You grew up in the DC area, right?
Yeah.
How old were you when you first sat in on studio sessions?
When I first started interning, I guess I would have been 13; right around eighth grade.
How did you know you were even interested?
I was shoved into music pretty young, with Suzuki lessons.
Your parents were into it?
Yeah, my mom played piano, and both of my parents thought it was a good thing. Takoma Park had bands around. The guitar player at this studio worked at some music stores my mom used to teach at. We had these neighbors who played in a band. They had a cool little basement studio where they'd jam a lot and let me hang out. They upgraded from their Tascam 234 4-track cassette to an 8-track cassette, and then they sold the 4-track to me. They started recording in a studio where a bunch of my gear later came out of, which was called Avalon Studios.
What kind of music were they playing?
They were world beat. They had a bunch of local musicians who were their buddies. Those were in the days of 2-inch and ADAT, where you'd sync them up with SMPTE. They bought an ADAT so that they could do overdubs at home while they recorded in the studio. That's where my tape machine and board came from. They brought me along a couple of times. I
think I was pretty bold. I got that shuttling, punching, and arming tracks was the same on my Tascam as it was on the MCI.
Right. That knowledge translated across.
It was the same thing to me. We wound up hanging out a bunch. I think, as I was younger, I hung out less on client sessions and got to hang out more during after hours studio family sessions; like the bass player's cutting a solo project, or whatever was going on.
That's cool. So they let you punch in and record?
Yeah, totally.
And you were in eighth grade?
I couldn't figure out my way around the board until probably ninth or tenth grade. I think the first week my boss actually took a vacation in Jamaica for ten days. I would have been going into eleventh grade. He left me some easy sessions, like local rock 'n' roll bands doing demos and voiceover sessions. I think he called once to make sure the place was still there.
Eleventh grade? You were young! Were people looking at you like, "Wait a minute"?
A little bit. I think I was definitely often mistaken for older, just by my attitude. I remember people trying to get me to do beer runs when I was assisting. It was a very nice studio, but it didn't look like the biggest commercial facility. It looked like a tried- and-true homemade, owner-operated studio. We had some cool bands come through, for sure; but it wasn't equipped with a huge reception area or hangout rooms. It was a studio. You came in, there was a live room, vocal booth, drum room, control room, and one lounge. There were a lot of small hip- hop sessions that I could handle. They were two tracks already, for the most part.
Like somebody brought in the beats?
Yeah, there was a lot of that going on. I was so into mics and mic'ing, but at that point my boss was more into sequencing. He had [Akai] MPCs and a record collection. He would let me cut a lot of the jazz bands. There would be a jazz band every month, as well as a couple of rock bands. It was a lull in the scene in that era. This is way after punk rock's era, and 20 years after the jazz scene.
Go-go was not really happening?
Nope, not really. I think go-go started making a comeback when I left. I think it's an amazing part of American culture there.
What led you to Nashville?
I was urged to come down here because there would be way more musicians. I dug that a lot more. I love playing with mics and moving things around. To me, getting sounds was so much more fun than anything else. That was the big thing, getting into a scene where that was happening way more.
How long ago did you move?
About 11 years ago. I was 21. A big thing was the leader of a jazz band I got to record. Montgomery College has this amazing jazz program. I got to record this guy, and he brought in some amazing players. He was intending to take it home and mix it himself on a computer. We tracked it all to 2-inch, and he said the sounds were better than anything he had gotten in 20 or 30 years. I told him I'd love to hang out with him while he mixed it. He let me hang out at his house and give him my thoughts when mixing. He was like, "You should move to Nashville. There are a lot of musicians there." I don't have any idea if he remembers me, or remembers it hit me that hard, but it really did.
Where did you start out when you got here?
I always had a home setup: I had my 4-track, an Otari 8- track 5050 1/2-inch, and I had Pro Tools 5 LE with the Digi 001. I probably had $300 worth of microphones. I would record bands in my house. In this town, especially then, every single person was in a band. Now I feel there are a lot more people here — a lot of different kinds of people. For a while there it was weird, like a gigantic music dorm room.
So your home became a studio?
The living room was the machine room and the control room — the everything room. Initially I had a little dugout basement. I sectioned off one area a little bit to be able to knock drums down some, and then I built these little booths that I could tuck amps into. It had really short ceilings. I guess I didn't really intend to start recording out of there. Just out of necessity. It got busier and busier. The ground floor — the living room/control room — got pretty intense, so we used the bedrooms. You'd go down one hallway and there was the piano. You could put the drums in there; it was loud as shit. Or you could put them in another room where they'd be really dark. I'd put things wherever they needed to go, in order to get the sounds I wanted. We tracked plenty of music in the basement back then. It was a big dirt hole. You could get the deadest, thickest sound out of that basement. I kept putting more windows and walls in, putting holes through walls, cutting holes through floors to run cables. It got to the point where it was like, "This house is going to cave in!"
It was a rental?
No, it was my house. If it was a rental I would have been in big shit.
Are you still living in that house?
You got the gear out of your living space?
Yeah, everything's moved out. We started making the house more normal again, little by little.
How many years have you been at the studio here?
This has been going on for four years now.
That's pretty nice. I'm surprised you had a B room back here.
Billy Bennett, who works here, is amazing. He came from Chase Park Transduction [Tape Op #14]. He recorded MGMT's Congratulations. He moved to town a couple years ago, and everyone kept telling us to meet up. He's an amazing engineer, producer, and human being; just a wonderful person. This room was a storage room for a long time. There's been so much overflow work, and I want to be able to help everyone I can. I tried to make this room first a "go and help yourself" room. "There's some gear, so do what you need, if I'm not available." It got to a point where there were clients who needed serious attention but couldn't always fit in. When I met Billy I was like, "Do you want to make this room your home base?" I've done some sessions back here, and I love it as a change of pace. There are other times when both rooms are super stacked up. It got busy enough that I thought I should get another tape machine.
Your MCI console and tape deck were from Avalon, where you started, in Maryland?
Yeah, those were the two things I grabbed from there. The MCI console, I think they call it a 636, even though you can get 38 channels in it.
Were they going all digital at that point?
Yeah. It was part of the times. I think a bunch of people were getting Pro Tools at home. It was a compatibility thing. They were doing less and less band recordings as I left. The tape machine was only getting used for occasional transfers.
It was a good time for people like us!
Totally. At that point, when I got the board, I was working on a bunch of APIs, Neves, and SSL consoles; all these things that had millions of features. When my old boss was talking about letting that MCI gear go, it was more sentimental than anything. I always said I never wanted to own a studio. That was my number one thing.
You shouldn't have said it.
I spent so much time maintaining studios I was working in, and I was always like, "I'm never going to own this."
But in today's environment, if you're producing and making records, you probably have to have a place.
Yeah. It's definitely gotten to be that way. I stay on one format, and we wind up doing the whole thing. It seemed like whenever I worked at places that would track to tape and dump to Pro Tools, projects wound up going through a lot of different hands. Here, for the most part, everything starts and ends here.
Are you keeping things on tape, if you can?
Totally. I just bought a normal Pro Tools rig. I've had a 12-year-old TDM rig this entire time, because I literally do nothing but a final archive with it. On occasion, someone might bring in a project they've started somewhere else, if they want to mix it here. I find the workflow to be way better. I have an easier time tracking on tape; spending the time getting it right on the front end and not trying to reinvent the mix after you've tracked.
It sounds like old-school recording.
It's how I started. Even my boss back in DC, who had gone through all these changes, I remember him one day saying, "I've seen it all. I've seen it start one way and wind up entirely digital. I've seen it go into the computer once and never back out of the computer. At the end of the day, the first way always sounded the best." This was, of course, after I bought his tape machine.
"Sorry!" I think the thing that people sometimes don't get through their skulls, especially these days, is that you can't always apply changes later and make sounds better. It's got to be better from the beginning.
It affects everything. It doesn't matter what you're doing, or want to do. If you're not printing some of your effects, dialing in certain sounds, or getting the right breakup or compression, the musicians don't play the same because they're using their imagination to imagine what it's going to sound like after you mix it. You can do the same thing with a computer that you'd do with tape, but it seems people tend to not. They leave a whole lot of safety of, "Let's get everything clean. Let's get a direct signal. Let's get a distorted signal and a crunchy signal." They get all these different sounds and decide later. If you dial in your sounds and focus on that, you can focus on the performance and really get that feeling out of the band. You can get a take that feels like something when you listen back to it.
We probably have both recorded many people who've never worked on tape before. Do you find the educational aspect of that interesting?
It's fun. Most people are like, "This is what I'm here for." People have all these funny misconceptions. They think that it all has to happen once, and that's it. People don't realize that you can ping-pong, comp, and do backwards psychedelic effects. You can do all kinds of cool things. It's funny because people don't always know all of the things you can do if you're good with your machine.
Like splicing.
Absolutely. I think the misconceptions have put everyone on their best behavior. It's not until later that I'll get the razor out. But you don't want to start with that. You want to keep everybody on their A-game.
You mentioned mic'ing skills.
That's a huge thing. I try to map that out beforehand a little; like being in the same room all the time, and knowing the drum really comes through this way or that way. Deciding if I want guitars to sound super in my face, direct and blown out on the board, or if I want drums to sound like John Bonham. Knowing that before I've set the band up is huge. I think the song and the performance come first, then it goes all the way to your board, and then your mics. How many times have you been in a situation where someone's in the lobby of a studio? They grab their guitar and say, "Let's do this one next!" They play the song on acoustic guitar, it's got all this life, and then you put them in a tiny booth and throw a mic near them. All of a sudden the life is sucked out of everything. It seems it would be a no brainer that you put a mic in front of someone and it sounds as good as if you were sitting there. But mics are nothing like ears. It's about learning how to get what you like out of a sound.
Did you get to watch a lot of other people engineer when you were young?
Yeah, absolutely. Getting to hang out in a project studio environment, I got to hear what sounded different. "The big studio has an AKG C414, and so does the little space. Why does it sound so different on the same drum set?" You learn the room has something to do with it, as well as with the drum tuning.
Do you feel like kind of an anomaly for Nashville?
It's a little different. I don't even think I'm really a part of the main Nashville industry, at least what it was when I came here. I get more clients from out of town than from here. I've had a couple people say, "We're going to try to do this pop country thing." It's a whole different workflow. When tracking a band, I get one mix that sounds like what we're shooting for. Everyone shares the mix and plays to one thing. I've been caught in situations doing union sessions, where someone pulls up, everyone plays their part, everyone's in complete isolation, and then everyone has their own mixing board where they can listen to whatever they want. The bass player and drummer aren't even listening to each other. Everyone's got the click, the guide, and whatever they want to play off. We're all making a song together right now. You're supposed to hear everything in its appropriate place.
On the other hand you've got Jack White [Tape Op #82] who's got a very strong recording aesthetic.
Yeah, probably. I guess when I think of the main industry here, I'm thinking back a few years before. It was a different thing. I got a little bit of time in that world, and it sharpened my skills. It's like being in the Navy SEALS of engineers. When the guitarist walks in to do an overdub, you've got to be dialed in before they even play a note. Then you hit record, and if it's not right, everyone looks at you. You're tracking 12 songs a day with an hour break every three hours.
Three on, one off.
Exactly. You're laying down so many tracks, as well as all these overdubs. The piano player has piano, a synthesizer, an organ, a Wurli, and a Rhodes. You've got to be ready to go. In that world I learned that there's no time to be, "Dude, what's that sound like?" It was a good thing, because it made me want to think about it beforehand. It made me want to say, "Okay, this is going to be a Leslie guitar part, so let's drag the Leslie in while we're listening to this other song."
How long did you do that? What places were you working?
I bounced around a couple places. A couple years at most. I was working my way into that scene, and then I thought, "This is not for me." I've got a couple of friends in that world who I tagged along with. It's cool to be able to run that fast, or to be at an SSL with 74 channels and able to flip and fly through everything. But I found myself getting a recall sheet for a tracking session. It's like, "You want me to set these EQs before you even walk into the room?" I like the speed and things, but I also like listening to what's going on in a room. You still have to have some time for that to be able to get it right. You can't know what your EQ is before you even put the mic on a drum. It makes no sense.
