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Mario Calire
Multiple Grammy Award winning drummer Mario Calire chats about his experience working on the new Ozomatli album. The Writing Process:"Since Ozomatli tours so much, different guys in the band are always working on new music on the road. Just about everyone has a laptop and uses it for composition. Most of the songs get written in a demo form in ProTools., and Justin Poree (percussionist) does a lot of drum programming. It isn't what they want the end product to sound like but it gets the job done for demoing songs. When it comes time to record, the band looks to me to bring the tracks to life, add energy and a human feel." "As far as my drum parts go, some of the new songs have actually been around for a few months and we've been playing them live. That gave me a great opportunity to find just the right parts well before we recorded them. However there were quite a few songs I hadn't played much at all before I sat down to record them. I had to learn fast and go with my instinct. I don't chart out drum patterns very often unless something is hanging me up, but I often make a rough sketch of the arrangement and I find that helps me a lot." Pre-Production:"On this album, I had the luxury of a couple days of pre-production rehearsals before we went in to record "for real". The way Ozomatli has been writing, most of the new material is already demo'd in ProTools so pre-production consisted mostly of me playing through the songs along to the tracks. Since this was how most of the record was going to go down, it was nice to have a run through. We also ran through a few songs that we would be tracking live as a band. We have a great producer (KC Porter) and engineer (Robert Carranza) so they came down and checked out what we were doing." Set Up/Recording:
"We were lucky enough to be cutting basic tracks at Oceanway Studios in Hollywood. Studio B is famous for its great acoustics and a hand built recording console. We only had four days to get 16 tracks done, "This is going to be a lot of work", I remember thinking..." 
"I set up my GMS kit in the big room as the primary kit, and my 1969 Ludwig kit in a side room as the secondary kit. The main room is quite large and has really high ceilings. You can see in the picture there is a big hexagonal dome that sort of flies over the kit. You can raise it or lower it to tighten up the drum sound as you wish. It looks really 70's but all the engineers said it really works. In the side room, we went with a minimal 3-microphone set-up to get a more vintage type of sound. We used this kit more as a texture when we needed a different vibe." 
"I brought a ton of snares as well as cymbals; you never know what drums are going to work in a given room. For Ozomatli, so much of the music is groove-oriented and the snare drum really needs to cut. I ended up using mostly 3 or 4 out of the 15 snares I brought down. Gersh from Drum Fetish came down on the first day to help me tweak all the drums and get sounds. He works a lot around town and mostly these days with Brain from GNR so I was stoked to get him. I love tuning my drums and being hands-on but it was great to have help so I could focus on playing." "We were in the studio 12 hours a day and most of that time I was sitting at the drum stool. Because we were on a tight schedule, we rarely got the chance to hear back any takes, we were always moving on to the next song. Although tracking this album was a whirlwind, we got a great foundation laid down and I'm really looking forward to hearing it all done. Dig!"
Mario Calire has been a Vater Artist since 1996 and uses the Vater Steve's White's Hitmaker and Slick Nut.
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