Why did you decide to build WireWorld?
I had a studio on Wolf Hoffman's farm, the guitarist of Accept, which was close to Gallatin, Tennessee. He moved back to Germany and other people bought the farm. Then, all of a sudden, it was going to be auctioned off in three weeks, but I had six months of work booked and paid for. Luckily they let me stay and finish everything, but I realized that this should never happen again, so my wife, Tina, and I decided that we needed to have our own place. In 2008 we drove around and found this place. The listing said, "Possible studio in the back," which at the time meant a little guesthouse, where maybe you could do an acoustic guitar and vocals. About nine months later we started building the studio you see now. It took us about a year to do the build, and, as you can imagine, that's a year of no money coming in and enormous sums of money going out.
Has the investment paid off?
With the way the budgets are nowadays, and the way the whole thing is structured, if you say the words "producer's advance" bands just look at you with glassy eyes and don't understand what you're talking about. But "studio rate" they understand. It's just a number that you pay for recording. I work a lot with new bands, where there's almost no money, so if I had to rent a studio for $2,000 a day I would never be able to make it work. But I can accommodate musicians with my own studio. If we go a week over, we go a week over. Nobody cares, and we make a better product.
Let's go back to the beginning. You started your musical journey as a guitarist, right?
Yes, I got my first guitar when I was 12. Udo Dirkschneider – whom we all know now as the lead singer of Accept – he and I went to school together, starting around when we were seven years old. We practically spent every day together. We decided to have a band together, but we couldn't come up with a name so we called it Band X. That went on for a while, to the point where it was a real band where we were really playing and coming up with songs. Then, at the point where it started to get serious, I got drafted to Hamburg, which was 350 miles away from Wuppertal where we lived – so that was the end of band practice for me. I left the band, and my last action with Udo was coming up with the name Accept. I pursued guitar in the army for a little while, but it just didn't come together.
Did you make the transition to engineering and producing right after coming out of the army?
No, I started working for a company called Stramp Amplifiers. The boss' name was Peter Strüven… Strüven Amplifiers… Stramp. We built tube amps for Rory Gallagher, Leslie West, Jack Bruce, and John Entwistle. When I started at Stramp, I didn't know much about electronics, but I went to school and got my degree at night. Stramp was basically a family; it was the boss and his wife, and then there were two more technicians and two more assistants like me. We would sit there late at night and come up with the new gear that we should build, like, "Have you seen the new Trident board? We should check that out." Or the boss would go to America and find out about some parametric EQ and decide we had to do that. It was wonderful and I got to do everything, from packing boxes, to sweeping the floors, to designing electronic equipment. We also ended up importing Otari machines – the big old 8-tracks – and building our own studio consoles. We had a little 8-track studio for demonstration, and I found out that working with the gear was a lot nicer than having to build it! Peter's wife died at 29 years old, and that kind of broke up the whole family. He lost his mind, and it was just not the same. This was 1979.
Where did you go after that?
There was a band in Hamburg – who were clients of Stramp – called Tennessee. It was American country music, Germanized – if you can think of anything more awful than that… But they were all older guys, and they had a lot of money. They asked me, "Do you want to build a studio for us? Just for the band." And of course it was called Tennessee Studios. If you have a new studio, you have a lot of equipment manuals, but you don't have a lot of clients, so you have plenty of time to read them. That was really, really helpful for me. I had few clients play in there while I got to mess up, big. We actually went all the way up to a 50-piece orchestra. The recording room was fairly big!
How many tracks was the studio?
Tennessee was 8-track, for one week. Then we got a client in who said, "If you had 16-track, I'd do my record here." So we bought a good old Studer A80 and made it 16-track. The Studer had a monitor panel where, when you recorded, it didn't have the relays in it yet; if you wanted to punch in, you had to punch in and flip that particular channel to input at the same time. You had to have a lot of coffee! The console was either a 24- or 32-channel Sound Workshop, and we had a very decent mic locker. Germany was a good place to get ahold of some pretty good equipment in 1979. [laughs]
Tennessee is also where you first recorded Dokken, correct?
We were hooked up to a club next door with a snake; they had a little stage in there, so we could record directly from that club into the studio. The club owner would go to the U.S. and bring bands back to Germany for little tours. One of these bands was Dokken. One day, the door flies open and I hear, "Give me a guitar! I haven't played for three days!" And I said, "Hey, nice to meet you too!" That was Don Dokken. But we hit it off right away. They played the music that I loved, and they were really good. They played in the club, we recorded the show, and then, right after, we did six or seven demos at the studio. I was up for 76 hours finishing those demos, and I ended up delivering the mixes to him at the airport right before he went on the plane back to L.A. Then I fell asleep in my car, in the parking lot, for 12 hours. You couldn't just upload mixes in those days; it was an actual tape! Don gave that little demo to Gaby Hoffmann, who managed Accept; she took it to a few people and got him a deal.
You also did front of house mixing for Accept during this period. How did doing live sound impact your engineering?
When I moved to America for the first time, in 1980 after meeting Dokken, the economy was pretty bad. I was working at Larrabee Sound Studios as a technician. They figured that I knew my way around a Studer machine because I was German – but the pay wasn't good. Udo came over on vacation and said, "We're going on tour with Van Halen. You wanna come back with me and do live sound for us?" The Van Halen tour got cancelled, but we went on tour with Judas Priest instead, for a month and a half. The console is the console, the whole system is the system, and if you understand it, you understand it. But you're fighting the space… from soundcheck, where it's a space with no people, to a full house where the room sounds completely different. That's a good learning experience. You have to be fast, and you have one chance to get it right. In the studio you can roll back and punch in again. I had another job in the early '80s, where I really learned to be fast. Dieter Dierks, who produced all of the Scorpions records, had a mobile stereo truck. Meanwhile, television stations had trucks that were mono. We used to do the live recording and transmissions for Rockpalast, which was a big music TV show in Germany that went out live to 40 million viewers. You don't want to piss off 40 million people at the same time! The console was an MCI 600, and we recorded on a Telefunken 2-inch, 32-track [tape deck], so each track had the track width of a cassette. Tiny! And in that truck we would go from U2, to Bryan Adams, to Cheap Trick, with 15 minutes in between. We had to be lightning fast. We would put colored tape right next to the channels with all the settings on them, put those up on the wall during soundcheck; then during the last three or four songs of the previous band, we'd put the tape down there. As soon as the band was done, we had to reset the whole console. And, to this day, I use those same colors for the same instruments: drums are green, bass is grey, vocals are red, guitars are yellow, and keyboards are blue.
Your first major label break in the U.S. was Tom Zutaut at Elektra Records calling you to record the band X. How did he know to call you?
There was a little community in the south Bay Area that I was part of when I stayed with Don Dokken while visiting the U.S. early on. Don, Alan Niven – who managed Great White, and later Guns N' Roses – Tom Zutaut, who would sign Mötley Crüe and Dokken to Elektra [and later Guns N' Roses to Geffen], and a whole clan that were all friends. Tom knew my work, as I had mixed the original indie release of the first Mötley Crüe record, Too Fast for Love, and also from my work with Great White. I was back over in Europe in '84, and he called and said, "I want you to come over and do a single with the band X. They're an underground punk band, but I kind of want to get them more into pop. And the single was "Wild Thing" by The Troggs. I came over, and I basically never went back. I applied for a green card. Then next I did the X album, Ain't Love Grand, on which I think I succeeded in making them pop. We all agreed on the direction, but in the end they would have probably preferred a more streamlined recording, sound-wise. On the other hand, it gave them their first hit single, which I think is actually the thing that they cared about the least. The label cared about it though! The press absolutely hated that; but, as you know, any press is good press, so that put my name in everybody's mouth. From then on it went, bang, after bang, after bang. Under Lock and Key with Dokken, mixing Master of Puppets, Stryper, and Alice Cooper. It just went crazy.
Such an important part of the work you did in Eighties are the huge, explosive drum sounds. Did you have favorite rooms, or go-to gear?
At the time my favorite drum room was the warehouse at Amigo Recording Studios in North Hollywood. There was a giant umbrella under the ceiling that you could lower and raise, so the reflections would be covered. There was just a whole bunch of junk in that warehouse that had no particular size or shape to it, but it created the best sound. You would hit the snare and it was like, "Whoa." That was where I did X, White Lion, Dokken, Stryper, and others. When I first walked into the Studio A control room, the owner, Chet Himes – who had produced Christopher Cross, among many other things, and who was a man of amazing knowledge – said, "Alright, what do you want in here? I've got a Harrison [console] and I've a brand new MCI 500." I liked the MCI at the time, so they put that in there and put the Harrison in Studio B.
It usually sounds like you had the cymbals spot mic'd versus a looser, overhead feel.
