THE PIANO TUNER STARTED WORK — THEN MARK RONSON COMMANDEERED THE MACHINE

Queens Of The Stone Age entered United Recording to make Villains with a precise target: Josh Homme wanted the band to sound clear, tight and driven by the beat.

Then an ordinary piano-tuning session took a strange turn. 🎹

Engineer and co-producer Mark Rankin had brought an Overstayer Mod Channel into the studio—a rack unit equipped with distortion, compression and filters capable of self-oscillation. While the piano tuner worked, Rankin routed the piano microphones through it and began adjusting those filters.

The polite sound of a piano being tuned suddenly plunged into something far more unsettling. 🌀

Mark Ronson was in the control room. His reaction, Rankin recalled, was immediate: “Oh my god, what is that?”

Ronson commandeered the machine and installed it in a side room. From there, Rankin would pass him recorded files to process, and Ronson would return with sounds for the band to consider. 🎛️

It fitted the larger experiment. Homme wanted unusually small, dry spaces in the music. Many guitars were recorded directly into the console, while contact microphones strapped to the kick and snare supplied hard, distorted drum sounds. Rather than leave every option open for later, the team committed to unusual tones while recording. 🥁⚡

The Mod Channel became what Rankin called the session’s “secret weapon.” He said the album’s extreme filtering was done with it, while Ronson used the machine to mangle material away from the main tracking room.

By the end of the sessions, everybody wanted one. 🔥

Sometimes the best studio story begins with someone simply tuning the piano. 🎶

#musicOnOff #QueensOfTheStoneAge #Villains #JoshHomme #MarkRonson #StudioStories #RockHistory