Wharton Tiers has run Fun City studios out of his Manhattan basement since 1981. He's recorded some of the finest records by Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Helmet, Unrest and many more. It's an unimposing place, and not very large, but the records he makes sound amazing. For the last few years he's also been helping Sonic Youth set up and run their Echo Cañon studio, where they've recorded recent releases for the band and their side- projects. He also leads the Wharton Tiers Ensemble, a riveting instrumental combo that he composes for and plays drums in (check out Twilight of the Computer Age on Atavistic). Hillary and I dropped in at Fun City and had a great chat. The following day we visited Echo Cañon and chatted with Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth — see sidebar) about working with Wharton and setting up a private studio for their band.
LC: In 1981 you started in this spot?
Yes.
LC: What were you doing before '81, recording wise?
Playing in about 20 bands. No, actually at my peak I was playing in five bands, no money in any of them.
LC: Playing guitar?
Playing guitar in a couple, but mostly drums. I was always a busy guy.
LC: Had you been going into studios with any of the bands as a musician?
Yes, in a bunch of New York studios, basically we were rehearsing stuff down here. We use to put a cassette down with a couple of mics and people were saying, "This sounds better than the studio." I had a 4-track, which I ran into the ground by recording on it. I ended up getting an 8-track and then I had Sonic Youth here a month later.
LC: That would have been Confusion Is Sex?
Yes. They never made another one that sounded exactly like that again. [laughter]
LC: I kind of wish... it's so raw.
It was an 8-track with no outboards, I think we had one compressor.
LC: Had you been using this place as a practice space then?
Yes.
LC: How does that work with people living up there?
My apartment is directly over the studio and this is all brick and stone. For a New York space it's pretty isolated.
LC: I think Lee [Ranaldo] had said you had some problems awhile back with someone.
I had a problem with a person in the building next store.
LC: Did you off them or anything? [laughter]
No, we worked it out.
LC: Did you set up some times or something?
It was just one those people that you find in New York, nothing happens in their own life and they're like, "Everything bothers me." She's complaining about the studio at the same time she's complaining about her neighbor closing his door or having his girlfriend over.
LC: I think when people see studios, they see bands pulling up and coming in and out, they probably think a drug deal is going on half the time.
People knew what I was doing. In New York it's better to have people around than to not have people around. If you have people around... half these buildings are empty during the day, everyone leaves for work and that's when all the robberies happen. So you're much better off having people around.
LC: So you had a 4-track initially and then went to eight and did the Sonic Youth stuff right after you got the 8-track going?
Pretty much, it was a Tascam 38, it had just come on to the market, it was a couple thousand dollars. I thought that was a lot of money to spend for my personal use so maybe I'll get some people in to record.
LC: What kind of jobs did you get after Confusion Is Sex?
Just a lot of local bands. I, of course, from playing in bands had a lot of contacts from different bands.
LC: What kind of board were you using then?
Kelsey, it was a Pro Club 12 channel. I got two of them at one point and spliced them together for 24 channels. Basically, when Kelsey was over Crest Audio blew out all of the stuff they had and I bought a whole lot of it.
LC: I've never seen one of these.
I don't know how many of them they made. It's an amazing board, it was designed by some guy in England, I think he worked for Neve. The circuitry is very similar to the Neve VR except it's basically half as much. It's the most economical straight-line design as opposed to outbands at every stop. It always had a really cool sound so I stuck with it.
LC: How many channels do you have now?
I've got the 24 and the 12 and the Mackie [1604] for effects returns. I've got the Pro- Mix here which I use to automate stuff.
LC: What are you tracking to these days?
A 1" MSR24 [Tascam].
LC: You don't see too many of those around anymore.
No, it's really a shame because I think it was the last analog tape machine that was ever designed. It's a spectacular machine but of course the ADAT revolution was already underway by the time it hit the market. The ADATs came out about three or six months before that machine was released and everyone was like, "Yeah, digital, digital!"
LC: What do you think of ADATs?
I've worked with them. 16-bit audio is a little thin for my taste as a rule, some of the 20- bit ones that are out now sound pretty good. I think that as the high bit stuff starts happening, the sound will catch up.
LC: After the 8-track, what did you move to?
A 16-track 1" Tascam. I was always into Tascam because they use to have a great service center in New Jersey.
LC: What projects were you doing when the sixteen came around? I think you had Dinosaur Jr. and Unrest.
I think the first Unrest I did was 16-track and the second album was 24-track.
LC: How did you get to do Dinosaur Jr.?
That was a Sonic Youth referral.
LC: It seems like that was a good band to get working with originally.
Absolutely, Confusion is Sex did really well; it got a lot of press and everything. I think it took me another four years to get something that had that level of visibility. Eventually, people were happy with what they were getting so they came back and told friends about it. I never really had to advertise, it's all been through word of mouth.
LC: Now your at the point where you're doing lots of work.
Yeah, now you walk around and it's like, "Blah, blah, blah was a classic record to me!"[laughter] It's fun when all that kind of stuff survives.
LC: Think of all the recording sessions that you've done that don't go anywhere. You never know when you're working on something which ones are the ones people are going to hear.
It's not always the best stuff either. Sometimes it's just people who have the right connections and their stuff comes out, other bands do this incredible material and sit home and smoke pot and never get any further with it.
LC: As far as recording, how do you use the space in here?
It's set up now for my band, there's something about the way this room is; you get incredible isolation. There's nothing parallel about this room, the floor slopes down, the ceilings are all curved, if you look at these walls they're not straight, they're kind of angled a little.
LC: You didn't even have to build it this way.
This was totally one of those lucky, fortuitous things. I just kept moving stuff around until it got to this point where things worked really good.
LC: Do you ever try to do vocals live with the band going?
Yes, usually if I do vocals live I'll just use a mic that hardly picks up anything except for what's right on it.
LC: A dynamic mic?
Yeah, like an Audix or an [Beyer] M500, something like that. If you get a good vocal take it's great because you've got plenty of isolation, you can compress it or put effects on it without getting instruments in it. A lot of times if you get a cool sound and later on you try a better mic on the vocals they end up liking the rough tracks better. Not everyone needs to sing through a super expensive clean mic. It doesn't really help a lot of people at all. Especially with rock'n'roll singers, high end condenser mics pop, sputter and hiss from their singing styles and it's just not the right mic. One of the best parts about recording is trying a few different mics out on a vocalist and seeing what really gives it character. Every mic has it's own character, you find the right match with the person. Helmet, for example, Page sounded great through this 635 Electrovoice which is an $80 mic. The guy from the label practically had a shit when he came over and saw... "This is your vocal mic?" Of course he called up a rental company and got 4 tube mics. We put them up together and tracked with them but in most cases the 635 was the one, it just sounded perfect on his voice.
LC: I heard about that session, they were even fighting with you about the tape speed.
Yeah well, some A&R people know a little more than you do. [laughter] If they worried about selling the records the music business would improve immensely.
LC: In the position you're in now, how busy are you? Do you have to field everything that comes in and decide which things you have time to work on?
I've been basically trying to get more time for myself. I'm trying to get a little less busy. I've been working with Sonic Youth a lot in the last couple of years, which has taken a lot of time between all of their individual projects. A lot of the local bands, which I use to record, don't even call at this point. They just figure that I'm too busy or I'm too expensive or I'm unreachable. I generally have enough to keep me busy.
LC: You're not having to scramble and record blues bands?
I don't really do anything like that. I've been spending a lot of time on my band and my stuff and that's totally rewarding. I've been doing a lot of mastering which is a lot of fun because you can get something to sound good with no commitment to spend 80 hours doing the thing.
LC: When you're doing the mastering, what kind of gear are you using?
I basically just use the Sound Designer.
LC: It's all in the computer?
I use the analog tape machine a lot because I get a lot of stuff that's totally digital and the best thing to do is to put it on tape.
LC: So you take it from DAT and dump it down to 1/4"?
Yes, usually I'll EQ the DAT or compress the DAT a little when going to tape and then the tape to the computer is pretty clean. Once it gets into the computer I try to do as little with it as possible. I don't really like the way that the manipulation makes things sound. It's pretty much just a straight line in with a maximum level.
LC: Cool. What kind of projects are you getting for that?
All kinds of strange things. My cousin's actually got a recording studio in his basement now in Brooklyn. He's been recording a lot of stuff that I probably would have done 10 years ago. A lot of them will come here to master stuff. Labels will send me stuff.... It's basically people that can't afford to go to Master Disc and get the super high-end deal.
LC: How much are those kinds of places?
Hundreds.... hundreds an hour, depending on whom you're doing it with. You can literally spend a few thousand dollars mastering something these days. They don't cut deals. It's hard to find off-hours, those places are really expensive. Obviously they have all the latest gear continually rolling in so I'm sure there's some little measure of benefit from all of that, but in reality, when your starting with tapes that are basically raw anyway, you don't want to clean them up. You're really just looking to get a good maximum level and a nice sound spectrum.
LC: When did you start doing the mastering?
Obviously the software became available and it really started about a year and a half ago when I was having some problems with the cassette machine and I thought "Well, I'll just go by a new cassette machine." The quality control on the cassette world has gone to where the machines don't play at the right speed. They don't track correctly... this is brand new out of a box! I started out spending a few hundred dollars and kept ratcheting my way up figuring sooner or later there's got to be a good cassette machine out there and there wasn't. I ended up taking the money and getting these two tape machines, a Nakamichi and a Teac and I got them completely rebuilt because I was happy with the sound of them. I figured it doesn't really pay to give people demos on cassette anymore so I just got a CD burner. Then I experienced the usual dilemma of how do you really make a CD sound good, because so much of the software is geared towards not peaking out so you end up with these things that are really flat sounding and don't have the correct level. So I went through this whole intensive period of studying and talking with people who worked with the big mastering houses and figuring out my chain to do stuff. When it got to the point where I was able to make my stuff sound as good as it would've sounded if it went somewhere else I figure I was ready to master.
LC: Initially you were doing it so you could give people a good sounding CD at their sessions.
Yeah, if they wanted something to give to someone that really sounded right. I would always experience bands taking off with cassettes and coming back and saying that the mix doesn't sound good. I'd say, "You're listening to a cassette." I can't even guarantee that when it leaves here it's going to sound right because your cassette player may be playing it at different speed or blah, blah, blah. If you give them a CD you stand a better chance of them getting an idea of what it really is going to sound like. Amazingly enough, cassette tapes survive better than reel to reels, which I haven't quite figured it out. I think in an effort to create a better tape, I think they just fucked up and didn't realize that climate would affect the tapes the way it did. New York City is horrendous on reel to reel tapes. They have ways of aging things to try and emulate what's going to happen. I guess they think that everyone stores their reels in underground humidity controlled vaults.
LC: As the backing gets older the oil type based moisture disappears.
I think it's the lubricant, when the lubricant breaks down that's when you start losing your takes.
LC: It replaces it with humidity.
HJ: that's where tape baking comes in.
I got the full thing on how to build it.
HJ: I got a whole set of instructions from Ampex on how to do it; I'll put it up on the web site.
LC: It's like a three day process if you're doing it right. Have you ever done that?
Yes. I had to do that on a couple of old Heartbreakers tapes that Richard Hell found. They were mush but we baked them and we got it off, I think after the baking you lose a little of the sound quality but if that's all there is then you're happy that you can get it at all.
LC: Was it studio stuff?
It was some stuff that they had done in the studio when he was in the band.
LC: How did you get involved with Echo Cañon [Sonic Youth's studio]?
I guess for the last record, A Thousand Leaves...I guess, basically, most bands without studios would spend large sums of money to make their records. For a band like Sonic Youth, it really made sense to have their own studio because every one of them, individually, has their own projects going on. They called me up and asked me to help them put something together. I put an 8- track studio together for them some years before so they would have something to at least do demos and things like that. They had accumulated a bunch of stuff for that, then they went and bought an old 16-track 2" and an old Neve BBC broadcast board. We found a space downtown and the stuff showed up... the boxes, no manuals, no documentation. I got to sit down there and figure it all out.
HJ: Was it fun?
Yeah, it's kind of like discovering a wreck, and trying to figure out... I always feel like the spaceship that lands and someone goes in and says, "How does it work?" I had worked with Neve consoles before and you learn that every one of them is different. So many of them are custom built, this one was on a BBC remote truck so it was definitely a custom built console.
LC: The faders go the wrong way right?
The faders go backwards.
LC: So if you want to hear more, you're pulling it towards yourself.
Yeah.
HJ: There's a story as to why that is.
Just to screw everyone else up? [laughter]
HJ: The BBC engineers wore suits, so the cuffs from the suits...
LC: No way.
Yeah. When you're on the air and you send out the wrong signal it'll just blow everything to a million pieces. The BBC is entirely anal about that anyway so that was exactly the reason that they did that. It's also got another feature where you push the control up a little you could actually solo. The fader actually solos, like a cue.
LC: When you buy a new Soundcraft or Mackie you just patch cords into the back. When you get a board like the Neve there are tie-points and you have to figure out where the wiring is all going.
Fortunately, there was a built-in patch bay and the jacks on the back we basically don't even use. Most of it was on the patch bay and what was on the back was labeled so it wasn't like totally being in the dark. One interesting thing I found was that they flipped the inputs and outputs on the outputs of the board so they were reversed on the labeling. You could be there for hours trying to figure out that the inputs and outputs were flipped. It took me awhile to figure it out. It looks right but it sounds all weird. I think they just flipped it around as a real easy way to screw people up that weren't BBC engineers, it was a union thing.
LC: With Abbey Road too, it was a very regimented thing.
