With roots tracing back to 2011, Toronto’s Intervals have risen to the top of the heap when it comes to the modern sounds of progressive rock.
With founding member and guitarist Aaron Marshall at the helm, Intervals quickly gained traction after the release of their debut EP The Space Between “mixed and mastered by Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood of Periphery fame.”
Fast forward to the present day and Marshall is the sole member of Intervals, opting to play live with a touring band from 2015 onwards.
Intervals
2024 has been a particularly busy year for the 44-year-old virtuoso, May saw the release of Intervals’ highly anticipated 5th studio album Memory Palace along with a 10-date North American tour supporting Wolfgang Van Halen’s band Mammoth.
Catching up with Aaron in early August it seems like there’s been no sign of slowing down as he sits in his new “and bare” home studio. After a recent move, he is avidly debating how exactly he plans to set up the space.
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“I’ve got the desk and the studio computer, the essentials. Now I just need to unpack the synths and decide which guitars are going to go in the rack.” Upon poking Aaron for further details on his home studio setup the axeman was more than happy to divulge.
“All my setups revolve around the Elite desk from AZ Studios,” he goes on to reveal that the brain of his project studio is an Apple Mac Studio with Studio display.
Aaron continues to give some insight into his workflow stating “So much of what happens these days is in the box that as long as I can get that up into my Universal Audio Apollo I’m rocking.”
Additionally, he goes on to add that he uses a Focusrite Clarett pre to expand his I/O via ADAT “particularly when using synths,” elongated by an additional 8 mic preamps from the Apollo that he tends to use for guitars “whether plugging in direct or micing amplifiers in conjunction with a load box.”
Despite orchestrating a lot of his pre-production in the box Aaron is certainly not one to turn his nose up at hardware stating “I can do most things with just the interface, plugins are so good these days but I still love me some hardware.”
With a Moog Matriarch, Roland Juno 106, Sequential Prophet 6, Moog Sub 37 and a Novation Bass station all in tow, it’s clear that Aaron is passionate about utilising hardware synths in his productions.
“It’s cool to stumble across stuff, especially with the Matriarch, because of the nature of it being a 4 oscillator synth it’s paraphonic so you get a lot of happy accidents.”
An enthusiasm that only accelerates when it comes to the topic of guitars, with models by Artisedes, Musicman, Suhr, Lark and Abasi all in his arsenal.
However, Aaron’s main squeeze these days is his signature model which he developed in conjunction with the folks at Schecter Guitar Research.
With US-made 6 models just released “and 7 string models imminent”, Aaron has been playing the import models out on the road for years now.
“I’ve been playing the Diamond Series out on tour since 2021 and that’s how the relationship started, I was tasked with creating and speccing out a sick Diamond Series and we just started with that.”
Schecter AM-6
He continues on to explain that he only just received his first US-made prototype guitar last year, stating “I really beat the brakes off the Diamond Series before then.”
“We spent some time refining a few little things, neck profile, pickups and now we are here. Though I use a mix of the USA and Diamond series guitars, the USA-made guitars are like my crown jewel.”
It’s at this point that the topic shifts over to the making of Memory Palace, “I do all of my pre-production at home but the final recordings were done in Studio A at Sweetwater.”
Diving further into the recording of the album Aaron states “There is a whole studio documentary on our YouTube channel, we did 26 days and it was all tracked on Neve 5088.”
A far cry from the early days of Intervals in which The Space Between was produced as a home job. Aaron fills me in on his process “Besides the first EP I painstakingly manage all pre-production at home, then as I like to say when you need a tooth pulled you go to the dentist.”
Elaborating on this concise analogy he continues “I take it to a point to where it’s probably passable, then like a psychopath do it all again with the fidelity and scrutiny of a professional mixer.”
Jordan Valeriote, Cameron McLellan, Sam Guaiana and Simon Grove are just some of the engineers and producers Aaron has worked with over Intervals’ history, elaborating “We’ve taken a hybrid approach with some things changing over time.”
Wrapping up our brief but pleasant Tuesday morning chat we highlight November’s upcoming Monolith Festival featuring dates in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.
With a stacked bill featuring the likes of Intervals, Coheed And Cambria, Periphery, Leprous, Novelists and Silver Fang, Aaron is quickly reminded of previous trips to the land down under.
Glowingly, he recalls the 2018 co-headline tour with Polyphia. “We had just come from Southeast East Asia very tired, Polyphia flew over nice and fresh, I miss Australia dearly and I can’t wait to come back!”
Keep up with Aaron and Intervals here, and continue reading or buy tickets to Monolith here.
