Tchad Blake – The Arctic Monkeys, The Black Keys, Tom Waits
Inside The Track #1
The Last Shadow Puppets “Bad Habits”
1h 25min – 6 Parts
Tchad Blake has been an impressive discography, having worked with numerous artists and musicians, including Arctic Monkeys, State Radio, Apartment 26, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, Pearl Jam, Tom Waits, Sheryl Crow, Crowded House, Tracy Chapman, The Dandy Warhols, The Black Keys, U2 and The Pretenders, amongst many others. Blake to date has won five Grammy Awards, including Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical and Best Rock Album for Sheryl Crow’s The Globe Sessions (1998), Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for his work on Suzanne Vega’s Beauty & Crime (2007), and two Grammys for his work with The Black Keys on 2010’s Brothers.
He is well known in the industry for creating original sonic textures (often with unorthodox gear, such as everyday objects like wooden pipes, metal cans, and cardboard boxes), and constantly shifting mixes, as well as his use of binaural recording, resulting in a unique sound. Since Blake’s move to the UK in 2001, he worked for a number of years at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, engineering, mixing, but also expanding into producing, clocking up credits like Gabriel, Travis, Phish, Tracy Chapman, and Bonnie Raitt.
Although Blake made his name by pushing the sonic limits of the analogue domain, since 2005, he has worked almost entirely in the box. He has a Protools HD rig with an Icon D Control, plus a choice selection of loads of guitar pedals and a few pieces of outboard. Blake comments, “I’m 99.8% in the box now, as opposed to mixing off tape through a vintage API console at The Sound Factory or the very large SSL at Real World Studios in the past. The 0.2% represents instruments I add or pedal-style effects I use.”