Are you a Los Angeles native?
No, I'm from a dirt road in Vermont. But I grew up watching CHiPs and The Brady Bunch, so I was indoctrinated by pop culture, and pre-programmed to come to Los Angeles. I love it. I have a high degree of anonymity. I'm out here in the sticks, outside of town a little bit, but I have access to all the resources, the studios, technical services, musicians, and everything else that I could need. It's a good fit for me. I originally moved here in '92, when I was 27. The television composer I had worked for in New York was moving to L.A. to do other projects and said, "Come on out." I worked for him for a little while, bounced off the walls, and drove around town with my [Akai] MPC60 in the trunk of my car doing drum programming for $35 an hour. Then I was brought into Trent Reznor's world, and we were off and running.
You were already in the television and film world a bit before you came out here?
I was lucky. I only ever had one real job, which was working at the Sam Ash store on 48th Street in Manhattan, back when 48th Street was the mecca of music stores. One of my customers there was an Australian guy [Cameron Allan] who was a film and TV composer, and a record producer. He'd come over every six months or so to buy a couple of toys to take back with him to Australia. At one point he came to NYC and said, "I'm here to stay! I have to set up this studio and score this television series. I need more arms in the studio." He had brought one friend with him who was going to play piano and do the string melodies, but he hired me to do all the sound design and drum programming – to fulfill that role that I naturally fall into. After we worked in New York together for a couple years, he came out here and brought me along. By the time I got involved with Nine Inch Nails, I'd spent a few years doing film and television soundtracks, and I walked away from it for a while. When I got back into it, about 2003 or so, I wasn't coming into it cold. I already knew the workflow, the terminology, and what's involved in delivering 42 minutes of score every week for seven months. That was a big advantage.
What was your role with Nine Inch Nails and how did that begin?
By the time I met Trent I would have been 28 or 29 years old. I already had record contracts with bands who'd made a record and then got dropped. I had worked as the programmer for a television/film composer for a few years. I'd also been doing drum programming and synth programming, as well as remixes all over Los Angeles for a bunch of industrial metal records, like Prong and White Zombie. An old college friend was producing a Nine Inch Nails music video and brought me into Trent's world to do sound effects as an overlay on the video. Rather than book into an audio post[-production] house, my friend said, "We should get my friend Charlie over here. He's a whiz on the computers and the samplers. Trent, you've already got a studio. We could do it here!" We allocated two days to do this and then completed it in four hours. We spent the rest of the day playing video games and screwing around, and after that I never left. Trent had finished basic tracking on Marilyn Manson's first album [Portrait of an American Family], and he had to get involved in a bunch of other work right away. He didn't like the drum sounds that they had tracked off the floor on that record, so he said, "I need to do drum augmentation. Sample reinforcement. I don't have time to deal with it. You do that sort of thing, right?" I did all the drum augmentation on Manson's record at Trent's studio while he was off doing other projects. He kept coming up with things for me to do, and eventually the previous keyboard player, James Woolley (rest in peace), was reaching the end of his tenure with the band, so I slotted in as the keyboard player in the middle of the touring cycle on the The Downward Spiral album. I'd been involved a little bit in the very final stages of The Downward Spiral [sessions], so when they started touring for that album I went on the road with the band, setting up a transportable studio in hotel rooms and working where we could, when we could, in between dates. Eventually, they forced me to get on stage and play keyboards.
Did you work on the records after that? Was The Fragile the last one you were on?
Yeah, that was the last. After the touring cycle from The Downward Spiral ended, we moved to New Orleans. Trent bought this gigantic funeral home and converted it into a recording studio with a big SSL [console] from Larrabee North Studios. It was a wonderful facility, with separate programming rooms for each band member, a rehearsal space for the band, and this big SSL studio. That's where we made Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar album, as well as a few one-offs and side projects by some other bands that Trent had signed to his label, Nothing Records. We also did a few one-off Nine Inch Nails tracks. Then we settled in to do The Fragile album, and we did all of that in New Orleans.
What about the Natural Born Killers soundtrack? Was that done there?
That we actually did in hotel rooms on tour. There was no score, per se, on that movie. It was all songs that the amazing music supervisor, Budd Carr, had picked and assembled with [director] Oliver Stone into a complete musical journey that fit the film. Trent contributed new recordings of two songs. One was "Burn," which was a one-off original that we actually recorded in South Beach [Miami, Florida] at the studio in the basement of the Marlin Hotel. Trent also did a version of an older Nine Inch Nails song, "Something I Can Never Have" – we did that in hotel rooms. Trent's idea for the Natural Born Killers soundtrack album was to make it a chronological travelogue of the movie. We'd take some of the songs that were used in the movie, as well as the dialogue tracks, and interweave it into one big long piece that resembled the movie – a continuous audio object.
Besides keyboards, it sounds like you did quite a bit of co-production, sound mangling, and manipulating for Nine Inch Nails?
Yeah. I was "the programmer." Trent's always in the driver's seat, but he brought me into the band and convinced me to move to New Orleans on the basis of a lot of the remixes I had done for other heavy artists. He wanted to have that "remix philosophy" in-house so that he could start a piece of music, drop it into my lap, let me mess with it, and send it back to him – as opposed to him squinting at the computer screen all by himself for the entire duration. That's what we wound up doing in New Orleans, where I had my separate studio and we could exchange elements. I'd also come up with rhythm beds, or track ideas, that he could extract from. For example, there's a song on The Fragile called "Starfuckers, Inc." He built the song around this drum and bass loop that I made on a drum machine and some fuzz pedals. He said, "I can turn that into something." There was a bit of back and forth, but clearly I was always trying to guess what direction he was going to go in next. I'd try to do work that would complement what he was after. It was a nearly impossible task, but still lots of fun.
I heard that you'd used the early soft synth program Turbosynth a lot? That was way ahead of its time.
Oh, yeah; we were big on that. I always loved software and computer tools as opposed to boutique analog recording techniques. Even though I came up in the pre-MIDI years, and went to audio engineering school – I can calibrate the [Ampex] MM 1000 or build a high-pass filter out of spare resistors and capacitors – that wasn't what interested me. Crazy new tools like Turbosynth and other early software did interest me. Anything that could process audio on a computer, we would jump on. Trent was already deep into that; it wasn't something I brought to him. We were kindred spirits, in that regard. In those days it was pre-DAW, pre plug-ins, so that was a little esoteric. Turbosynth was something that allowed us to do unholy things to audio. It was a great tool for getting those cyber guitar textures and ultra-heavy blasts of distortion.
Why did you eventually leave Nine Inch Nails?
By the time I left the band in 2001 I was 38 years old. We had a very brutal eight-year run, with all the rock 'n' roll mayhem that you would imagine. New Orleans was also not a city that felt like home to me. We weren't there because of the roots music scene – we were there to get away from Los Angeles. There were many other things that I wanted to do and couldn't accomplish within this umbrella of Nine Inch Nails and in New Orleans. We were in a lull after the touring cycle for The Fragile, and it was unclear what was going to happen next, or when it would happen. I think the single motivating factor was that I had a half-finished record in progress that Page Hamilton, from the band Helmet, and I had been writing together [Helmet's Size Matters]. He said, "It's time to make that record! Let's do it." I came out to L.A. to get that underway, and then I never went back. It took a few years for Trent to redirect his energy to the next phase of Nine Inch Nails. The next Nails record came out in 2005. Looking back, I was glad I didn't hang around because I got a lot done in those four years!
You've got the dream job of a lot of musicians. Everyone wants to be able to stay at home, work in their studio, and do cool music for movies and TV! What would you recommend to a younger person trying to get their start in this world?
Oh, the kids these days have it so easy, let me tell you! [laughs] I have very limited classical music training. I don't have deep knowledge of orchestration and harmony; what's conventionally taught in conservatory. There are a few good film composition programs, like the one at USC, and folks who go through those programs can get on a pathway to become an intern for one of their visiting professors, who are also successful film composers. Onwards and upwards through the conventional hierarchy of Hollywood film composers. I didn't do that. I came into it at a right angle. But the conventional career track, and the one thing I have in common with those traditionally-educated composers, is that I did work as the right hand man for a guy who was already up and running. My name wasn't on the show; it wasn't even in the credits. It was a cash paycheck every week, and that was it. But my responsibility was also limited, because it was his ass on the line, not mine. That path of being an intern and then an assistant to a working composer is always going to be valid. If a young person coming up can get access to that USC film music program, or some of the other excellent ones, that certainly seems to help. But, from a more philosophical point of view, the one thing that I've always tried to do is to avoid doing what could be easily taught in school. I know that runs counter to what I was saying, but I got a late start. I was a drummer and didn't study harmony – I don't even know blues scales. Because I got a late start in some aspects of it, I didn't want to forever be playing catch-up so I tried to find a path that was untrodden. I tried to avoid doing what could be encapsulated into a semester at school – if a musical style can be reverse-engineered into a set of sample loops and sold for $99 on a website, then I didn't want to do it. I always tried to avoid styles that could be easily described. That led me to steer away from jobs like epic trailer music, even though the sonics are tempting. Once the vocabulary is well established, there's less fun in it for me; there are already boundaries and ground rules set down. What I wound up doing in my scores is a weird hybrid of my favorite elements of everything from Pink Floyd to György Ligeti. Hopefully it's not an easily-definable style. I'll click around occasionally on YouTube, and there're a million tutorials that can be invaluable for seeing how someone else does it, but I always caution people to not necessarily take that next step and assume that those tutorials are showing you how you should do it. That was a long-winded way of saying, "Have your own sound!" The internship and assistant route is not some weird, mysterious thing. There's not a huge barrier to it. Composers who are busy on A-list movies – guys like Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) – have 10 or 15 people working for him, and he's got them lined up. The single most important skill to get there seems to be personality related; having good communication skills and a friendly, workable attitude. It's not all about being someone they want to hang out and have a beer with, but about being able to communicate, read situations, and to have some element of social graces. That's the most valuable skill, in terms of embarking on that path of intern to assistant. The few assistants who I've had have always gotten the job based on personality more than on which plug-ins they know how to use.
Is most of your soundtrack work done in your room here now?
Yeah. Despite my background as a synthesizer guy, and despite the bunches of synthesizers here in the room, I don't use synthesizers all that much. I'd say 95 percent of the sounds on any score that I do are processed acoustic sounds; whether it's me playing drums in the big concrete living room across the yard here, or using a bow on a metal sheet, or using an EBow on a Chinese guzheng. I prefer sounds that have an acoustic, organic footprint. This all goes back to one of the first TV shows I had ever scored myself. There was a cue where I had some tricky, fancy synth programming on it. We were previewing the score for the directors and producers, and one of them said, "Stop, stop! What's that sound? It sounds like R2-D2 there in the background. It's distracting." I realized that not every civilian is going to be wowed by studio trickery and elaborate programming of filter envelopes. We took out that R2-D2 sound and replaced it with a Wurlitzer electric piano part; which, in my earlier life, would have been a crime against the art of pushing boundaries, but in the end it worked much better. That was the beginning of my transition from fancy programming to using sounds that originated in the acoustic world. Whether they're heavily manipulated and time-stretched, pitch-shifted and granulated in the Waldorf Quantum [synthesizer], or some software tool, their original DNA comes from the real world. To my ears that adds a human quality. When I start with sounds that have an organic sonic DNA, I can go even further with the processing and the manipulation before it becomes something that is distracting to the person watching the movie. There's life and movement that I didn't have to draw into the mod wheel strip chart in my DAW.
The Waldorf Quantum is part of that whole chain?
Yeah. The Quantum can do either live processing of the audio coming into its inputs, or I can also put wav files on SD cards and import them. They can be turned into wavetables, or they can be dealt with as a sample source for a granular engine that slices up the audio into little fragments and then distributes them in a cloud. You can create these wonderful synthetic-ish textures that have no sawtooth waveform in them. The Waldorf Quantum is absolutely bonkers. For the money, it's the king of flexibility and it sounds good all the time compared to the synths that are around today. Obviously there are a lot of amazing synths coming out weekly. The Moog One is a ridiculous triumph of analog engineering, but there's not one in this room because those aren't the type of sounds that I typically use. That's why there're so many guitar pedals here. That's one way I can further manipulate sounds that started in the real world.
