The Making of Minutes to Midnight (Minutes to Midnight DVD) - Linkin Park

when we first started working on this album i was excited to see where it would go i knew that that i wasn't going to be happy kind of just doing a continuation of what we'd already done before when we initially started to think about making this record in our minds we wanted to try something new what we were kind of preparing ourselves for was to try and re-develop the sound of the band from every aspect which was kind of a scary thought we were looking back at the things we had done in the past you know hybrid theory through meteora and i think we just figured that we had exhausted that sound it was easy for us to replicate it was easy for other bands to replicate and we just needed to move on we didn't want to lose anything that people might enjoy about the band but we also didn't want to you know make a trilogy we didn't want to make another album that sounded you know like what people would expect [Music] so [Music] as far as rick rubin we wanted the right guy to help us facilitate what we're trying to accomplish and we didn't know what that was rick has done so many records that are just amazing you know really just ridiculous stuff some of the records that he's done have been really influential to me like you know raising hell by run dmc blood sugar sex magic by the chili peppers rick's way of working is a lot different than anybody that we've worked with in the past it feels like you know when he was going into a lot of those projects it was like throughout the rule book and make music he would initiate conversations as far as like you want to do it this way you've done that before once you think about doing it another way he kind of gets in there and says all that stuff that people say you are you don't have to be that and if that's in your head if you think you have to be that then that's not true either he said i want you guys just to forget what the linkin park sound sounds like and just go and just write music and write whatever you like just write it that's what we did we just started writing ideas not thinking about what it should sound like just writing whatever came to our minds there's an early point where brad and i were working on some music everything we were working on was coming out radically different just kind of sounds and textures of music that we never had done before and a lot of it was us sitting in his little home studio just kind of saying is this a link park song like can we work with this like you know he'd play something for me i'd say i love it but i can't yet you know visualize how that would finish at one point we're listening to all the stuff that we really really liked and we were kind of in shock saying wow this is really different than what lincoln park has sounded like in the past and what are we going to do about this when we first met with ricky he asked us how our process worked and after we described it he said i don't know if you know this but you don't make records like most rock bands you make records like a rap production team that contributes to your sound you make a track and then you put vocals on the track the reason the song sounded the way they did is because our approach was different so we threw that out the window [Music] originally we'd work in spots like this all the guys would kind of go to each other's home studios and just work on ideas that they'd been working on individually we get everything that we've done from the studio and update them on our own hard drives we can bring them back home and then work on your own when we started working on this album we made sure not to use any of the conventional methods that we've picked up along the way rick dubbed all of our earliest ideas seeds on the other records brad and i would go to my house and start a whole bunch of seeds and then we'd bring them to the guys when we thought they were ready and we'd narrow those down on this process right off the bat i said why don't we do six different hard drives six pro tools rigs and everybody starts their own seats and we'll come in once a week and play them for everybody you know we'd bring in a seed rather than it being developed to a certain degree before anybody heard it we heard it right away it was more like everyone kind of had sketchbooks you know you you make these little doodles and our case it was music overall it sparked a new kind of creativity everyone came up with tons of music we had about 150 songs that we started out with each guy coming up with different songs and passing it to the next guy this song's working title is grecian i just started playing guitar to that click into that rhythm and eventually started building a beat around it [Music] eventually add maybe like some crash that kind of stuff now if you take that and you give it to brad and mike i'll show you what happens [Music] [Applause] [Music] there's some chester on it it was interesting because a lot of the process was actually done in scouting we were literally just kind of mumble [Music] words we have a musical idea that we like the goal has been to get vocals on it right away and because it would take too long to actually write words that make sense the first thing that microchester will do is just go on the vocal booth and spontaneously sing using gibberish you know you listen to a track and you hear a bunch of donna naws and i always made a joke with mike i'm like man you know this chick donna you know she's she must be something because every song is written about her [Music] very complicated harmony harmony [Music] yeah try that one we learned the discipline to just take the initial musical idea and put the vocals on it and you can tell right away whether it's worth developing those ideas where the content was the strongest are the ones that got all then they got worked up stylistically so already you can tell that this version now is in the range that we wanted to sing it in the words were wrong but it was the right melody and rhythm i rescated the verse because i'm not sure if the words are making me think of certain melodies so i wanted to remove the words it's funny listen to these because i mean there's no words you know it's just we're just it was hard for i think a lot of the guys to really attach themselves to the melodies early on without hearing words and especially for rick we'd jump lyrics and he'd be like this doesn't mean anything to me whether or not the lyrics were good enough or not he wanted to hear the song sung so i ended up singing tracks you know 15 16 30 times you know all the way from this [Music] [Music] and that's how we do hi boardy look it's rob board my hello it's band meeting time it's been a meeting time yeah at one point we're listening to all the stuff that we really really liked and we were kind of in shock saying wow this is this is really different than what lincoln park has sounded like in the past and what are we gonna do about this we were trying to stay in that frame of mind that rick talked to us about in the beginning was don't think about what it should sound like just think about what you like and what sounds good to you we had like weird dance songs and heavy metal songs and like stuff that sounded real 80s and if anyone ever heard the stuff they wouldn't think it's the same band sometimes it's kind of like aimless wandering you know we're making music but we don't know what it's going to be or what it should be is this important as a discovery process there's always been piano mike's really good at the piano rob's good at the piano too um he played some piano on some stuff just in general this album is more musical in a different way it's it's not specifically just like guitar distortion it's more songs and then we've tried to think about unique ways to arrange them that's a piece of a song that was i think number like 72 or something like that it made it made it into the mix it was in the mix and stayed in the mixture a little bit but then got voted out so goodbye to that really the scariest part i think for me was you know hearing something that i loved and that i thought was really beautiful and different and you know whether or not it was going to survive you know the process this is the precedes folder um these are the rough song ideas that still need musical work which at this point probably won't be happening but some of the uh the greatest merit to these songs are their titles some of my favorites include um electric uvula hemophiliac chunky monkey one of my favorites resident turd face and i think probably one of the most witty titles that chester came up with clever name when we crossed the hundred seed mark i think everybody looked around and went i can't believe that we've made this much stuff in this amount of time just to give you a sense of how much like raw material there is i'm the least creative one in the group so i would title them song a then song b i did song a through z and the only one that actually made it like the next step was song q so that might also be reflection of just how bad the stuff i brought in was there was definitely a learning curve we had a few great songs off the bat and then we had a lot of crap there's definitely a lot of bad stuff like when i say 150 songs the majority of it's crap but yeah you'll never get to hear any of that we've made two records in the past and we've done some other projects on the side and they've all been unique in a certain way and this was completely different than anything we've done before we went about the entire process completely backwards for instance we never went into the studio until we were let's say 80 done with the songs this process we actually went to the studio about a year before the completion date starting from at home on our individual rigs to bringing them in to what we call the corn studio which is a space that corn owns we were there from january of 06 to the middle of 06 and then we moved everything to laurel which is really a house you have to bring in all the gear it was a cool house as far as being on the hill and having some of the history but it's really worn down the first time we walked into the house we knew some of the rumors that houdini had lived there that people had said it was haunted and what not [Music] they won't let me out i'm so scared i keep hearing noises i just [ __ ] my pants dude i thought this was real [Music] dude i thought that was a real dinosaur for a second i mean looking around in this studio you know this is a studio studio that we're at nrg right now you know you've got the board you've got the nice room with the acoustic treatments on the walls you know everything is set up to sound as good as possible we're used to recording in a room like this but when we did the record with rick he immediately said why don't we go to you know the laurel canyon house it made a lot of the guys uncomfortable at first because they're like i don't know it's definitely not going to sound as good for sure there's no way it could but there's also a certain feeling like when you're coming to a studio you're at work when you're at a house you could be hanging out and for the first you know month we'd be screwing around a lot like playing a lot of basketball and messing around we're chilling at the studio [Applause] 15 15 oh 30 15 and sets that's not to say that no work got done but it is to say that there was a there's an adjustment period in a studio you don't really know what time of day it is you lose track of the hours you know you go outside and you're surprised it's dark out but in the house you can actually see the day as it changes and that was something that was helpful during the process you know watching cars driving by and all that it felt like we were still part of society in a way rather than being closed in this environment where you don't really know what's going on in the outside world glass hurts when you walk into it so that that mistake should not be repeated we started to write songs in like an organic kind of fashion we just naturally started to focus and stop screwing around and start really working hard the house kind of had this vibe and it kind of lent itself to creative atmosphere and then it was also like really desolate and kind of empty and cold you know so it was an interesting contrast there are three stories on in the laurel canyon house i mean there's tons of little weird rooms and three floors of weirdness going on just stairways to curve around in strange directions and rooms that only are only like six feet tall come in here i'll show you where chester is real quick this is the room we're working in and then two rooms away camera camera camera camera and that's where chester's at hey this is the amp room this thing right here this is pretty much the most expensive amp you can get check out these amps like each of these amps is basically the cost of a hotel room a day i think this is the most expensive thing we're renting at the moment in the house it's known as the bo diddley amp the company that manufactured these only made like 20 of them apparently they custom made like 50 and i'm sure like 10 of them were destroyed of the 50 that they made he probably went through 30 of them eventually so like our engineer andrew said he's literally only seen this ant like a picture of this amp looks like a piece of crap to me but apparently it sounds kind of cool the clean sound on this is just a joke and then a really cool feature to turn it around is it actually has a tape delay so it's super cool and super expensive i don't know what these knobs do but i know that i'm not supposed to touch them brad's gonna be so pissed look at that unlike a traditional studio where you've got really one room to work in we had i think we either called it a or one which was the first floor and that was the main tracking room the control room was set up in what used to be like like a library and then the tracking took took place in what probably would have been like the living room and then on on two we had all our electronic gear set up so if we wanted to mess with a melotron or you know old moog keyboard or weird synthesizers and drum machines 808s that's where we could do that work simultaneously and then at the end of the process we also had a rig up on three where the vocals were being cut i'm gonna leave a little present in here for ethan and then i'm gonna go outside so i really felt at the end like we were maximizing all of the studio space people would be working on any of the three levels in different rooms at the same time i mean we could have four different things going on at once and there's a studio recording vocals upstairs i could be on the second level writing more lyrics joe could be doing beats and stuff in the room next door and then drums and guitar could be tracking downstairs multitask i don't eat pizza and pringles i ate pizza pringles the pizza is right in here that's more pringle so we're on our way over to the studio i probably go over the studio almost every day i have a few more days of recording to do joe's actually in right now working with andrew our engineer so i'm kind of like getting in where i fit in around his schedule there was a lot of freedom you know it wasn't one room dedicated to like only one person being able to record at a certain time we had tons of equipment around and you could just come in at any time and record so like i would just basically start running all the sounds into different apps and different rooms there's always so much going on within a song so a lot of times after working in the studio i would go back to my practice room and work on some of the parts that i knew i was going to record the next day so now i'm on my way over to my drum studio i go back and forth a lot from the laurel studio to my drum room there's actually times when i'm working in the studio i'll hit a point where i know that i just need to stop working on the actual recording process and go back to practicing and writing i've been to the studio probably hundreds of times in the last year it almost feels like groundhog's day at some point there are other days that are really incredible days where new ideas come out and i get a lot done one of the things that rick has really been impressing on us is that when the ideas are just flowing it's really important to just run with those and to keep going so when that happens i just i stay there as long as my body can physically handle it evil idea was done at laurel this song was written at the laurel studio and i actually worked on the drums with mike there as mike was sitting in the control room i was sitting at my kit and we were just coming up with different ideas together so i've been through this song now and we've decided that this is the drum part for evo idea so at this point i'm just practicing [Music] this [Music] we have a lot of cooks in the kitchen and the songs tend to change a lot so i'm sure that when i get to the studio to track ebay idea there will be some changes that i haven't practiced yet just so are we punching in the end of that piece are we doing is the beat going to play up until this new fill that we're doing right now we're going to do a whole another take but i think just there's something interesting about the thing you almost played so we want to get that on the end of that take okay so it's just gonna be a tom lead-in to the yeah the songs were constantly changing and whenever anybody was inspired to do something they kind of just went and did it you could throw an idea out there and it doesn't work then we just revert back to the version before this concludes the drum session day and now i'm off to laurel for a band meeting where we sit and talk about all the great music we're making we've always been more of a studio style band and then said let's learn how to play these songs live when it comes to that and this time you know we experimented with the fact of it's never worked in the past but what if we do kind of sit and all try and record at the same time what's that going to look like how's that going to feel we're here at laurel today working on two songs patience and ebo idea and we're playing them live as a band to see if that result is better than the versions we have already in the computer which were mainly tracked individually we sat down and kind of put rob in a section me and a section brad in a section and then most hilarious of it all is mike and chester in their own little vocal booths chester's being like completely enclosed and probably only six and a half feet tall so it's kind of really low like ceiling and extremely hot and muggy so we'd all be you know playing and chester's in there completely naked just sweating and disgusting what are you doing there dude it's [ __ ] partying toasty in there he's partying in there huh yeah i don't know why you kept those on let's see about taking them off but i didn't want to make anybody uncomfortable the mentality that rick brings is you know he'll try anything and so if someone gets an idea when you're listening to something i know if you're working on a guitar part doesn't sound right let's try it on let's try and play it on a piano let's try and play it on a banjo let's try and play it on anything we're literally at this point trying everything after i finish this i'm gonna have to go through and replay all these options with my fingers and after i finish that i'm gonna have to go through and replay all the options with my teeth whenever you're trying to create the beginning middle and end of a song all the solutions you've found that have worked you can't use them anymore you're in a sense even more limited or even more challenged to come up with something uh compelling and unique the drums that actually ended up on drum song are the drums that i recorded in that little home studio we'd put a ton of work into a song and trying to develop an idea and rick would say you know what that let's go back to the original form where that song was at i think i liked that better it was frustrating for me when i was in the studio and i heard rick's opinion on it i invested probably 50 to 100 hours of work on the drums and all of it was just for practice that sucks to hear at times but a lot of times it was kind of like everybody agreed once i got past that initial reaction i just sat back and listened to it and a beat him and i went they're so he's so right he's dead on i think we in the prior albums figured you know if we put 20 hours of work into this or x amount of time will work and we've rewritten it this many times then where we're at now has to be better than where we're at two weeks ago or six months ago there's all these different roads you can take don't just walk down it you gotta like pummel that road to the point that it's no longer working look santa who a fairy anything happy there's a specific moment in the recording and writing process that was way different from any other record we've ever done now normally what happens is if somebody feels like they really don't like a part they'll just catch us in the studio and say you know that line da da da i really don't like it can you check with the other guys and see if that's true for them too today what we did is we put all all songs are in the computer downstairs with all the vocals and we printed out lyrics on everything and the rest of the band is sitting down there and basically picking picking everything apart yeah apart all of our work and saying what's wrong with it we open the door i should say i did because i don't think chester wanted to to the other guys to make comments and notes on our vocals i appreciate democracy but at the same time i have very strong feelings when it comes to the kind of music that i want to listen to and we had rick lead that meeting so it was four guys and rick and he basically moderated it and when there was a consensus about a line or a part whatever they'd write it down we knew that we didn't want really want to be in that meeting so we decided to go up and continue working on other things if the answer is going to come back try a different direction it's kind of kind of really it's too late for that was tough because for me and the way i think like they were all wrong already but it was interesting because like i wanted to hear what they had to say and then i wanted to like you know i wanted to re you know give my rebuttal they're gonna come back they're gonna be like we've got good and bad news you should sit down we like 80 of your stuff the other 20 uh start over it ended up being a lot more notes than you we would normally get on a record which sucked one of the notes i remember the way it was worded was this doesn't sound like music i was just like i was like [ __ ] you guys when you work for two months on anything and somebody tells you that they don't like it your first instinct is well [ __ ] you you do better you you come in here and try and beat this because i've worked my ass off and i can't like that's all i got we'll bring we'll bring down like a like a stack of papers like this big and be like yeah we've got some notes on the music um let's start with bass hey joe you know what i i think your notes are really good go ahead and do it i'll finish [ __ ] doing all the samples it's easy for them to say maybe you should go back and like try to make this better they don't understand that mike and i have already done that probably 50 60 times before we even show them so when everybody gets involved telling you what you already know they're going to say it gets really frustrating actually one of the four of you guys go up there with ethan finish [ __ ] singing the records rewrite the lyrics mike and i will sit down here and we'll [ __ ] pick through all your [ __ ] and once we got over that it was like okay four guys don't like this and it's not good i mean no matter how much we like it we can say that it's good but it's not great then it took a long time to fix some of those things because it really needed to be special in order for it to be better than what it was it worked out for the for the greater good but man it was like pulling your teeth out you know at some points i think at the end of the the whole thing everybody feels really invested you know and that's important i want everybody to listen to the record and go i had a say in everything you know these were last week's lyrics you know this there's the last week's lyrics and this and these are the rewrites here's some chester's some chester's notes my notes rewriting rewriting rewriting most of them around like version four or five rewrites per but this one has 838 million rewrite that's how i felt about that one i was not happy to be rewriting it again i was joking with people like when we were about three months in that i was writing myself out of the record because i was singing everything i was like you should probably sing you do all the harmonies live you've been working at this now for you know seven almost eight years i think you should try there were no rap parts at all like i just put it down as singing because that's what i thought sounded better like i try and put rap stuff on it i thought it sounded cheesy it sounded cliche he would sing songs and we'd listen to it and if there was an aesthetic that his voice brought to the track that mind couldn't capture that was really you know unique and genuine then we went with it [Music] what ended up happening is people listen to some of those and in a couple cases compared it to chester's we did as banned and chester was like yours is way better don't even use my vocal and we had him sing it too just to just to make sure that we weren't being crazy i consider chester one of the best singers of our time i mean that's not just being in the band with the guy i would challenge anybody to sing the stuff that he sings to cover the song and make it sound anything like him it can't you can't do it you know and there are other singers that are like that and i think he's on that level for him to listen to something that i sang and say yours is better that's and that was crazy for me we came back to nrg at the end of this process laurel canyon house was already being revamped for a new project when it comes to just needing to get stuff done and having things set up the way we're really familiar energy has always been a really good place for us to work i made a joke to jay the owner that apparently our record isn't a record until we've spent money here you know what's nice about nrg when you walk in the door that's love man thanks jake pictures guitar solo take one you'll edit that part out [Music] coming in here to put the golden golden ticket in the wonka bar that's what i'm here to do may i have a wonka bar please two chocolate monkey balls this stops all the pop from getting through just rock just pure rock can get through this one hey wait take the popper stopper off and show show the folks at home what happens if the popper stopper comes off here's here's here's the chorus i've given up right put the popper stopper off i've given up put it back on it's amazing isn't it it's like all it's like it's like all of a sudden i get like really pinned i've definitely said this before i think chester is one of the best singers in the world the fact that he's the singer in the band i'm in is like pretty dope for me tasty we have this like ongoing joke we were like kind of laughing about it we're like okay and you're done one more time [ __ ] excellent let's do a double of that and you're done for today for now it got to the point where like you actually really did finish i got in my car and i was driving home and brad called me and goes we forgot to double this one line i was like you gotta be kidding me at 4 36 i looked in here and i saw these tracks up here are the ones that we were supposed to re-sing and i noticed that this one ended here so that means there was one word that i forgot to have him sing and we had told him to go home that he was done finally at 4 35 and so 4 36 through 439 i tried to fake it by copy and pasting different things and fudging it so i didn't have to ask him to come back and fortunately that didn't work so it is now 4 40 p.m and once again you're back hey guys i'm going back in just when i thought i was out they pulled me back in i'm an [ __ ] i can't believe that happened so that sucks i'm like the chick who's like you know boyfriend keeps promising to take her out but never does it's kind of like that only i'm the guy that keeps getting told like hey the record's done that good job we need you to come back every step of the way it's been this where it's like oh we're done and oh no we're not quite done last one ready i'll believe it when i'm open when i'm opening the cd time is okay so go home and we'll see you probably again soon oh yeah don't leave quickly don't leave too quickly i might need you i'm still waiting for the call to come back in and finish i'm not going to consider this record done until i can actually go to a store and buy it [Laughter] the guys gave me a production credit on this record next to rick rubin which i couldn't be more excited about you know that's a huge nod and and i had to live up to that so i tried my best to really get involved with instrument like i always do and just try and make sure that they know that i'll be there to bounce ideas off of i'll make sure that everything is put together correctly you know we're going to be recording strings on six songs today we're starting with drum song today which is probably the most all right special song on the record to some and uh [Music] we worked with david campbell on the strings who has scored our songs before mike and i met with him and listened to all his arrangements and actually brought them back to mike's home studio and added things to them and changed them and made sure that they were working with our sense of the songs brad and i and dave did all the work that we have to worry about last week where we wrote all the parts to make sure they're right and change them and change them and we've come mocked them up on keyboards so at this point it's on autopilot i can say i can have a sandwich and i know they're gonna be awesome [Music] this is such an awesome day one because we don't do anything because this might explain we've already worked the parts out and everyone's so professional between the players and the conductor and andrew you just get to enjoy it [Music] it's funny because the strings ultimately get mixed just one element in the song but on the day where they're recording them if you're listening through the board it's like the loudest thing the string parts themselves are really beautiful i'm so proud of how those sound in and of themselves and then when you add them into the songs it's just one element kind of exemplifies the depth and the layering sonically that goes into the making of each song it sounded great in the control room but it sounded even better in the room it's like incredible sounding [Music] [Applause] i don't know it's harder like writing songs or like actually like trying to like name the record there was definitely a point where i was potentially i was gearing myself up to be very unhappy with and disappointed with the album title our band is so bad at coming up with titles for things i mean we have a dvd called frat party at the pancake festival like you know we're horrible at it frat party pancake festival was mine also you know we had a couple different ideas that have been kicked around that kind of stuff and there was one that a couple guys liked um that it was uh in triumph and tragedy there was probably like 15 names or titles that like i thought were great but like somebody in the band was like chester brought up this idea about um the doomsday clock i was watching the special on the doomsday clock it was developed as kind of like the idea to kind of mark the end of the world there's only 15 minutes on the on the doomsday clock the nine mark to the midnight mark and it can move back and forth you know the more uh heated things are in the world the closer we are to midnight just the idea of minutes to midnight can mean so many different things you know it's got that feel of uh like something important it's got that feel of like something like looming told the guys about the idea of the doomsday clock thing and and applying that to kind of like how the band has changed from you know what we used to be like to like what we've become you know um and the risk that that that that's involving um so minutes to midnight kind of made sense chester may claim that he's excited about it because he named it quote unquote he's gonna relish in glory forever i cracked the code on that one i may have been even more excited about it just because i was safe from an album title i didn't like at all the last song we finished a song called what i've done to me that song encompasses what the album is it's kind of a little bit of a link from from the previous stuff we've done into this lyrically it's it's it's about like recognizing the faults of the past and trying to move on with with the future and that's what this album's about i think that we did reinvent ourselves in a big way on this record and i think listening to the music you can tell that it's lincoln park but there's something different about there's something new and fresh as chester put it really eloquently once you know at this point we're not just idiots jumping around the stage we really grew as songwriters on this record we were able to take stuff that was just so out there and make it sound like our band and put our touch on it can never control what happens to the record once it's released but you can control the process and and the record that you make and what it sounds like and that's how i define success i don't feel like i have to defend it i don't feel like i have to say anything other than i hope you like it you know this is this is something we're proud of this is something that we're excited about and to this point or at least right now that this is this is the best we can do you know this is this is lincoln park at its best face myself [Music] i'll face myself [Music] so [Music] i paid for your [Applause] [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] is [Music] peace

Channel: Linkin Park

Views: 899,775

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Id: XazANPCQ4UI

Length: 39min 59sec (2399 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021