AH: Why did you move to Nashville?
This town is the most amazing, supportive community I've ever been in. You can make phone calls, and in five minutes literally everybody shows up. I'm from Savannah, Georgia, but I lived in Los Angeles for 11 years before moving here. Every time you meet somebody in L.A., the first thing out of their mouth is, "So, what do you do?" It's never because they want to be your friend, but because they want to further their career. Coming here was the exact opposite. I think this is the only place in the world where art meets commerce. In L.A. I saw the studios go down one by one, the labels move out, and the industry really shrink and die. In New York they were writing checks, but there were no studios in New York. I think this is the only place [where] it's viable to be an artist, have a career, and not die. Besides country music, there's a great rock scene, as well as Americana and folk. It feels alive. I'm not old enough to remember London in the '60s, or California in the early '70s, but it feels like that environment here now. It feels as exciting.
HTK: I read an article that said you played on almost everything you produce.
Yeah. There was a guy, Jimmy Miller, who I love. Jimmy produced the best Rolling Stones records; Exile on Main St., Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers – he did all these records. Those records had a groove – a swagger. That's because Jimmy Miller was a drummer. He'd get in there and play drums, or play shakers with the band. He always seemed to find the pocket. I completely rip him off as much as possible. When a band's playing, I'll play something, whether it's guitar, or percussion, or bass – just something. I wind up playing on a lot of records strictly as a metronome.
AH: Do you do that live with the band?
Yeah, I hate cutting separately. I can't stand it. It obviously works really well for a lot of people. One thing I really try to do is keep all live tracking vocals. Even if the band nailed it, I'll keep cutting takes just to get the singer's performance.
HTK: So the whole record's live?
Almost every record I do has live vocals. If the singer's singing live and they go for it, the guitar player will come down in volume when they're singing. When they're not singing, they come up. I think when I get to mix, I don't have to mix as much. They self-balance. I noticed I can create the perfect track; then, when I bring the singer in, it's hard to make it sit in the mix. But if you let people in the room mix it themselves – as they play and work out their dynamics – it's almost like cheating. It takes a little longer going down, but it saves a lot of time later. I can't punch it in. It won't sound natural.
HTK: The drums on Sturgill Simpson's Metamodern Sounds in Country Music are magical.
It's the drummer; the way he plays. I met Miles Miller when he was a kid – just 16. We've been force-feeding him records, like Hal Blaine and Richie Albright – who played with Waylon Jennings. If you hear the tuning on the drums it sounds so terrible and goofy, but he's just barely hitting them. It sounds big because he's barely hitting. If somebody hits hard, things collapse.
MR: A lot of people think John Bonham was just pounding away.
He wasn't. I got to make a record with his son, Jason Bonham – and Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple – about a year and a half ago. He came in here and sounded like those records. He'd grown up playing with his dad; he hit medium, but he wasn't killing the drums. He said his dad's favorite drummer was Mick Fleetwood, which I never would think. His dad would say, "Listen to that," to a really basic thing. "Listen to that groove. That pocket. That's what it's about." He was infatuated with how simple and straight some part was.
AH: And a good drummer will play at the right volume for the room.
Look at pictures of the Wrecking Crew – the drummer's right there in the middle of the entire band. They're all there together. I'm completely fascinated with records that were made with no headphones, in the same room together. I think you get this human interaction that can't happen the other way around. I always think it's weird how people go into the studio: say you're a young band who's never made a record. You've been playing together in the rehearsal room, but when you go into the studio, they put you in different booths away from each other. All of a sudden, they put this crazy monitoring over your ears. Everybody has themselves cranked at their own headphone stations. I don't think you can feel music the same way with headphones. I think headphones are borderline evil. If the drummer can't hear the singer, he's playing too loud. If the guitar player can't hear the singer, he's playing too loud. That's kind of the rule, for the most part. I say that, but I do use headphones sometimes. With some singers, I'll put a monitor right next to them as we track.
HTK: How do you think singers react with headphones?
I think they sing way better without them, and their pitch is way better. You put headphones on somebody and they start going sharp or flat, based on volume. You turn it down, and they get flat. You turn it up, and they get sharp. I feel like when I'm tracking live vocalists I get these great performances with the band in the same room. But if you do it the other way around, or you have to fix something or change a lyric, I put them in the booth and I find we start doing multiple vocal takes. It's so hard to get back to that same thing that happened so naturally and easily when they weren't focused on the vocals. It's a really weird concept that the band cuts a song, and then the singer goes and is by him or herself. The band's all watching and waiting for the singer to get that magic take. I think it's a lot of pressure on the singer.
AH: When was the last time you recorded someone who wasn't a good singer – someone who couldn't nail a live take with the band?
It's kind of a rule not to do that anymore. I'm attracted to great singers. I think you can have an okay guitar player, but if you have a great singer then it's awesome. An okay bass player and a great singer is still badass. But if you have a great fucking bass player and a shitty singer, it's still going to sound like shit.
MR: When you're listening to records to establish the right environment, what have some of those records been?
That record right behind you, White Mansions, changed my life. That was the first record that really got me into country music. It was produced by Glyn Johns [Tape Op #99] at Olympic Studios and written by an English guy, Paul Kennerley. He had a dream cast of country characters on it: Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, Steve Cash – and the band is Eric Clapton's band. It's just sonically a masterpiece. The feel is incredible. The strings are really simple and haunting, and the piano parts are kind of low-held piano chords. The way everything weaved and bobbed on that record was life-changing. I probably owe 90 percent of my career to copying shit from that record.
AH: When you say copying...
The essence and the feel of it. There's a lot of tension on that record. It's a concept record, but there's so much restraint in it. They're really waiting and building the tension. They had the most badass players on the planet on this, and no one showed off. I think that's a really important lesson.
MR: What's the typical amount of pre-production you do?
I think pre-production is a silly concept. Maybe if you don't have a studio you can record in, then I understand it. You've got to go into a big studio and have everything prepared. I was in bands for years, and I know whatever your newest song is, it's your favorite song. Whenever you hit that right tempo or get that signature riff… whenever you play it the first time, you play it the most passionately. If you take that song on the road for six months and tour with it, you're over it. We'd get this magic in pre-production when I first started, but we couldn't get it back in the studio. We'd be chasing this whole thing. "What's the tempo? Pull out the metronome. Let's find out where we were at." You're chasing a fucking dragon that you're never going to get again. You're never going to get the vocal to feel the same way again as when you were writing the song. I keep tape rolling the entire time when I make records – all day. I think it desensitizes the band, because they just forget that it's rolling. We may be in there working on a song; when we first started at the beginning of the day, we may get that magic bridge. Then we work out a whole different part, but we have that other thing captured. When we get the final master, we just chop it into it.
AH: Do you mean edits?
Oh, yeah. I don't have anything against editing. I don't care if a band gets it all in one take. I prefer it if we get most of it in one take; but if we're missing a part of the song, I'd rather have the band cut it one more time and maybe we'll get that one part of the song.
AH: But you have them cut the whole song each time?
A lot of times. If it's a really difficult part, and people often forget it by the time it gets to it, we'll just do the one part – kind of ramp up to it and splice it in. I'd be a hypocrite to say I never tuned anything, or adjusted time, or something like that. It's whatever makes it feel right. Even if we do edit or move something, it's to try to make it feel as if it were played naturally. I say all this shit, but I'm full of shit too. If it needs to be done a certain way, we do it. It's whatever peoples' headspaces are, and whatever it takes to keep things moving fast.
AH: If you're rolling tape and capturing every performance, or capturing moments when the band is working out something, how do you go back?
I have a stupid simple way of keeping a log. If I'm in the other room, I'll yell out, "Hey, that bridge was really good." Even if we're rolling on tape, we're capturing out of tape and into Pro Tools, because hard drives are cheap and tape's expensive. The engineer will have a note of where we said that and log it. With singers, sometimes I'll have a situation where the singer is on, right off the top, but the band isn't. I'll keep working to get the band in shape, even though we got the vocals on the first or second take. When I feel like there's going to be that situation, I'll put the singer in the booth or separate them. Then I can go look through those old takes and steal verses or choruses from other takes. Whatever makes the process easy. What's really shitty for singers is when the band may spend two weeks on basics, and you have a handful of days left of tracking and it's only vocals now. The poor singer has to sing all day. I think that sucks. By keeping vocals going down live, they're cutting vocals as we go. It removes all that pressure for them. There's nothing really left to do at the end, except maybe punch in a word or two if you change a lyric.
MR: You sort of know when you get a magical take. Is it just a feeling?
Yeah. A friend of mine, Greg Gordon, was a really big mentor to me. We worked together a lot in L.A. before I moved. He always talked about this thing, where for some reason the molecules add up and that specific take "sounds like a record." I'm looking for that – whatever feels warm and fuzzy, like you've already heard it – like a record you've heard. I'm not a fan of figuring it out later. To be honest with you, I hate mixing. Obviously there are people who make records sound way better, like Vance Powell is unbelievable. But I hate that whole process of mixing. I try to make the mixing happen at tracking. It's all about balancing. When you hear it, it sounds like a record. Even all the reverbs are committed. I come back to the Sturgill album [Metamodern Sounds in Country Music], because it's an easy example. When we were doing his album, we were printing all the reverbs and delays live. That sounded like a record because it was live. It's about treating it like performances and not going, "Okay, I'm going to get a mouse out and start automating all these things."
MR: I have to ask what the reverbs and delays were on that record. Especially the vocal.
The vocal delays were a Studer A80 1/4-inch tape machine going into a [Studio Technologies] Ecoplate III in the other room, with 15 IPS pre-delay. That's all the vocals on that. Also the Moog 500-series Analog Delay. All the weird psychedelic shit was Sturgill with a handheld microphone and a [Maestro] Echoplex – just riding pedals and Echoplex delays after we did the master tracks and were kind of getting stupid.
AH: Was that his idea or your idea?
My idea, but he was laughing all the way and just loving it. There was actually one little hiccup in the studio that day. There was kind of a fight between a couple of guys. It was me here going like, "Fuck, what do we do now?" I reversed the track we were working on, and that made this cocained-out, '80s sound. Sturgill came back the next day, heard it, and started laughing. We wrote a song based on the reversed song we'd already done, and incorporated that into it. Since it was already ridiculous, I thought it would be fun to start tape-reversing sounds, and then looping and creating organic shit on top of that. That's all based upon Beatles songs, like "Tomorrow Never Knows" from Revolver. That's all shit that was done in the '60s. Same thing – making tape loops and goofing off. If tape hadn't been rolling all day, or this had been a pre-production, that probably never would have happened.
AH: What are some of your favorite mics?
The Coles 4038 is probably my favorite vocal microphone. It's not sibilant; it's got a really huge bottom end, and it's really EQ-able. I've been going back to the [Neumann] U87 as a mono overhead [on drums]. I've got tube [Neumann] U47s, [Neumann] U67s, and [Telefunken] Ela M 251s, but I love '87s. Maybe because a lot of my favorite records in the late '60s and early '70s were all [recorded with] U87s. I like the mono '87.
AH: Where do you place it?
Looking at pictures of The Beatles, you'll see the microphone right at Ringo's head. It's the same thing with soul music; I'm a big Stax and Muscle Shoals fan. You'll always see the mics right here, by the drummer's head. I try to get it as low as I can. I like that really tight sound. I've tried a million different ways to mic. I'll go through phases where we do the Glyn Johns mic'ing, and that's cool, but all my favorite drum sounds I've gotten have always been the three-mics – just kick, snare, overhead, and then sometimes not even using the snare at all. I always put safety mics on toms, and then I'll never use them. If I had to nail my favorite drum sounds on a record, it's probably the Rolling Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" on Sticky Fingers. The drum sounds are fucking insane. You can find pictures of it, and it's that simple. I think there are a lot of people who are much smarter than me who can put up a lot of mics and make it sound good, but I just start not paying attention to the band. I start paying attention to engineering when I put too many mics up. If I only put two mics up, I'm concentrating on the song. When I first started making records, in 1997 or '98, there was this process. You had to have 12 mics on the drums and a big drum room. You had to cut to a click. But I don't think anybody cares anymore. I like really simple recording.
AH: What about the rest of the instruments?
Guitar mics change all the time. Mark Neill [Tape Op #29] got me into transformerless [Shure] SM57s for a while on guitar. I like RCA Type 77 ribbons a lot on little amps. Sometimes it's a Coles [4038] or a U67. Really simple. I find when I put two or three mics on a guitar, I wind up muting them. I get really nervous about how to EQ both of them unless I can put them on the track together. I don't like many options.
MR: How do you typically record bass guitar?
A friend of mine bought out a studio that was selling DIs, the Quonset Hut, here in Nashville. He was buying them just to get the transformers out of them. I kidnapped one and never gave it back to him. It sounds unbelievable. The Acme WolfBox is the shit too. I also mic bass. A friend of mine a long time ago showed me the trick of putting a large-diaphragm condenser right on the cone, right on the grill, but keeping the amp barely on. It uses the proximity effect and natural bottom-end of the microphone.
AH: What about preamps?
The Helios is the best console I've ever heard in my life. It sounds like a record, and that's with no EQ. It's really fast. It's also soft in the top-end, so it never sounds sibilant or hard. The EQs are really natural, but I hardly ever use them. I have a Neve BCM10 that I'll travel with sometimes. I just bought a bunch of Spectra Sonics modules. They remind me a lot of the Helios, but they're very American and super fast – they don't need any EQ at all. It just sounds like a record. They're really easy to make things sound natural. You don't have to add any high-end, because the high-end is so fast. You don't have to add any low-end to the kick drum or bass, because the low-end is so fast.
MR: What's the history of your Helios?
