How do you get the session jobs and production work that you do?
The only reason that people get work and are working on records is because somebody has heard a record that you've done something on and they want to pull off a little of that. If you show up and you're a jerk, they'll never call you again. That's it, that's all there is. There's no other secret that is being withheld, for you or for anyone else that does it. People are going to hear some tracks that you've done and go, "I think that's cool, I want to work with that guy."
And it seems like you've got to do 20 tracks for every one track that somebody hears.
And it's not always the thing that you think. It's not the thing you're doing that you think the world is going to go, "A-ha! Mr. Crane is up to good work." It's going to be something that somebody's playing and the person they're going out with hears and happens to go out drinking that night and says, "God, I heard this amazing thing today." It's going to be the b-side of something or something that was never released — it's just a cassette. That's the reality of it.
The secret that the old engineers don't tell you is that your best work is never going to be heard. [laughter] Something that you put a lot of energy into might just be totally buried or never released.
I remember reading some things with session musicians over the years — they would grumble about how it doesn't matter what you do because it's going to be mixed too quietly or the mix of the whole record is going to not have a groove whatsoever. You work on something that was really cool when you were there and by the time it comes out it's messed up. And lo and behold, it actually turns out to be true. As a session musician, I played on so many things where I just came home out of my head so happy about it [the session] and by the time it gets released it's completely watered down. They killed it.
Did you start out as a session musician or as a musician?
As a musician, I've always loved recording. As a kid, I was fascinated with tape recorders, I love everything about them — microphones, amplifiers, all of this was magical stuff. By the time I was 13, my dad had a friend who happened to have a recording studio attached to his house. There was this local hard-rock band recording — it was a 16-track recording studio. I went nuts. I was just sitting in the control room watching them overdub. I was 13 years old and realizing the significance of an overdub.
How it's piecing the song together..?
Yeah, and the whole notion of it. I totally got what it was and the potential of it and just looking at the machine and this big piece of 2" tape going by. It was the most massive piece of tape I had ever seen. It was the most monstrous, fantastic thing. I pretty much knew that I was going to spend my life being a musician by the time I was 7 or 8. By the time I was 13, I knew that I wanted to be recording. I had a stereo cassette deck and my dad had an old stereo reel-to-reel and I just used to do massive overdubbing, jumping between them. Ever since I was 13 I've had headphones on. I didn't have an amp so I used to overdrive the tape machine by plugging my guitar into the mic input. It was beautiful. A couple of years ago, somebody turned me on to the Lindsey Buckingham stuff on Tusk [Fleetwood Mac]. It was a very similar guitar sound.
There's that strange kind of dry, edgy guitar sound on there.
Yeah, and the other funny thing at the time was that I discovered if I detuned down to low D, I could play power chords with the fuzz with just one finger. I had this really strange proto-grunge sounding guitar stuff on these horrifically bad songs with some squeaky 13-year old singing on them.
What did your parents think of all that when you were messing around with those kinds of things?
I was very lucky. My dad was a music teacher and my mom loved singing and they had really good tastes in songs. They just sort of felt that there was no question in what I was going to be and it was useless to even fight it. So, any interest on my part, was a good thing. Most of my friends didn't have that good fortune. As a parent, it seems like a rather bleak situation. "Oh my god, my kid will starve and be a drug addict." [laughter] The fact that my dad was the breadwinner of the family at the time — they couldn't exactly say, " This is an irresponsible thing for you to be doing."
'Cause he's teaching music.
Something funny that did happen was that my mom, at some point, when I was 8 or 9 years old said that I might want to think about some other things or some other options just in case. It was a really serious heart-to-heart and I remember it very clearly. At the time, I was pretty much obsessed with drums. Around this time I had started playing my brother's guitar, that he got for Christmas and didn't play, so I started playing Beatles' songs on it. I took my mother's advice and basically learned to do tons of other musical things. I didn't think about becoming good at math or getting other interests. I did take her advice, I learned to play a bunch of instruments and I started writing songs. As an adult looking back, I had a good laugh about that. Funny enough, her advice probably helped keep me in good stead, because from very early on I liked doing everything.
As a kid, did you ever get a 4-track cassette unit or anything?
Those didn't exist when I was a kid. I'm 36 so...
I'm the same age as you and they weren't around were they?
No. I eventually got a used 4-track Teac reel-to-reel by the time I was 18 or 19. Around that time, the PortaStudios [Tascam] were out, but that was a new and expensive item. I got the used reel-to-reel with a Teac mixer for precious little money and I had one mic and that was it. I had the same pair of headphones that I had when I was 13. The PortaStudio seemed like an unbelievable extravagance that I looked forward to. I didn't even mess with one of those until well into my 20s.
When you first started going out into "real" studios, what were those like for you?
There was a studio that I did all of my initial work at in New Haven called Presence. It was owned by a guy named John Russell and it was in his parents' basement. He had an 8-track Tascam and a Tascam board, a pair of those atrocious JBL monitors that lots of people had at the time. They were supposed to have incredibly realistic low and high-end. I think he also had a DBX compressor and an MXR digital delay and some sort of spring reverb in a box and he had an [Neumann U-] 87. What was cool about the studio was that he was a professional keyboard player around town and that's how he bought the studio. But because of that, he had a Mellotron, which I later bought, and a lot of interesting stuff. I started going there with one of the first bands I had — we did our 8-track demo there in a couple of days. I was just going crazy, I was so happy. I was finally around a studio. I became friends with the guy who was the engineer and we ended up forming a band together and doing a lot of work at that studio. He would produce people, locally, and he would bring me in as a session player and it's not like there's a ton of session work in Connecticut. But, these bands would come in and maybe they didn't have a keyboard player so I would play keyboards. Or if they needed guitar, I would do that. I made a conscious decision, when I was 16 or 17 that I would go to any session and do anything on it for free at any time. I wanted every opportunity to be around the stuff, I wanted to see other people doing it, I wanted any chance to have my hands on the stuff... everything. I would go in and maybe one day I would be just sitting around making tea, on another day I would be involved in something or one day I would be an assistant engineer or just wrapping chords. Any time they would let me be around, I was around. I ended up dropping out of high school right around my 17th birthday. It was really an odd, but eventful few days... John Lennon got shot, my birthday hit and I turned 17 and I literally went and signed out of school where I had hated being for 10 years — it was always cutting into my recording time. [laughter] The day that I signed out of high school, I actually went to my first paying session. My dad dropped me off and I had my guitar and I played the session. Basically, my friend's studio went up from 8 to 16 and eventually to 24 [tracks]. He also got his own building and I started working at his studio, officially, as anything. I would engineer sessions or be his assistant. I did programming, he was the only person in Connecticut to have a Fairlight [CMI, early sampler] at the time and I would program that. He was of the mind that things should be getting used, so whenever sessions were done I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. I really started getting my shit together fast. Often, I just came in and played the grand piano and I would just play it from the end of the session until 9 in the morning. That's when I also started getting my own writing chops together.
Did you start recording yourself at that point?
That was never really my interest then. It was always song first and if I was just making a track to make a track, it was it's own experimental thing. After that, I ended up moving to Boston and I got involved with the people at Q Division — right when their studio opened. That's really where I sort of found myself. I did some solo recording out there before I moved to Los Angeles, which kind of cemented a lot of opinions that I have about recording and even certain styles of working.
What would you say those styles or opinions are?
The sense of intimacy with recording, which can happen even with recording tons of tracks and instruments on it. The sense of intimacy does not necessarily denote small or large. It's strictly the feeling of presence, emotionally or sonically. I'm quite obsessed with that. I also started working with Aimee Mann at that time and she was very obsessed with very loud vocals. Eventually, she totally won me over into that world and now anything I do has a vocal as loud as it can possibly be without sounding like it's a separate record.
Or without making the music incredibly puny...
Yeah, but I'm also figuring out ways of making it so that the music doesn't sound puny but the vocals are still large. These are the constant challenges that you never really get good enough at doing. I actually like to go in without a lot of structure. I like to do things... like throw paint at the wall and really not worry about them, whether it's in the basic tracking stage or the overdub stage. I'm also fearless about being able to throw things away. Rather than labor on one thing a long, long time, I'd rather do a bunch of options and look at the different combinations that come up.
When you first started working at Q Division, did you start as an intern?
When the studio had off-time there was a group of musicians — we ended up being a band for a few months. There was just always recording going on, everybody wanted to be making music and everybody wanted to be improving in their respective craft. I was writing a ton of songs, Mike Denneen, who's the chief engineer and producer there, he wanted to be engineering all the time. Everybody wanted to be recording and moving different mics around and seeing what it meant. The real moment of glory was they traded their board for a couple of Pultecs, two 67s, two 47s, two 44s, two 77s, a 49 and other things I forgot. They got this amazing deal. This was about 11 years ago and basically there was just a phone call going, "Okay, you have to come down here." I was like, "Is that stuff as good as people say?"... "Come down here!" That was it — that was the light going off. I was like, "Oh, this is why the records that I like sound the way they do."
Do you buy much gear? Do you have a home studio at this point?
I do have a home studio. I have a bunch of really nice things. I've got an Ampex 1200 24-track and I also have a Stevens [deck]. I have an Oram console — John Oram is the guy who originally designed the Trident EQ. He has his own company now. They have good stuff and they have a good concept. Right now, the only things that are available to people are a Mackie or a $300,000 new console or $300,000 vintage console. There are few mid-priced good sounding things. So, they've made some good sounding consoles. I have a great deal of outboard stuff designed by David Bock, who designs gear for Soundelux [and Mercury]. I've actually got a number of prototypes of his. Things that they couldn't make on a mass production level because the parts would be too expensive.
I don't think people realize what a consideration that is.
It's horrible. This guy has wonderful ears — he makes great stuff. I'm just thrilled to know him and I like him as a person and he's up to great things. He's made a bunch of Pultec style EQs. I've got four of those and I have a stereo tube mic pre that he made for me. I don't know that he's even made another one, but its beautiful sounding. I'm obsessed about mic pres. Mark Sampson, who use to make Matchless amps, literally just dropped off to me a pair of mic pres that he just designed that are some of the finest things I've ever heard. Obviously, whatever studio I'm at I get to know the sound of their console and whatever their freestanding mic pres are. It is really possible to get onto tape, just going from the mic to the mic pre to the tape — compression if necessary. The other thing people don't do is that they don't listen to all the different compressors available. That's yet another EQ curve. It's not like I'm anti-EQ; I'm just anti having anything between the microphone and the tape that doesn't have to be there. If you get to know these other pieces of equipment, you're physically closer to the thing that's happening. It's coming out of the speaker and the waves have gone through fewer things, they have less coloration from other things. As close as you can get to the original airwaves is cool. I don't believe that there is any form of recording that replicates what it's like to stand in a room — or even close. I think that people who claim that are idiots.
I've never put a record on and felt like it's the same thing by any means.
