the Nails' resident drummer, programmer and all-round studio head Chris Vrenna. Yang to frontman Reznor's yin, Vrenna is decidedly un-neurotic: he's easy going and an avid conversationalist. A self-confessed computer nerd, he's also a fan of comic books and science fiction and he freely admits to collecting toy action-figures during his increasingly rare time off.
Judging from NIN's recorded output alone, one might mistakenly peg Vrenna as a superb drum programmer who may not have what it takes to cut it on stage. But not only does Chris play a full kit in addition to an array of machines in the studio, he's also a seriously white-hot live drummer. Studio dweeb or not, Vrenna is one of the most physical players on the scene today. Chris describes his multi-faceted role in the band as a "Jack-of-all-trades. When we're not playing, I'm either sampling or creating new sounds - not just drum sounds but general sounds, sort of like sound designing. That was one of the main things that I did for The Downward Spiral (NIN's last album release). There was a lot of sequencing because a lot of e stuff that we do isn't live-oriented, so I'll do some of the rhythm programming as well. I'm also becoming a not bad engineer," he laughs. "I engineered The Downward Spiral because it was just me and Trent recording it at his house.
If he was singing, someone had to be running the console and the tape machine. "Now that we have a full studio (unofficially named Hot Snakes) built here in New Orleans, there's even more to be done. Trent bought an old funeral home down here with many separate rooms. This place already had a kitchen in it and multiple bathrooms, and the whole building has been converted to studio and offices for the band.
"Trent bought an SSL console unit - a mixing console - and 48 tracks of tape, which is all in the old chapel in the dead centre of the building. It's the most secluded and quiet room. And the embalming room is now the laundry room." While Chris gets his laundry done at Hot Snakes, he's also working on a variety of acts signed to Nothing, the label which Reznor spawned.
"Whenever a project is taken on, it basically becomes a big group effort here," Chris explains. "Our latest big thing is Marilyn Manson. Trent produced their record here, so I helped them do some engineering and did some drum programming for them - they changed their sound a little bit for their new record. I've actually played drum overdubs on the record, too. Trent and I also did the sound for a video game called Quake, from the guys who put out Doom, Doom II and Heretic. They've done a new, realistic 3-D game and we did all the sound effects for it: doors closing, screams, gun shots, monsters growling... We also did some music beds for the title theme and some atmospheric stuff."
Chris admits that he never knows what unusual soundscapes he will be asked to create for Trent. "I'm always being asked to come up with weird things," he says. "We were doing our own 'March of the Pigs' remix last year, and Trent asked me, 'Do you have any pig grunt samples? I want an orchestra of pigs'. I found some samples and built a whole bank of pigs. That was a weird one; I went out and rented Charlotte's Web and took out farm films from the library, stuff like that." Sampling is certainly an essential element of the Nine Inch Nails sound. "Our band's not like Nirvana, where it was always bass, drums, guitar and where it's always about a song," explains Chris. "Our band is based around sound, and our arrangements are about totally unique sounds. We try not to ever repeat ourselves, which is a challenge. We have this one bank of drums that we've used since Broken and it's already become identifiable. So it's always a challenge to keep ahead of that and just keep making new stuff. We're not about repeating ourselves."
NIN imitators are coming out of the woodwork here in the US, so the originators have to remain one step ahead of the clones. "There are a lot of bands ripping us off," admits Vrenna, "but none of them come close. The grunge thing has started to die down now and the electronic/industrial thing is starting to become more accepted. We would consider the copy bands flattering, but so far no one has done anything that has kicked ass. It's becoming almost formulaic." Since NIN are renowned studio moles, I asked Chris if he would de-mystify the day-to-day recording scenario with respect to his drums. "As far as drums go, I keep my good kit - my studio kit - set up in the live room, fully miked and ready to go at a moment's notice, because we don't always know when we're going to do live stuff. We don't have days where we decide to track drums, but when something isn't working we say, 'Now, let's try this approach', and the kit is just ready to rock. Then we'll just jam and see how it goes. We always use a click track because everything has a sequence. I hate it when drummers can't play to a click - there has to ba a tempo somewhere, it can'e be all free-form. But I meet people all the time who say, 'Ooh, I can't play to a click track.' I'm like, 'Don't be a pussy.' "
Chris also plays to a click when touring. "Because of the backing sequence stuff we play to," he explains. "Even though for most of the songs I count the band in and there might be nothing going on sequence-wise until the chorus kicks in, if I'm not totally in sync when that chorus arrives it's going to be horrible," he laughs. "So I stay locked in to everything." How did Chris become proficient with the electronic side of music?
"Personally, I've always been a technology-head and I've always been into computers," he responds. "When I was a little kid, the minute I saw the old Simmons drums - the ones that were shaped like stop signs - in a magazine, I said, 'Dad, I've got to have a set'. I didn't know what they were but they looked cool. So I saved up all my money by working one summer and I bought a set. Ever since that first kit, I've just got more into the technology stuff. It may seem weird or non-purist, but we're not a purist kind of band anyway. In fact, we're anything but. "With the electronic thing, you can either embrace it and incorporate it into your world, or be destroyed by it," Chris admonishes. "If you don't use electronics, you don't know what you're missing. To be able to have an acoustic kit live as well as pads scattered throughout with triggered sounds that a regular drum isn't able to make, that's a lot more powerful." However, Vrenna does make a concession when it comes to electronic drums: "I've never heard really good tom-tom samples. Tom-toms should always be live. Even if we use programming for everything on a track, we'll always go back and overdub all the toms live.
"Every song is different, but they always start with the sequenced stuff," he continues. "Even if we are going to do it live as opposed to sequencing, we will always sequence it first, just the skeleton of the rhythm. When Trent is writing the melodies, he always has a feel for what rhythms will go underneath. Once we get the skeleton track up on the computer, it can go in any one of 7,000 different directions. We could decide to play it all live or do none of it live. Sometimes we get seriously into the programming or it becomes a hybrid of both programming and live. We sometimes sample for a day or so to find sounds, until we figure it all out."
In a recent issue of Spin magazine, there was an intriguing quote from Trent about recording The Downward Spiral where he said that he and Vrenna sampled drums in stereo with stereo mics, resulting in them sounding like real drums when played on a keyboard. Chris clarifies: "Most people, when they want to sample their drums, put close miking on them - like putting the mic right over the drum head to get a nice clean tom-tom or snare drum sample. That's how a lot of people like to make drum samples. But we don't do that kind of meticulous miking; we'll set the drums up in aroom with two mics on either side. Then we sample the drums, it's in true stereo with stereo mics, so they're not all perfectly centred and certain sounds will be louder on the left than the right. We leave them that way and we sample them like that. You can hear when you hit the high tom-tom, it makes the snares buzz and all the drums interact with each other, and the cymbals ring when you play a full kit. When people sample, they usually sample an individual drum. But we leave all of that interaction oise in there. It's not technically great miking technique, but it sounds as if you're sitting in a room listening to a real drumset. It's uncanny how much more real it sounds." Does he carry a library of samples out on the road?
"No. When we go out on the road, the songs are already well-rehearsed and the arrangements are done. So when we're in that rehearsal mode, I'll come up with my bank. Each song has a unique set of sounds. Like the kick and snare in 'Closer' which are totally unique to that song; I have to have those sounds for that song, otherwise it won't sound remotely like it should. When we play live, we do change things, but we try to keep it fairly true to the original. So I put each song's sound together in rehearsal, and when we leave, I just take the finished master drum sound bank with me." "The sound banks are conveniently sored on floppy disks. "We each carry a set - the office gets one, the road manager gets one, and the tour manager, and my tech gets about four. I always carry backup copies because on tour things get lost or broken very, very easily. Flying your gear is always a nightmare, just because gear doesn't like to be that high up or that cold. Extreme temperatures tend to mess with stuff."
Chris is originally from Erie, Pennsylvania. After high school, he relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, the city where NIN ultimately got a record deal. Vrenna admits that during this period he was once in a band who actually named themselves Exotic Birds. Does he cringe at the memory?
"It's especially embarrassing," he racalls with a laugh, "because Trent just found these old pictures of us from the '80s, and I've got this super-poofy, Duran Duran meets Flock of Seagulls hair thing going on - it's so funny. At the time, it was an all-electronic band and I was playing a whole pad kit, triggering drum machines, playing with sequencers and stuff like that. It was just what it was, you know? Id didn't really go anywhere. But it was a way for me to learn more about electronics and get deeper into playing with clicks and triggering sounds. It wasn't like it is today, where you just have a drum MIDI interface and hook it into your favourite sampler and hit any sound in the world. Back then, sampling was just starting and drum machines had one input on them to trigger one thing. It was very archaic and it was challenging to figure out how to do it all back then." Chris is clearly a dichotomy: he's the ultimate tech-head, yet he's also an extremely adept live drummer. "That's like a big joke in the band," he says. "I hear the bad drummer jokes all the time, like, Why do drummers keep drumsticks on their dashboard? So they can park in a handicapped space. How do you know when the drum riser is level? When the drool runs out of both sides of his mouth. It's kind of like a joke around here because they say that (in his best Yogi Bear impersonation) I'm smarter than the average bear."
Vrenna has been playing live even longer than he's been playing with computers. "I took my first drum lesson when I was six," he recalls, "but I was playing bars when I was fifteen. My father would drive me and my drums in the station wagon, and the owners of the bar would only let me in to play. He'd sit there and have a beer while I'd play and get harassed by all the punks. I was playing in a punk band who wrote all their own songs. In fact, I've never played in a covers band. We sucked, but we were every band's opening act who came through town. I've always played alternative stuff and it's always been original music. Somehow the playing thing and the geekdom stuff grew together." Chris and Trent's friendship began in their Pennsylvania high school. Then they were roommates in Cleveland. After the band got signed, they worked together fairly steadily until NIN's Lollapalooza stint. Trent and Chris fell out for a while, with Jeff Ward hired as a stand-in drummer. Ward later killed himself because of his ill-fated attempts to kick heroin. "We basically hit a point where we weren't getting along on a personal level. It was time to get away," Chris comments on their hiatus. "I went back to college for a semester during that time," he continues. "Then I moved to Chicago and did a short stint with a band called Die Warzau which no longer exists. They had opened for us and were doing a new record. At the time, I was looking for a new city to move to and Chicago sounded as good as anywhere, so I went. I still love Chicago. Anyway, I did a record with Warzau and a tour with them. That was the most electronic tour that I've ever done. There was no tape machine or sequencer, it was all triggered by me from pads. It was insane. You don't have nearly enough space for me to get into this, but it was the craziest, coolest thing that I've ever done, technologically speaking. "After that was over, I did a tour with KMFDM, and I also worked on Broken a little bit during that time, because Trent was recording it just outside of Chicago. so I went up there and we started to become friends again at that time. In '92, I moved to California with Trent. When we finished The Downward Spiral, we went on tour for a year. That year encompassed about three rounds in America and the one European tour. We also did Woodstock within that time." Although Woodstock II was justly slammed for its crass commercialism, Nine Inch Nails deftly emerged as the hottest draw of the festival.
"Given all the hype going into it," muses Chris, "when I was actually there, I saw all the masses of people who actually showed up, and it ended up being kind of special and cool. But it was the scariest thing ever playing to all those people. Plus it was being broadcast live to many millions of people watching at home. I'm not sure why, but everyone seemed to pick us as the highlight of the whole thing. When you're playing between Crosby, Stills & Nash and Metallica, you think that maybe everyone's going to take a piss while you're on stage. But it wasn;t that way at all. It really helped boost the band up a couple more levels."
NIN will be putting out a new album sometime in 1997. The latest project is the soundtrack for the new David Lynch film Lost Highway. Due to the success of Trent's label Nothing, there seems to be no end in sight to all the work Chris has to do. That means 'home' for the forseeable future is the twelve-step recoverer's nightmare, New Orleans. "It's a weird town," Chris observes of his semi-permanent residence. "Trent really loves it here. There are 24-hour bars, everything is geared around partying and going out. It's cool and definitely unlike anywhere else. But I get up in the morning, throw my clothes on, drive here to the studio, stay until the middle of the night and then go home and get ready to do it again the next day. That's pretty much all I do these days."
If any of you plan to read or have already read the fascinating Chris Vrenna article in this issue, there has been a slight change in Vrenna's career path since he was interviewed. Soon after the piece was filed, Rhythm heard from Chris' publicist that he was no longer a "member" of the band. We decided to contact Chris Vrenna himself to get the real story, and here's the lowdown: Chris is still involved with NIN and has been working on the upcoming album (which will be released in late Spring or early Summer). He plans to tour with NIN in support of that as-yet-uncompleted release. Chris will not, for the forseeable future, work exclusively with NIN. He recently moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and, as we go to press, is out on the road with Smashing Pumpkinsin a 'technical advisory capacity'. In any case, I urge you to see him play live the next time NIN comes to your neck of the woods.
"No. When we go out on the road, the songs are already well-rehearsed and the arrangements are done. So when we're in that rehearsal mode, I'll come up with my bank. Each song has a unique set of sounds. Like the kick and snare in 'Closer' which are totally unique to that song; I have to have those sounds for that song, otherwise it won't sound remotely like it should. When we play live, we do change things, but we try to keep it fairly true to the original. So I put each song's sound together in rehearsal, and when we leave, I just take the finished master drum sound bank with me." "The sound banks are conveniently sored on floppy disks. "We each carry a set - the office gets one, the road manager gets one, and the tour manager, and my tech gets about four. I always carry backup copies because on tour things get lost or broken very, very easily. Flying your gear is always a nightmare, just because gear doesn't like to be that high up or that cold. Extreme temperatures tend to mess with stuff."
Chris is originally from Erie, Pennsylvania. After high school, he relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, the city where NIN ultimately got a record deal. Vrenna admits that during this period he was once in a band who actually named themselves Exotic Birds. Does he cringe at the memory?
"It's especially embarrassing," he racalls with a laugh, "because Trent just found these old pictures of us from the '80s, and I've got this super-poofy, Duran Duran meets Flock of Seagulls hair thing going on - it's so funny. At the time, it was an all-electronic band and I was playing a whole pad kit, triggering drum machines, playing with sequencers and stuff like that. It was just what it was, you know? Id didn't really go anywhere. But it was a way for me to learn more about electronics and get deeper into playing with clicks and triggering sounds. It wasn't like it is today, where you just have a drum MIDI interface and hook it into your favourite sampler and hit any sound in the world. Back then, sampling was just starting and drum machines had one input on them to trigger one thing. It was very archaic and it was challenging to figure out how to do it all back then." Chris is clearly a dichotomy: he's the ultimate tech-head, yet he's also an extremely adept live drummer. "That's like a big joke in the band," he says. "I hear the bad drummer jokes all the time, like, Why do drummers keep drumsticks on their dashboard? So they can park in a handicapped space. How do you know when the drum riser is level? When the drool runs out of both sides of his mouth. It's kind of like a joke around here because they say that (in his best Yogi Bear impersonation) I'm smarter than the average bear."
Vrenna has been playing live even longer than he's been playing with computers. "I took my first drum lesson when I was six," he recalls, "but I was playing bars when I was fifteen. My father would drive me and my drums in the station wagon, and the owners of the bar would only let me in to play. He'd sit there and have a beer while I'd play and get harassed by all the punks. I was playing in a punk band who wrote all their own songs. In fact, I've never played in a covers band. We sucked, but we were every band's opening act who came through town. I've always played alternative stuff and it's always been original music. Somehow the playing thing and the geekdom stuff grew together." Chris and Trent's friendship began in their Pennsylvania high school. Then they were roommates in Cleveland. After the band got signed, they worked together fairly steadily until NIN's Lollapalooza stint. Trent and Chris fell out for a while, with Jeff Ward hired as a stand-in drummer. Ward later killed himself because of his ill-fated attempts to kick heroin. "We basically hit a point where we weren't getting along on a personal level. It was time to get away," Chris comments on their hiatus. "I went back to college for a semester during that time," he continues. "Then I moved to Chicago and did a short stint with a band called Die Warzau which no longer exists. They had opened for us and were doing a new record. At the time, I was looking for a new city to move to and Chicago sounded as good as anywhere, so I went. I still love Chicago. Anyway, I did a record with Warzau and a tour with them. That was the most electronic tour that I've ever done. There was no tape machine or sequencer, it was all triggered by me from pads. It was insane. You don't have nearly enough space for me to get into this, but it was the craziest, coolest thing that I've ever done, technologically speaking. "After that was over, I did a tour with KMFDM, and I also worked on Broken a little bit during that time, because Trent was recording it just outside of Chicago. so I went up there and we started to become friends again at that time. In '92, I moved to California with Trent. When we finished The Downward Spiral, we went on tour for a year. That year encompassed about three rounds in America and the one European tour. We also did Woodstock within that time." Although Woodstock II was justly slammed for its crass commercialism, Nine Inch Nails deftly emerged as the hottest draw of the festival.
"Given all the hype going into it," muses Chris, "when I was actually there, I saw all the masses of people who actually showed up, and it ended up being kind of special and cool. But it was the scariest thing ever playing to all those people. Plus it was being broadcast live to many millions of people watching at home. I'm not sure why, but everyone seemed to pick us as the highlight of the whole thing. When you're playing between Crosby, Stills & Nash and Metallica, you think that maybe everyone's going to take a piss while you're on stage. But it wasn't that way at all. It really helped boost the band up a couple more levels."
NIN will be putting out a new album sometime in 1997. The latest project is the soundtrack for the new David Lynch film Lost Highway. Due to the success of Trent's label Nothing, there seems to be no end in sight to all the work Chris has to do. That means 'home' for the forseeable future is the twelve-step recoverer's nightmare, New Orleans. "It's a weird town," Chris observes of his semi-permanent residence. "Trent really loves it here. There are 24-hour bars, everything is geared around partying and going out. It's cool and definitely unlike anywhere else. But I get up in the morning, throw my clothes on, drive here to the studio, stay until the middle of the night and then go home and get ready to do it again the next day. That's pretty much all I do these days."
If any of you plan to read or have already read the fascinating Chris Vrenna article in this issue, there has been a slight change in Vrenna's career path since he was interviewed. Soon after the piece was filed, Rhythm heard from Chris' publicist that he was no longer a "member" of the band. We decided to contact Chris Vrenna himself to get the real story, and here's the lowdown: Chris is still involved with NIN and has been working on the upcoming album (which will be released in late Spring or early Summer). He plans to tour with NIN in support of that as-yet-uncompleted release. Chris will not, for the forseeable future, work exclusively with NIN. He recently moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and, as we go to press, is out on the road with Smashing Pumpkins in a 'technical advisory capacity'. In any case, I urge you to see him play live the next time NIN comes to your neck of the woods.
Judging from NIN's recorded output alone, one might mistakenly peg Vrenna as a superb drum programmer who may not have what it takes to cut it on stage. But not only does Chris play a full kit in addition to an array of machines in the studio, he's also a seriously white-hot live drummer. Studio dweeb or not, Vrenna is one of the most physical players on the scene today. Chris describes his multi-faceted role in the band as a "Jack-of-all-trades. When we're not playing, I'm either sampling or creating new sounds - not just drum sounds but general sounds, sort of like sound designing. That was one of the main things that I did for The Downward Spiral (NIN's last album release). There was a lot of sequencing because a lot of e stuff that we do isn't live-oriented, so I'll do some of the rhythm programming as well. I'm also becoming a not bad engineer," he laughs. "I engineered The Downward Spiral because it was just me and Trent recording it at his house.
If he was singing, someone had to be running the console and the tape machine. "Now that we have a full studio (unofficially named Hot Snakes) built here in New Orleans, there's even more to be done. Trent bought an old funeral home down here with many separate rooms. This place already had a kitchen in it and multiple bathrooms, and the whole building has been converted to studio and offices for the band.
"Trent bought an SSL console unit - a mixing console - and 48 tracks of tape, which is all in the old chapel in the dead centre of the building. It's the most secluded and quiet room. And the embalming room is now the laundry room." While Chris gets his laundry done at Hot Snakes, he's also working on a variety of acts signed to Nothing, the label which Reznor spawned.
"Whenever a project is taken on, it basically becomes a big group effort here," Chris explains. "Our latest big thing is Marilyn Manson. Trent produced their record here, so I helped them do some engineering and did some drum programming for them - they changed their sound a little bit for their new record. I've actually played drum overdubs on the record, too. Trent and I also did the sound for a video game called Quake, from the guys who put out Doom, Doom II and Heretic. They've done a new, realistic 3-D game and we did all the sound effects for it: doors closing, screams, gun shots, monsters growling... We also did some music beds for the title theme and some atmospheric stuff."
Chris admits that he never knows what unusual soundscapes he will be asked to create for Trent. "I'm always being asked to come up with weird things," he says. "We were doing our own 'March of the Pigs' remix last year, and Trent asked me, 'Do you have any pig grunt samples? I want an orchestra of pigs'. I found some samples and built a whole bank of pigs. That was a weird one; I went out and rented Charlotte's Web and took out farm films from the library, stuff like that." Sampling is certainly an essential element of the Nine Inch Nails sound. "Our band's not like Nirvana, where it was always bass, drums, guitar and where it's always about a song," explains Chris. "Our band is based around sound, and our arrangements are about totally unique sounds. We try not to ever repeat ourselves, which is a challenge. We have this one bank of drums that we've used since Broken and it's already become identifiable. So it's always a challenge to keep ahead of that and just keep making new stuff. We're not about repeating ourselves."
NIN imitators are coming out of the woodwork here in the US, so the originators have to remain one step ahead of the clones. "There are a lot of bands ripping us off," admits Vrenna, "but none of them come close. The grunge thing has started to die down now and the electronic/industrial thing is starting to become more accepted. We would consider the copy bands flattering, but so far no one has done anything that has kicked ass. It's becoming almost formulaic." Since NIN are renowned studio moles, I asked Chris if he would de-mystify the day-to-day recording scenario with respect to his drums. "As far as drums go, I keep my good kit - my studio kit - set up in the live room, fully miked and ready to go at a moment's notice, because we don't always know when we're going to do live stuff. We don't have days where we decide to track drums, but when something isn't working we say, 'Now, let's try this approach', and the kit is just ready to rock. Then we'll just jam and see how it goes. We always use a click track because everything has a sequence. I hate it when drummers can't play to a click - there has to ba a tempo somewhere, it can'e be all free-form. But I meet people all the time who say, 'Ooh, I can't play to a click track.' I'm like, 'Don't be a pussy.' "
Chris also plays to a click when touring. "Because of the backing sequence stuff we play to," he explains. "Even though for most of the songs I count the band in and there might be nothing going on sequence-wise until the chorus kicks in, if I'm not totally in sync when that chorus arrives it's going to be horrible," he laughs. "So I stay locked in to everything." How did Chris become proficient with the electronic side of music?
"Personally, I've always been a technology-head and I've always been into computers," he responds. "When I was a little kid, the minute I saw the old Simmons drums - the ones that were shaped like stop signs - in a magazine, I said, 'Dad, I've got to have a set'. I didn't know what they were but they looked cool. So I saved up all my money by working one summer and I bought a set. Ever since that first kit, I've just got more into the technology stuff. It may seem weird or non-purist, but we're not a purist kind of band anyway. In fact, we're anything but. "With the electronic thing, you can either embrace it and incorporate it into your world, or be destroyed by it," Chris admonishes. "If you don't use electronics, you don't know what you're missing. To be able to have an acoustic kit live as well as pads scattered throughout with triggered sounds that a regular drum isn't able to make, that's a lot more powerful." However, Vrenna does make a concession when it comes to electronic drums: "I've never heard really good tom-tom samples. Tom-toms should always be live. Even if we use programming for everything on a track, we'll always go back and overdub all the toms live.
"Every song is different, but they always start with the sequenced stuff," he continues. "Even if we are going to do it live as opposed to sequencing, we will always sequence it first, just the skeleton of the rhythm. When Trent is writing the melodies, he always has a feel for what rhythms will go underneath. Once we get the skeleton track up on the computer, it can go in any one of 7,000 different directions. We could decide to play it all live or do none of it live. Sometimes we get seriously into the programming or it becomes a hybrid of both programming and live. We sometimes sample for a day or so to find sounds, until we figure it all out."
In a recent issue of Spin magazine, there was an intriguing quote from Trent about recording The Downward Spiral where he said that he and Vrenna sampled drums in stereo with stereo mics, resulting in them sounding like real drums when played on a keyboard. Chris clarifies: "Most people, when they want to sample their drums, put close miking on them - like putting the mic right over the drum head to get a nice clean tom-tom or snare drum sample. That's how a lot of people like to make drum samples. But we don't do that kind of meticulous miking; we'll set the drums up in aroom with two mics on either side. Then we sample the drums, it's in true stereo with stereo mics, so they're not all perfectly centred and certain sounds will be louder on the left than the right. We leave them that way and we sample them like that. You can hear when you hit the high tom-tom, it makes the snares buzz and all the drums interact with each other, and the cymbals ring when you play a full kit. When people sample, they usually sample an individual drum. But we leave all of that interaction oise in there. It's not technically great miking technique, but it sounds as if you're sitting in a room listening to a real drumset. It's uncanny how much more real it sounds." Does he carry a library of samples out on the road?
"No. When we go out on the road, the songs are already well-rehearsed and the arrangements are done. So when we're in that rehearsal mode, I'll come up with my bank. Each song has a unique set of sounds. Like the kick and snare in 'Closer' which are totally unique to that song; I have to have those sounds for that song, otherwise it won't sound remotely like it should. When we play live, we do change things, but we try to keep it fairly true to the original. So I put each song's sound together in rehearsal, and when we leave, I just take the finished master drum sound bank with me." "The sound banks are conveniently sored on floppy disks. "We each carry a set - the office gets one, the road manager gets one, and the tour manager, and my tech gets about four. I always carry backup copies because on tour things get lost or broken very, very easily. Flying your gear is always a nightmare, just because gear doesn't like to be that high up or that cold. Extreme temperatures tend to mess with stuff."
Chris is originally from Erie, Pennsylvania. After high school, he relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, the city where NIN ultimately got a record deal. Vrenna admits that during this period he was once in a band who actually named themselves Exotic Birds. Does he cringe at the memory?
"It's especially embarrassing," he racalls with a laugh, "because Trent just found these old pictures of us from the '80s, and I've got this super-poofy, Duran Duran meets Flock of Seagulls hair thing going on - it's so funny. At the time, it was an all-electronic band and I was playing a whole pad kit, triggering drum machines, playing with sequencers and stuff like that. It was just what it was, you know? Id didn't really go anywhere. But it was a way for me to learn more about electronics and get deeper into playing with clicks and triggering sounds. It wasn't like it is today, where you just have a drum MIDI interface and hook it into your favourite sampler and hit any sound in the world. Back then, sampling was just starting and drum machines had one input on them to trigger one thing. It was very archaic and it was challenging to figure out how to do it all back then." Chris is clearly a dichotomy: he's the ultimate tech-head, yet he's also an extremely adept live drummer. "That's like a big joke in the band," he says. "I hear the bad drummer jokes all the time, like, Why do drummers keep drumsticks on their dashboard? So they can park in a handicapped space. How do you know when the drum riser is level? When the drool runs out of both sides of his mouth. It's kind of like a joke around here because they say that (in his best Yogi Bear impersonation) I'm smarter than the average bear."
Vrenna has been playing live even longer than he's been playing with computers. "I took my first drum lesson when I was six," he recalls, "but I was playing bars when I was fifteen. My father would drive me and my drums in the station wagon, and the owners of the bar would only let me in to play. He'd sit there and have a beer while I'd play and get harassed by all the punks. I was playing in a punk band who wrote all their own songs. In fact, I've never played in a covers band. We sucked, but we were every band's opening act who came through town. I've always played alternative stuff and it's always been original music. Somehow the playing thing and the geekdom stuff grew together." Chris and Trent's friendship began in their Pennsylvania high school. Then they were roommates in Cleveland. After the band got signed, they worked together fairly steadily until NIN's Lollapalooza stint. Trent and Chris fell out for a while, with Jeff Ward hired as a stand-in drummer. Ward later killed himself because of his ill-fated attempts to kick heroin. "We basically hit a point where we weren't getting along on a personal level. It was time to get away," Chris comments on their hiatus. "I went back to college for a semester during that time," he continues. "Then I moved to Chicago and did a short stint with a band called Die Warzau which no longer exists. They had opened for us and were doing a new record. At the time, I was looking for a new city to move to and Chicago sounded as good as anywhere, so I went. I still love Chicago. Anyway, I did a record with Warzau and a tour with them. That was the most electronic tour that I've ever done. There was no tape machine or sequencer, it was all triggered by me from pads. It was insane. You don't have nearly enough space for me to get into this, but it was the craziest, coolest thing that I've ever done, technologically speaking. "After that was over, I did a tour with KMFDM, and I also worked on Broken a little bit during that time, because Trent was recording it just outside of Chicago. so I went up there and we started to become friends again at that time. In '92, I moved to California with Trent. When we finished The Downward Spiral, we went on tour for a year. That year encompassed about three rounds in America and the one European tour. We also did Woodstock within that time." Although Woodstock II was justly slammed for its crass commercialism, Nine Inch Nails deftly emerged as the hottest draw of the festival.
"Given all the hype going into it," muses Chris, "when I was actually there, I saw all the masses of people who actually showed up, and it ended up being kind of special and cool. But it was the scariest thing ever playing to all those people. Plus it was being broadcast live to many millions of people watching at home. I'm not sure why, but everyone seemed to pick us as the highlight of the whole thing. When you're playing between Crosby, Stills & Nash and Metallica, you think that maybe everyone's going to take a piss while you're on stage. But it wasn;t that way at all. It really helped boost the band up a couple more levels."
NIN will be putting out a new album sometime in 1997. The latest project is the soundtrack for the new David Lynch film Lost Highway. Due to the success of Trent's label Nothing, there seems to be no end in sight to all the work Chris has to do. That means 'home' for the forseeable future is the twelve-step recoverer's nightmare, New Orleans. "It's a weird town," Chris observes of his semi-permanent residence. "Trent really loves it here. There are 24-hour bars, everything is geared around partying and going out. It's cool and definitely unlike anywhere else. But I get up in the morning, throw my clothes on, drive here to the studio, stay until the middle of the night and then go home and get ready to do it again the next day. That's pretty much all I do these days."
If any of you plan to read or have already read the fascinating Chris Vrenna article in this issue, there has been a slight change in Vrenna's career path since he was interviewed. Soon after the piece was filed, Rhythm heard from Chris' publicist that he was no longer a "member" of the band. We decided to contact Chris Vrenna himself to get the real story, and here's the lowdown: Chris is still involved with NIN and has been working on the upcoming album (which will be released in late Spring or early Summer). He plans to tour with NIN in support of that as-yet-uncompleted release. Chris will not, for the forseeable future, work exclusively with NIN. He recently moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and, as we go to press, is out on the road with Smashing Pumpkinsin a 'technical advisory capacity'. In any case, I urge you to see him play live the next time NIN comes to your neck of the woods.
"No. When we go out on the road, the songs are already well-rehearsed and the arrangements are done. So when we're in that rehearsal mode, I'll come up with my bank. Each song has a unique set of sounds. Like the kick and snare in 'Closer' which are totally unique to that song; I have to have those sounds for that song, otherwise it won't sound remotely like it should. When we play live, we do change things, but we try to keep it fairly true to the original. So I put each song's sound together in rehearsal, and when we leave, I just take the finished master drum sound bank with me." "The sound banks are conveniently sored on floppy disks. "We each carry a set - the office gets one, the road manager gets one, and the tour manager, and my tech gets about four. I always carry backup copies because on tour things get lost or broken very, very easily. Flying your gear is always a nightmare, just because gear doesn't like to be that high up or that cold. Extreme temperatures tend to mess with stuff."
Chris is originally from Erie, Pennsylvania. After high school, he relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, the city where NIN ultimately got a record deal. Vrenna admits that during this period he was once in a band who actually named themselves Exotic Birds. Does he cringe at the memory?
"It's especially embarrassing," he racalls with a laugh, "because Trent just found these old pictures of us from the '80s, and I've got this super-poofy, Duran Duran meets Flock of Seagulls hair thing going on - it's so funny. At the time, it was an all-electronic band and I was playing a whole pad kit, triggering drum machines, playing with sequencers and stuff like that. It was just what it was, you know? Id didn't really go anywhere. But it was a way for me to learn more about electronics and get deeper into playing with clicks and triggering sounds. It wasn't like it is today, where you just have a drum MIDI interface and hook it into your favourite sampler and hit any sound in the world. Back then, sampling was just starting and drum machines had one input on them to trigger one thing. It was very archaic and it was challenging to figure out how to do it all back then." Chris is clearly a dichotomy: he's the ultimate tech-head, yet he's also an extremely adept live drummer. "That's like a big joke in the band," he says. "I hear the bad drummer jokes all the time, like, Why do drummers keep drumsticks on their dashboard? So they can park in a handicapped space. How do you know when the drum riser is level? When the drool runs out of both sides of his mouth. It's kind of like a joke around here because they say that (in his best Yogi Bear impersonation) I'm smarter than the average bear."
Vrenna has been playing live even longer than he's been playing with computers. "I took my first drum lesson when I was six," he recalls, "but I was playing bars when I was fifteen. My father would drive me and my drums in the station wagon, and the owners of the bar would only let me in to play. He'd sit there and have a beer while I'd play and get harassed by all the punks. I was playing in a punk band who wrote all their own songs. In fact, I've never played in a covers band. We sucked, but we were every band's opening act who came through town. I've always played alternative stuff and it's always been original music. Somehow the playing thing and the geekdom stuff grew together." Chris and Trent's friendship began in their Pennsylvania high school. Then they were roommates in Cleveland. After the band got signed, they worked together fairly steadily until NIN's Lollapalooza stint. Trent and Chris fell out for a while, with Jeff Ward hired as a stand-in drummer. Ward later killed himself because of his ill-fated attempts to kick heroin. "We basically hit a point where we weren't getting along on a personal level. It was time to get away," Chris comments on their hiatus. "I went back to college for a semester during that time," he continues. "Then I moved to Chicago and did a short stint with a band called Die Warzau which no longer exists. They had opened for us and were doing a new record. At the time, I was looking for a new city to move to and Chicago sounded as good as anywhere, so I went. I still love Chicago. Anyway, I did a record with Warzau and a tour with them. That was the most electronic tour that I've ever done. There was no tape machine or sequencer, it was all triggered by me from pads. It was insane. You don't have nearly enough space for me to get into this, but it was the craziest, coolest thing that I've ever done, technologically speaking. "After that was over, I did a tour with KMFDM, and I also worked on Broken a little bit during that time, because Trent was recording it just outside of Chicago. so I went up there and we started to become friends again at that time. In '92, I moved to California with Trent. When we finished The Downward Spiral, we went on tour for a year. That year encompassed about three rounds in America and the one European tour. We also did Woodstock within that time." Although Woodstock II was justly slammed for its crass commercialism, Nine Inch Nails deftly emerged as the hottest draw of the festival.
"Given all the hype going into it," muses Chris, "when I was actually there, I saw all the masses of people who actually showed up, and it ended up being kind of special and cool. But it was the scariest thing ever playing to all those people. Plus it was being broadcast live to many millions of people watching at home. I'm not sure why, but everyone seemed to pick us as the highlight of the whole thing. When you're playing between Crosby, Stills & Nash and Metallica, you think that maybe everyone's going to take a piss while you're on stage. But it wasn't that way at all. It really helped boost the band up a couple more levels."
NIN will be putting out a new album sometime in 1997. The latest project is the soundtrack for the new David Lynch film Lost Highway. Due to the success of Trent's label Nothing, there seems to be no end in sight to all the work Chris has to do. That means 'home' for the forseeable future is the twelve-step recoverer's nightmare, New Orleans. "It's a weird town," Chris observes of his semi-permanent residence. "Trent really loves it here. There are 24-hour bars, everything is geared around partying and going out. It's cool and definitely unlike anywhere else. But I get up in the morning, throw my clothes on, drive here to the studio, stay until the middle of the night and then go home and get ready to do it again the next day. That's pretty much all I do these days."
If any of you plan to read or have already read the fascinating Chris Vrenna article in this issue, there has been a slight change in Vrenna's career path since he was interviewed. Soon after the piece was filed, Rhythm heard from Chris' publicist that he was no longer a "member" of the band. We decided to contact Chris Vrenna himself to get the real story, and here's the lowdown: Chris is still involved with NIN and has been working on the upcoming album (which will be released in late Spring or early Summer). He plans to tour with NIN in support of that as-yet-uncompleted release. Chris will not, for the forseeable future, work exclusively with NIN. He recently moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and, as we go to press, is out on the road with Smashing Pumpkins in a 'technical advisory capacity'. In any case, I urge you to see him play live the next time NIN comes to your neck of the woods.
Transcribed by Keith Duemling