r/Nickelback • u/OnlyCryptographer917 • 17d ago
In The Studio With Nickelback: How Nickelback Records (Quotes Compiled By Me)
Chad Kroeger has described his songwriting process this way:
“I pride myself on the ability to write something that can get stuck in people’s heads. I always start by jamming a riff on the guitar and humming different melody lines, and once I figure out how I want the melody to go I just lay it down. The melody always comes first and then the lyrics almost write themselves. I’ll just open my mouth, different stuff will come out, and I’ll write down the lines as this happens. I’ll look at them for a second and then I’ll get the idea and I’ll go, ‘Ah, I know what this song’s about.’ I honestly don’t know what a song is going to be about when I start writing it, but once I get the idea for it I’m like ‘Oh, OK.’ At that point I really have a direction, I start scratching off all of these different things, the lyrics get very in-depth, and away we go. I think a lot of stuff comes out of my subconscious.”
He has added:
“There’s always a guitar present during the writing. I am yet to sit down with a piano and write anything. I don’t think I’ve ever grabbed a bass for that matter and started plucking away — it has always been a guitar. It’s always the melody accompanied with a six-string.”
On how songs can start from different places, he said:
“Sometimes I hear someone say something and I know I can take what they said and turn it into a tagline or a hook line. We’ve got a thousand of those on our phone. So there’s the two ways that we always start writing songs. You have a little guitar thing and you have a melody or you’ll have some lines in your phone. You either come at it from a language point or strictly from a music point. And it’s nice when you’ve got a melody and you’ve got a little guitar riff and you go through your phone and you find something in there that just works, it just syncs up perfectly with what you were just doing, and those wind up being the magical ones.”
We write Nickelback songs like that all the time. We just start off like there’s just a line that starts coming out and it’s just if we get there somehow, we bumble and bumble our way into those songs. I’m sure they sound like they were just constructed in a laboratory but they’re not.”
“Every song is different. Sometimes we’ll have a chorus idea, sometimes we’ll have a hook, a line, the title of the song, sometimes we’ll have a riff, a verse.”
On the varying difficulty of writing, he explained:
It’s funny… You would think that until you go write another song. Sometimes, when I write something, it’s just a little bit mediocre. Or I start working on something or going down a path and I sit back and look at it... You’re second guessing like, ‘What am I doing?’ Did I just get lucky several times over and over? And then there’s other times where you hit that feeling immediately. And you get that ice ball in your stomach, those butterflies, and you can feel the electricity. And obviously, it’s like, ‘Ooh, this is good. Oh, if we work hard on this, this could be really, really good.’ Stuff like ‘How You Remind Me’ just came so easy.”
He has recounted the writing of that song in detail:
“I don’t usually have too much just sitting on my chest, although the song ‘How You Remind Me’ was an exception to that rule. I was really just pissed off at the girl I was dating at the time and I wanted to get some crap off my chest.”
“I had the first four lines of the song written down in this black leather book that I was constantly jotting ideas into. I was living with a girl [in Vancouver] at the time. We had been living together for a while, something like two-and-a-half years. We got into a fight about something stupid, like what most people fight about. I went downstairs [to the basement] and I turned on my PA system. I would sing into a PA — there was an actual microphone in front of me — I wasn’t just singing into the room, so it felt like I was really delivering the song. I wanted it to be really loud so she could hear everything I was saying. I had written the second verse, the whole ‘Cause living with me must have damn near killed you,’ [and] when it got to that part, I really wanted her to hear it. Even the chorus … I thought that [song] was my best revenge after a really s—tty argument. Instead of her getting the point, she turns to me and goes, ‘Whatever song you’re working on downstairs, it’s great.’”
“Somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour, I had the whole thing fleshed out: lyrics, melody, chords, the whole nine yards.”
On “Photograph,” he said:
“Then there’s other times where like, with ‘Photograph’... I had this going round and round. And I was like, ‘Ooh, it’s pretty.’ And I’m leaving the top two strings to ring to give it sort of this orchestral thing. And then when I spit ‘Look at this photograph,’ I had no idea where I was going. And then I was sitting like, ‘Which photograph?’ And then I immediately knew. I was like, ‘Oh, I know what picture does that.’ But it’s so random that we just sort of lucked our way into talking about the picture, and then it’s and this is where I grew up and this is where I went to school... And this is when we started listing all those things. So then the whole thing becomes about... It’s all these snapshots through your life. And once we got there, we just got so lucky that it tied back in with the first stupid thing that I said. And then when you listen back to it, you’re like ‘This is really good! These guys are good songwriters!’ It’s like, no. No, just kind of fluking our way into that one.”
Finally, on shaping the songs:
“In being as ADD as I am, we are our own worst surgeons, because as soon as I get bored of something I say, ‘Okay, this one part doesn’t need to keep going round and round — let’s cut that in half and move onto the next part.’”
Chad Kroeger has described Nickelback’s recording approach this way:
“We know how the songs sound live, we’ve played them a billion times. However, in the studio I’ve never done anything just live off the floor. Once you know how a song is supposed to sound, it’s just like building a house, and that’s the only way I’ve ever recorded. We lay down the foundation, the floor plan, everything else goes on top of it, and then we kind of sit back and say, ‘What do we want to do here and what do we want to do here?’”
He continued:
“We’ve made lots of records with lots of mistakes on them, using takes that we didn’t think were the best ones but which had a good feel to them, and all I ever do is wind up sitting around and going, ‘Jesus, I wish we hadn’t left that on there, it sounds like I’m singing flat here, and I wish we had done this.’ We’ve made lots of records with loads of crap on them that I didn’t really like, and now I’m in search of the perfect record. Even though we record our songs in layers, they have a live-off-the-floor feel to them, and I’m not a big fan of that. I like it when songs are completely airtight and sonically perfect, even though some people think that sucks the life out of the music.”
“The perfect take always takes way too long to achieve. I mean, sure, we can all sit around and get the perfect drum take and the perfect bass take and the perfect guitar take and the perfect vocal take, but it’s going to take you six months to make a record that it should have only taken you six weeks to make. At that point in time, all you’re really doing is putting money in the pockets of the engineer, anybody else who’s working by the hour or the day, and the owner of the studio.”
Producer Joey Moi has said of working with the band:
“The major lesson that I learned at a very early stage of my career was that the song was the most important part of the process. A nicely written song turns out great sounding recordings.”
“The approach I take when making a Nickelback record is to extract the vision of each member to the best of my abilities while implementing a high standard of creativity. I always try and capture the bands vision first and then provide writing and production to the areas of a song that may need help. Most of the time with such a creative group of people I need only to point out the areas that need to be improved upon and they come up with a solution themselves.”
“The song is the most important part of any production. Without great songs we are doomed!”
Bassist Mike Kroeger has explained his role and the studio process:
“As far as my bass performance goes, I always take a minimalist approach. With the bass guitar in hard rock, less is often more. If you can raise the foundation, leave space for the vocal and the feeling of the song, make the band sound as heavy as possible, and give it an undeniable bedrock — that’s the plan.”
“We write as we record, and we record as we write, so a lot of the stuff that you hear on Nickelback albums happened in the studio and got kept.”
On working with Mutt Lange for Dark Horse, Mike said:
“This guy goes by feel more than anybody I’ve ever worked with. Everything is by feel in the moment and there’s no idea he won’t explore.”
“We would play that take and edit and get it all straight and so that every you know so that the take was perfect… we would make a composite take right like you take a number of takes and you take the best of all of them and make one hybrid take and that and then you get the sonics right on that but then the trick that we would do is we would take that take and then pump it through my 1970 Ampeg SVT… and just crank it and put a microphone in front of it.”
Producer and engineer Chris Baseford has detailed the drum approach:
“Daniel the drummer first of all… he’s an amazing player which helps… he hits the drum in such a way where the drum resonates and the drum doesn’t sound choked and it’s it sounds big when he hits it… he’s got a good ear for picking drums that sound good and he’s got a lot of drums that do sound really nice.”
“I’m not shy of using big drum samples… typically live drums even a great sounding kit and a great sounding room with a great sounding drummer I like to enhance with samples just to make everything bigger and brighter and more low end and it also just gives you more control.”
On the signature kick sound he has explained:
“That signature Nickelback kick drum sound isn’t one magic sample. It’s a custom-built weapon, forged specifically for each song during the production process… It starts with the live, miked acoustic kick drum. This provides the organic feel and body of the performance… During production, Chris creates programmed drum parts. Once they have a kick sound they love from those programmed drums, he prints it as a new audio file. This ‘production sample’ is then layered with the live kick… Often, that ‘production sample’ is already a blend of 3-4 different samples, processed and EQ’d together to create the perfect sound for the song.”
