You must have a background in reading music from playing trombone growing up?
When I was a kid, I played for years in our school's concert band and knew how to sight read, but I can’t do that anymore. With the bands at Morrisound, my biggest contribution was trying to keep everyone in tune, as well as making sure we used new strings and drums heads, and the drums were on time and free from stick clicks, etc. I never told a band how to write parts or anything. I was influenced by punk rock and turned off by the pompous attitude of bigger bands like Kiss and Queen at the time. I used to do live sound, and I went to a studio with a friend’s band and thought it was amazing. There wasn’t a drunk guy yelling at me to turn the guitar up, and the rooms didn’t sound like shit because it was a controlled environment. The engineer didn’t want to have anything to do with us because of our style, so I made a deal with the band to do a 7-inch where I agreed to split the costs with them. I went around to the local studios in Tampa, most of which did jingles. And this is where I’m nothing without the guys at Morrisound [Recording]: Jim and Tom Morris, and Rick Miller. I was just a young guy in awe of them and how good all the bands sounded coming out of the studio. Even in their original location, they really had it going on. There was a little shoebox-sized 8-track studio with a 1/2-inch, 8-track Otari machine that Rick Miller used to start tracking Obituary’s Slowly We Rot. [It was finished at the “new” Morrisound on 56th Street.] I had recorded a couple of punk bands and worked nights as an assistant engineer, from ‘83 onwards. Jim and Rick were both electrical engineers, and Tom had a master’s degree in chemical engineering and had done quite well. They had encouraged me to get an electrical engineering degree, so I went to USF to acquire that while working nights.
I read that the second Morrisound location [on 56th Street] had sound panels that could be adjusted for classical sessions versus drier rock or jazz recordings.
Tom was a genius because he built the studio from the ground up. The A Room was very large, with these sound-absorbing panels. Those panels were plywood on one side, with high-end acoustic insulation on the other. They were about 2 ft. by 6 ft. and 5 inches deep, placed strategically along the walls. You could open them up to deaden the room, or you could close them to make it more live. Classical pianist Robert Helps would come to record with those guys – you could fit a larger orchestral ensemble in there – and there were isolation booths as well. Their other remarkable innovation was to come up with a design for 8-channel headphone mixers, and there were about ten of them around the room. Each musician could have their own mix. Nowadays this is all taken for granted, but in 1983 it was a big deal. They also had a friend, Rick Mabry – a mathematics professor – and he was working on locking up the 24-track machine to video and doing lots of mad scientist stuff for them. He was brilliant. These guys were super fucking smart. Back in the day, all of the music for Busch Gardens amusement park shows were recorded at Morrisound, and all of these guys were bad-ass jazz session musicians.
How did the shift towards heavy metal happen at Morrisound?
Dan Johnson signed Avatar/Savatage to his label, Par Records, and they recorded their first two records [The Dungeons Are Calling and Sirens] with him at Morrisound. He also signed and recorded Crimson Glory. He put heavy metal on the map at the studio, and I started assisting him on Agent Steel’s Unstoppable Force and Whiplash’s Insult to Injury. He was the producer, and Jim and Tom were the engineers. Dan also mixed the No More Color album from Coroner, which I engineered. The studio was one of the first to get a TC Electronic 2290 delay sampler, which enabled them to get that big drum sound and manipulate it. The biggest problem with metal was making it sound good when it was fast. Take a rock drumbeat, “Boom, smack, boom, smack.” Anybody can make that sound good. If you can’t, you’re not a very good engineer. When it gets faster, it’s hard to get that definition. So, we would use Cakewalk software with MIDI and noise gates to trigger drums, which, in Tampa at the time, was quite advanced. Jim was also recording bands like Nasty Savage, and the production sounded great with their techniques, so it grew and grew.
You put these techniques to use engineering Death’s Leprosy with Dan Johnson producing. The book also speaks to you having a good rapport with bands early on.
I was a younger guy and perhaps more in touch with the underground scene. I was doing live sound occasionally for Nasty Savage and Obituary, when they still went by Xecutioner. But, like I said, even though I grew up on hard rock during high school, I was more into punk rock and not aware of death metal yet. But I was into extremes, so when Xecutioner and Death came in, I thought they were cool. Dan was the producer of Leprosy, and it became one of the first death metal records I’d done as an engineer. Rick Miller had started Obituary’s Slowly We Rot, tracking drums and rhythm guitar on the 1/2-inch Otari. We bounced the drums to two tracks and transferred them back to another 8-track tape, which gave us six tracks for guitar, vocals, and effects. Rick took a leave of absence to continue his electrical engineering job, so I finished the rest of the record. The Atheist guys had gotten signed after doing work for Borivoj Krgin’s label, Godly Records. They were up for me recording their first album, Piece of Time. Those guys were amazing; so different. Dan Johnson also decided to focus on his day job, decided he would not be doing Death’s Spiritual Healing, and was kind enough to recommend me to Chuck [Schuldiner, vocals/guitar] to do the record.
You refer to this being the sweet spot before “death metal got big” and often point to Terrorizer’s World Downfall as one of your favorite productions. What was that session like, and what was the process of sampling drummer Pete Sandoval “live”?
That was a one-off project for Earache Records, and there was no real budget for it. We only had two days to record and mix it. We didn't even have money for 2-inch tape to record on a 24-track machine, so we did the record on the 8-track. I took the TC 2290 from the A Room and the one from the B Room, sampled his real kick sound, triggered them live through a noise gate, and recorded his drums onto four tracks. By doing this, if there were mistakes, I couldn’t fix them and the take would be screwed. I didn’t have the luxury of recording his kicks individually and going back and triggering them – putting the sampled tracks on their own. This is what we typically did when recording the drums. Each kick would have a separate track, and then I would trigger those and record them onto their own additional tracks. Once they were good, I would throw away the acoustic kick drum tracks because I never used them. It’s different for a snare drum, which has more dynamics. With death metal, everyone hits the kick drum hard. All we’re looking for is that impact. It’s like recording everything in a blender, and we’re trying to get definition at 200 BPM. Back to the Terrorizer album: We’d listen back to a take, and if the kick drums were messed up, there was nothing I could do about it. If I had missed triggers, or the noise gate didn’t work, we would re-record the track. Oscar [Garcia, vocals] and Jesse [Pintado, guitar] came in prepared – it’s grindcore, punk rock, thrash, death metal. They played their parts and that’s it. I was fortunate that most of the bands were well prepared and could play their tracks with minimum intervention from me, and that’s what being underground was to me: To be able to play. Not to disparage my punk brethren, but the mentality was, “Let’s get fucked up and play,” and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. The metal guys were more rehearsed, and I appreciated that. And Pete Sandoval was amazing! I never got to record [his later band] Morbid Angel, but he was the man. I’m not saying World Downfall sounds the best, but it’s got a raw feel that I like. Another band that always strived to get better each album was Cannibal Corpse. They always came in well-rehearsed and tried to make their next album better than the last.
You soon got the call to record Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains in Brazil. I love the image of you taking a Marshall head and various drumheads on the flight!
Roadrunner Records had approached a number of the popular thrash metal producers, but I was told they all thought Max [Cavalera]’s vocals were too death metal. The session was booked over the Christmas holiday, and there was a limited budget. I was sort of the engineer/producer of last resort. Monte [Conner, of Roadrunner] had talked to Tom, and they thought I could do it. I was able to bring a Marshall or Mesa/Boogie head on the plane, guitar strings, and sticks and heads for drummer Igor [Cavalera]. Brazil has a 100 percent tariff on bringing anything into the country, and the customs agents were trying to charge us $1000, which is about all the cash Roadrunner had budgeted for incidentals. Max’s friend finally helped us find an agent who was willing to take $300, so we got in and headed to the studio. Nas Nuvens, which translates to "in the clouds," was a studio founded by the famous Brazilian samba legend Gilberto Gil. It was the only 24-track studio in Rio, and it was booked for samba sessions every day, so we would work from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. The picture of the band at Ipanema Beach on the back of the album was taken at 7 a.m. after they’d been tracking all night. The night shift was challenging, but the band was coming off of the success of Schizophrenia and was really prepared. They knew this was their big shot, and they were serious and ready to go. I’d like to think that I am just a liaison between the artist and the studio. I’m the technical person trying to help them to create art. My only job was to get their vision on tape and make it sound as good as possible. These days, everyone knows how to record. But back then you had to go to a studio and spend money, and the Sepultura guys were cool as hell, and we had a great time. Nowadays, you have producers like Arthur Rizk [Tape Op #150], Erik Rutan, and Jarrett Pritchard [#166] who do amazing work as producers and are also playing in great bands. Amazing.
Were you pushing the band to play hard?
Andreas [Kisser] is a killer guitarist, and maybe with Max being more of a frontman we would work a little more on rhythm parts. But, as I said, they were well prepared. If the two guitarists have different picking or phrasing, then it doesn't sound as tight if they are both playing the same riff. Things like that I would check to make sure it was the same. Through Tom and Jim, I’d learned a lot about checking tuning before takes, using new strings, maintaining tempos, and listening for drum mistakes like sticks clicking on fills or hitting microphones. I’d be soloing the left and right guitars when it sounded muddy, and pointing out the differences between the two performances. With guitar sounds, most everyone likes that bluesy, classic rock sound from a 50 watt Marshall Jubilee. We tended to like solid-state amplifiers overall, because it sounded heavier and more brutal to us. I remember when Marshall came out with their Valvestate solid-state head, and Tom let me buy one for the studio. That was a great day! Like I said previously, we were all trying to find our way on how to record something that had 100 percent clarity yet was heavy and brutal as shit.
As a kid I saw Sepultura in Metal Maniacs magazine and couldn’t wait to hear it, but before the internet there was more of a mystique.
That’s a perfectly good point; there was a mystique! You had to read a magazine like Metal Maniacs, edited by a dear person and huge proponent and supporter of the scene, Katherine Ludwig. The scene was pretty much underground. You didn’t know what was going on unless you read about it, went to a mom & pop record store, or your friend told you about it. Now we hear about everything, instantly. Ronnie Galletti of Nasty Savage was amazing for spreading the band’s name and hyping the band. Borivoj Krgin was also so influential in the underground, and still is to this day with <blabbermouth.net>.
The year 1990 saw an explosion of activity for you: Death’s Spiritual Healing, Deicide’s s/t, Cannibal Corpse’s Eaten Back to Life, and more. Did you have a process for tracking bands by this time?
