ARTICLES
INTERVIEW BY ACTION
ATTACK HELICOPTER MAGAZINE
Interview with Aaron Feibus
by Kurt Morris
The Aeffect is a three piece techno group fronted by Aaron Feibus, who happens to also be my press contact at Fueled By Ramen Records (the same label their debut EP was released on). I swear that this wasn't meant to be an "Avoiding the Obvious" feature, but we sure did one helluva job not talking about the Aeffect much.
Kurt: What is that "ae" thing called?
Aaron: You know, I don't even know what it's called. "That symbol" is what we call it. That one symbol with the A and the E together that Tool used on their one album.
Kurt: Everybody thinks that you're just some Tool influenced band.
Aaron: Totally man. All of our songs are just about Tool. In fact, while most of them are about Tool, some of them are about tools--
Kurt: And we recorded the whole thing on ProTools!
Aaron: Actually, to be honest, the demos were, but the CD that's out wasn't recorded on ProTools.
Kurt: What have you found to be the difference? I know a lot of people seem to prefer to use ProTools for the final project.
Aaron: I have the ProTools home edition, LE. I like it a lot and it sounded pretty good and some guy that I know who does recording stuff who now works at Inner Ear actually said that the demo sounded better. But I personally think the CD sounds better. I think you get better separation with digital, but I prefer the tape warmth.
Kurt: I know a couple producers who use ProTools and I was surprised at first to find that out.
Aaron: I know Brian McTernan has the same setup that I did the demos on and I was talking to Rory from the Impossibles and he said that Brian records everything to tape, dumps it to ProTools and mixes it. I don't know the whole deal, but a lot of people are using that these days. I know that Roger (?) from Less Than Jake has a recording setup in his house and he has one of those in his house.
Kurt: How much did the home version of ProTools cost that you have?
Aaron: When I got it when it first came out it was $900 and now I think it's like $700 or something.
Kurt: That's not too bad, though, if you want a good recording.
Aaron: Oh, it's incredible. All you need is to have a decent home computer and you can have pro sounding demos.
Kurt: I thought you had to have a Mac system to have it work.
Aaron: It started as that and then they re-wrote it so that the other 95% of computer users could use it. I'm a Mac user myself.
Kurt: Well, I used to be really anti-Mac, but at work I use a Mac so I'm really digging it now.
Aaron: I was the same as you before. I used to think they sucked, but I went ahead and got one because I really didn't know that they sucked and my friend had gotten one and I started using recording programs like Logic and Platinum and it was pretty good stuff. So, I'm a convert.
Kurt: Well, the fact of the matter is, it just doesn't crash nearly as much.
Aaron: Yeah. Have you tried the OSX yet?
Kurt: No.
Aaron: It's the new operating system and it's incredible. It's based on UNIX and they totally rewrote the operating from the ground up. And there was another operating system called neXt and they combine both of them and it's really stable.
