Recording Tedeschi Trucks Band’s ‘Future Soul’ – Part 1

New York, NY (July 20, 2029)—When Tedeschi Trucks Band guitarist and vocalist Mike Mattison brought his “Future Soul” demo into the studio, it arrived fully formed in feeling, if not in execution. The track was grungy, urgent, a battle cry against a world where algorithms are eating the culture alive. Derek Trucks knew immediately what the recording needed to match it.

“I just want it to sound like the building’s going to blow apart,” he says.

That instinct became the north star for the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s sixth studio album, released March 20 via Fantasy Records. Produced by Mike Elizondo and co-produced by Trucks, Future Soul is the sound of a 12-piece band that could unfurl a song into the stratosphere, choosing instead to distill and sharpen.

After the sprawling I Am the Moon, a quadruple album recorded during the pandemic, TTB spent two years on the road. When the core of the band finally convened at the Trucks family farm in Georgia to write, the directive was clear: lean and mean. “We really don’t need to do that again,” Trucks says of the four-album format. The question was who would help execute their new vision.

Mike Elizondo’s name surfaced early. A prolific songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Elizondo has forged a genre-spanning career as a producer, moving fluidly from the rhythmic architecture of Dr. Dre’s 2001 to records with Eminem, Twenty One Pilots and Carrie Underwood. “Mike has lived a lot of lives musically,” Trucks says. “He’s comfortable in a lot of places.”

THE SWAMP RAGA SESSIONS

The sessions began at Swamp Raga, the studio that Trucks and Susan Tedeschi added on to their Jacksonville property. The control room had just undergone a rebuild—Future Soul was the first record made in the new space—driven in part by the room’s centerpiece: a vintage Neve 8048 console that had always felt like a tight fit.

“It went wall to wall,” says TTB’s longtime touring/recording engineer, Bobby Tis, who helped construct the studio more than 20 years ago and led the renovation alongside Derek’s brother David. “Part of building the new control room was building a space worthy of this amazing device.”

Elizondo arrived with his engineer, Justin Francis, who has worked alongside him for the past seven years. The sessions ran with an efficiency TTB hadn’t experienced before. Where the band’s default mode was to “roll in around noonish and go until people are just dropping on the floor,” jokes Trucks, Elizondo brought structure to the days. The approach to tracking matched that discipline: one or two takes per song, capturing the immediacy and live energy. Two or three completed tracks a day became the rhythm.

• Live Sound Showcase: The Tedeschi Trucks Band

Part of what Elizondo brought was a producer’s willingness to press on arrangements before committing them. Unlike previous TTB records where, as Tis puts it, they would “learn the tune and record it,” the band demoed extensively before the sessions began. Songs arrived with ideas largely worked out, but structures got reworked, sections revamped, melodies reconsidered.

“How long is that outro guitar solo going to be?” Elizondo asks. “Things like that, to just make sure that the album felt like it could move from song to song.” The goal was economy: nothing longer than five minutes, something listeners could latch onto and return to, leaving the stage as the place for songs to stretch and breathe.

CLASSIC TOOLS, NEW TEXTURES

The core tracking band consisted of Trucks, Tedeschi, drummers Tyler “Falcon” Greenwell and Isaac Eady, bassist Brandon Boone, keyboardist Gabe Dixon, and Mattison, who Tis calls “our utility guy,” contributing acoustic guitars and background vocals throughout. The two drummers were isolated from each other, one in the main room and one in an iso booth. “I try to be more sparing with microphones than I would be if I only had one drummer,” Tis says.

The sessions pushed Trucks into new sonic territory. Known for his minimalist guitar chain—Gibson SG, open E tuning, straight into a classic tube amp—he found himself reaching for new tools. “There’s something nice when you fall into new territory musically or sonically,” he says. “I think everybody kind of gets excited in a way that something about playing a song for the first time does that. And it’s the same when you hear your instrument from a different angle; you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know I could do that.’”

• Subscribe to Mix magazine and our daily SmartBrief newsletter for free!

Usually, a second amp running a dirty signal— what Tis calls “the slime sound”—was tracked alongside Trucks’ main rig, sometimes with a tape delay, sometimes through a Leslie. “It definitely led to some vibe in the tracks automatically,” Tis says. Trucks’ primary amp setup was captured with a blend of two microphones, typically a Neumann U47 FET paired with a Beyerdynamic M160 ribbon, or the M160 alongside an RCA 44.

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THE CONCLUSION!