Recording
Reznor secretly made the then untitled recording under various pseudonyms to avoid record company interference. English record producer Flood, who produced "Head Like a Hole" and "Terrible Lie", the first two tracks on Pretty Hate Machine (1989), returned to work in 1992 on the EP for "Wish," "Last," and "Gave Up."
Reznor preferred to use a Zoom pedal for his Jackson guitar at nearly all times. He would convert these recordings into audio files via a Digidesign program on a Macintosh computer. As Reznor explains in retrospect: "Broken had a lot of the super-thick chunk sound, and almost every guitar sound on that record was me playing through an old Zoom pedal and then going direct into Digidesign's TurboSynth . Then I used a couple of key ingredients to make it unlike any 'real' sound."
Reznor's dog, Maise, was invited to the production of the EP. Her barking was recorded, along with Sean Beavan's line, "Ow!...fucker!", after Maise bit him. After being owned by Reznor for over three years, she died after jumping onto a railing of a three-story balcony to leg injuries and a cancellation of a concert, during the Self Destruct Tour.
Development on the record was done at seven studios, Hell at New Orleans, Louisiana, Royal Recorders at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, South Beach Studios at Miami, Florida; Village Recorder and A&M Studios at Los Angeles, California, and Le Pig at Beverly Hills, California. The last two studios were later used during the production process for The Downward Spiral (1994). Tom Baker mastered the EP at Futuredisc. Following this step, Reznor presented the recording to Interscope Records on September 1992, and signed to the record label, making Broken Nine Inch Nails' major label debut.
Read more about this topic: Broken (EP)
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