Spencer Nezey (left) and Jessie Payo of Jupiter Rising in the control room at House of Blues Studios with producer/engineer Greg Ogan
Photo: Kevin Estrada
At press time, urban pop duo Jupiter Rising — beatboxer/vocalist/co-producer Spencer Nezey and singer Jessie Payo — were in House of Blues Studios (Encino, Calif.) tracking, editing and mixing songs in Pro Tools for a new album to be titled The Quiet Hype. The artists spent a month on pre-production in The Writing Camp, engineer/co-producer Greg Ogan’s (Britney Spears, Ashley Tisdale, Brandi) personal studio, before going into HOB with Ogan and session musicians Brent Paschke (guitar), Mike Shapiro (drums) and Mike Garcon (keyboards). Ogan took time out to give Mix a few details:
“The sound of this new album is rooted in programmed-electro, but we’re putting a lot of live instruments on it. We’re keeping it live and raw, but also a little futuristic with synthesizers. We’ve been tracking live drums on almost every song and tracking guitars on almost every song, and playing piano and keyboards, but also doing programs with synthesizers and soft synths, and tricks with vocodors and vocals.
“Mike Shapiro is a great drummer who’s giving us a lot of different sounds. Sometimes they’re tight and funky like disco sounds; sometimes they’re big Led Zeppelin drum sounds, and if we combine programmed drums with live drums and synthesizers with guitars, that turns out to be the formula of getting the sound of these songs. Sometimes we use up to four room mics and lots of compressors to really get things sounding big and halting and pumping, and we have a lot of real estate at the House of Blues, so we’re experimenting — throwing up mics and playing with shifting the phase, changing the relative distance between the mics to get small, narrow sounds or a big open sound.”
