How did you get into recording and how did Stillness evolve?
How I got into it is fairly relevant; I've always thought in visual terms. The way I mix and the way I approach placing microphones is to capture a cogent, believable space that is easily visualized. When I started recording music as a teenager I was mainly preoccupied with visual art. I always listened to music when I painted and it occurred to me that I was cheating, because I had this silly idea that the music was influencing me and that wasn't right and that I needed to make my own music to listen to when I painted. I decided to set out and make some of my own recordings rather than playing with other people. I got a hold of whatever instruments I could and whatever happened to be around the house. I just started rigging tape decks together and bought a little 4-channel Radio Shack mixer. I had gotten pretty good at doing the multiple cassette players thing, so I picked up a couple of 1/4 inch stereo machines in pawn shops or thrift stores for $20 and started doing the same thing with them. Then next it was a 4-track cassette. At my first job away from home, a co-worker, who was a musician, had a 1/4 inch 8-track studio in his basement, which he invited me to use. He couldn't really be around much to help, so it involved me figuring out what was going on from what little I knew and what basic knowledge of electronics I had. I ended up renting all that gear from him and moving it into my basement where I started recording my band. Those recordings got around and people started asking me to record them. I decided it was time to start charging. By that time I was about 20. From that point on this is all I've done.
When did you move Stillness into its current location?
Three years ago. The sound of the rooms pleased me and I decided, well, this is it, wood floors, plaster walls, high ceilings. I don't like to do a lot of acoustic treatments. I like to find a place that just sounds good inherently, so if I want to use it open I can. If I want to close it down I have all these resonator sound absorbers that I can move around to tailor the acoustics. I find that, when using the fundamental character of the room sound, artificial reverbs become much more believable. Basically, what you're doing in that process is making rooms bigger, rather than totally altering the character of the sound. With the new Stillness, I went for a much more natural atmosphere. I tried to keep it, for a lack of a better word, homey. I think that the concern of any competent engineer is not just getting a clean sound on tape and saying "Well I did my job," but also creating an environment which is comfortable. People can relax and disconnect themselves from the fact that they are recording, because recording isn't necessarily a terribly good experience for a lot of people.
How long are your recording days?
It really varies from project to project. Generally I prefer 6 to 8 hour sessions. A lot of the records I've done have been recorded in 5 or 6 consecutive days, so we need to put in pretty long days to do it right and that turns into 12 or 14 hour days pretty easily. It depends also on who else is involved. Usually when I work with Neil [Hagerty] and Jennifer [Herrema from Royal Trux] it turns into very long days. Sometimes I'll get started with the band around noon and then Jennifer and Neil might show up around 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. and will want to work till about 4:00 in the morning. So we'll be working on basic tracks or overdubs that we know we need to do or vocals that we know we need to do and Neil and Jennifer will get there and listen to everything we've done and evaluate it. So doing the Edith Frost record [Telescopic on Drag City] was sometimes 16 hour days.
How do you feel about the analog versus digital debate?
While the bulk of what I do happens in analog, I work in a hybrid environment where both are available and very frequently working in tandem. Sometimes tracks that have been recorded in analog will be flown over to the computer, edited and moved back. I generally keep drums and electric instruments on analog and if all 16 tracks have been filled up with that activity then vocals or perhaps acoustic instruments will end up on ADAT or on the computer. I don't very commonly record directly to the computer. The bulk of what I do can and does happen on 16 tracks, but if there's time I sometimes end up using both anyway, because I've been doing more and more redundant micing and stereo micing.
You have a 1" machine right?
It's a Tascam MS-16 1" 16 track which runs at 30 inches per second and I don't use noise reduction.
Often arguments in favor of analog revolve around the assertion that the equipment is better.
The equipment itself is generally built better. The best analogy for the analog versus digital debate is film and video. Video is cheaper, you can edit it much more easily, you can do things with it that you can't do with film, but film is much more believable much richer looking. There have been great movies shot on video and there have been bad movies shot on film, so the medium doesn't decide it. I think it's good to have a big technological vocabulary as well as a good understanding of acoustics and natural spaces. If you don't have a choice then do whatever you have to do on whatever you've got. But if I had to choose only one format it would be analog.
Let's talk about your drum sound.
My favorite reverb processing unit is my bathroom. The bathroom is adjacent to the drum room, so I just open the door and put a mic in the bathroom. Sometimes it gets used throughout as part of the sound, or sometimes it's just brought in for certain sections of music to expand the sound. For every foot the microphone is from the source, there's a one millisecond delay. With the way that the bathroom is situated, the sound has to bounce around a number of times before it actually gets in there, so you get something along the lines of a 40 millisecond delay and this very colored reverb with a short duration. The more dense the music is, the less that works.
When you're recording, how assertive are you with aesthetic ideas?
I try not to put my stamp too much on things. I don't tend to repeat things terribly often. I use the bathroom fairly commonly, but usually in different ways. It sits in the mix differently or it's applied differently or the sound that I'm getting from that room is treated differently, so it has a different characteristic overall. Very frequently the stimulus is actually the band. Sometimes it's just responding intuitively to what bands are trying to suggest no matter how vague. Other times it's just like,"This is something I've thought about and I think I'd like to try it on this track. Do you mind?'
Could you fill in some details on your recent discography?
