What gear are you working with at Waterloo Sound?
I track on a few different machines. There's an Alesis HD24 hard drive recorder, a Tascam 1-inch, 16-track tape machine, and a Teac 8-track, 1/2-inch machine. Over the years, I've come to peace with the equipment I'm able to have, as opposed to feeling sad about equipment I can't have. My board is a 32-channel Mackie, made in the '90s. I've always wanted to replace it, but I haven't been able to. I used to be angry at it and blame it for bad work, but Chris Keffer [at Magnetic North Studio], who masters most of my stuff, helped me get over that. Chris helped to instill the idea in me that an engineer proves his ability by doing good work, in spite of sub-professional equipment.
What about microphones?
Most of my condensers came from a studio that went bust years ago. I inherited other mics from my friend, Scott Bennett, who ran the old Waterloo Sound in his house [in Kent, Ohio]. I go to Shure dynamics a lot for drums, amps, and vocals. I also like the Cascade Fat Head ribbon mic on amps. There's an Oktava tube mic that gets used on vocals and acoustic instruments. I have [Sennheiser] MD 421s for bass cabinet and toms, [AKG] D 112 on kick drums, and an Electro-Voice 635A on vocals. For acoustic guitar and ride cymbal overheads, I like the [Shure] SM81. A good, neutral-sounding condenser that I use a lot on vocals and drum overheads is the Audio-Technica AT4050. I also like the built-in mic on the old boombox Bob [Pollard] uses to make demos!
You also use a Vintech X73 preamp for the snare mic. How did you decide on that preamp?
Chris Keffer had one of those in his studio. I admire a lot of recordings from the '70s, and whenever I'd talk to engineers they all seemed to be in agreement that this was the preamp for that fat snare sound. That is an important part of the drum sound to me.
What do you have for tracking rooms?
I built them out of an open basement, which I partitioned into a control room and two main recording rooms. They're small — about 9 by 12 feet. I couldn't afford to line the walls with hardwood, so I ended up completely deadening one room with fiberglass insulation, and I angled the walls so I wouldn't get standing waves. I have complete control of the sound in that room. The other room has some concrete walls, so I get reflections that aren't completely controllable. It has a little bit of a "bathroom ring" to it. Between the two rooms I can get a selection, and sometimes I'll put the drums in a third room that connects with the garage. It's full of standing waves, but it's a nasty enough "live" sound that, for some songs, it does the trick. In the old Waterloo studio, there was a big main room with hardwood floors; I could get a room sound and use it as part of the song. At the new studio, other than in the room with the nasty reflections, I'm not really able to do that. The drum sound at the new studio's more tight; I have to simulate room sounds with reverbs, or by putting a mic far off in another room. At first I was bummed out about that, but I haven't heard any feedback saying that the sound has deteriorated or anything. The first album of Bob's I did here was We All Got Out of the Army, and after that was Moses on a Snail.
The drums on your recordings still sound like they're being recorded in a space.
That's good. The room mic is actually a couple rooms away, and it's a Shure SM57 that I have pointed at the soundboard on a piano. After I moved out of the old studio, I missed having wood as part of the drum sound. The only wood surface I have now is the piano's soundboard. I get the reflection off that, and the distance from the source creates a little bit of a slapback. I assume the wood gives me a better reflection than the drywall and rough concrete in the basement walls, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.
There's a on many of the records you've made.
Sometimes I'll bus the bass drum and snare into a stereo compressor and run that back in under the mix, just to give them a little bump. I never noticed it overwhelming the drums with noise, or anything like that, but the aim is to give them a little bit of a kick. Usually I'll compress the room mic heavily and bring it up under the mix. Phase is important; I'm careful about phase while recording, just so we can get everything punching through. When I mix, I'm going back and forth between stereo and mono [monitoring] to check the phase situation, in case something was overlooked during tracking. I like to mix in mono anyway, on a tiny boombox, in addition to the [Yamaha] NS-10s, in the studio.
Your recordings tend to sound professional, without having an overproduced sheen.
Making a natural-sounding recording is important to me. I'm not schooled in any formal "production," so I just come at it with my ears. I'm not referencing any other recordings to try to sound like other people, and if a band ever comes to me and says, "Oh, we brought this record, can you make us sound like this," I just tell them I don't do that. I don't listen to anybody else's recordings and try to mimic them.
The Robert Pollard albums you've done seem cleanly-recorded, but occasionally there'll be songs that are intentionally distorted and abrasive, like "Kensington Cradle" on From a Compound Eye.
Yeah., either by putting the drums in a space where I get nasty wall reflections, or by distorting drum tracks. It's a combination of things. Sometimes I use an old '50s Webcor mono tube reel-to-reel deck and overdrive the input on that, which was the case with "Kensington Cradle." There are microphones, like the Electro-Voice 635A, that may not have a big frequency range, but that have a certain character in the midrange. Distortion pedals, running vocals or drums through amplifiers, more distant mic'ing, less close mic'ing, hard compression on distant mics... all those things can contribute to a rough treatment.
What's the benefit of giving songs that treatment?
I think it can give a song a sense of being in its own unique space, like the effect of listening to old songs recorded back in the '30s. The recording medium does a lot to determine the aura around a song. Do we record it on 24-track digital, 16-track tape, 8-track tape, or 1-track mono? I think it depends on the material. It has to be the right kind of song for that kind of treatment.
How did you come to start working as an engineer and producer?
I started with a cassette 4-track, doing instrumental music for my own enjoyment. I guess you'd call it experimental rock. I was also playing drums and bass in bands with my brother Tim [Tobias], who eventually joined Guided by Voices. That was in the late '90s. Tim showed Bob Pollard some of my music, and Bob proposed that the three of us form a new band called Circus Devils. That was in 2001. I've been working with Bob on most of his projects ever since then.
What was the first studio album you produced?
Universal Truths and Cycles, by Guided by Voices. It came out in 2002. That was my first experience in a studio as a non-musician, and I was the producer. [laughter] Everything I did before that was done at home, on the 4-track.
That's a pretty decent way to kick off a career! How was the experience of recording GBV for the first time?
Aside from the music? Sometimes I was afraid to step outside the control room.
Yeah, I would think their reputation preceded them.
Bob was good about making sure that anyone not doing actual work was kept out of the control room, so that was a big help. On the music side, it was intimidating at first, but I dove in and did all the engineering and mixing. I felt compelled to do everything, because I wanted to learn. I'd been through an engineering course in the mid-'80s at the Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio, but all I remembered from that was how to edit and splice tape with a razor blade. All the technical, gear-related stuff was mostly forgotten. What helped me the most was just recording Universal Truths..., and learning by doing it. We went to a studio in Dayton called Cro-Magnon, and the owner, John Shough, was kind enough to let me take over the project and to be there when I needed to ask questions. The process was strange, because I was thrown into this situation that I had no bearings for. But, at the same time, after listening back to the record, it gave me confidence that I could keep doing it. I'm grateful to Bob for giving me that chance to learn.
What was the hardest part of that experience, from a technical standpoint?
Getting to know compressors. I just went full-tilt into using compression on that record. I had no idea about the theory of it, so I was just approaching it with my ears, twisting knobs until it sounded right. So it's kind of embarrassing, because I should've at least read up on it. [laughter] Aside from that, the hardest part was probably just mixing with 24 tracks, plus all the bus tracks. When we were mixing, we had three guys up on the board doing stuff.
Did GBV choose you to record them partly because they wanted to get away from the slicker sound they'd gotten on the previous two records [Do the Collapse and Isolation Drills], when they'd worked with big-name producers [Ric Ocasek and Rob Schnapf]?
I think Bob wanted a paradigm shift in the band, and he was kind of finished with the whole "big-name producer" approach. So the switch to me was about as radical as you could make. That paradigm shift extended not just to their production, but even to their appearance. I think some of the guys in the band grew facial hair at that point. [laughter]
Some songs from Universal Truths..., like "Eureka Signs" or "Everywhere With Helicopter," seemed to hit , in terms of retaining clarity and a big sound, but without overproduction. There were also some shorter ones that were more roughly recorded.
It was a patchwork approach. The different rooms we were using on Universal Truths... probably had more to do with the sound of that record than my engineering did. On Do the Collapse or Isolation Drills, you get a homogenous sound, from front to back. But on Universal Truths..., the drums were set up in one room, recorded, taken down, set up in another room, recorded, taken down — plus I'd recorded one song on the 8-track tape machine, and another one on ADAT. They did half the record at one studio, and half at another.
Where did you go, besides Cro-Magnon?
Waterloo Sound in Kent, when it was still in Scott [Bennett]'s house.
The next two albums you did for GBV — Earthquake Glue and Half Smiles of the Decomposed — seemed more consistent sonically, even though there was still an occasional rough snippet.
Earthquake Glue was all recorded at Cro-Magnon, and Half Smiles was all recorded at Waterloo. There was less of a patchwork approach on those, but it was still going on, in the sense that we'd record certain songs on the 8-track tape machine, and then switch to 24-track ADAT or 2-inch tape for others.
