How'd you get started in recording?
I think I did what every kid did in the '70s, which was I went to Radio Shack and bought a cheesy mixer. Of course, Radio Shack has the 30-day return policy, so a month later, I returned it and got the next model up. I did that for three months in a row before the guys finally figured out that I wasn't gonna buy anything. That's how I got into recording. I got into music before that because I had played piano for many years as well as clarinet and saxophone. I listened to a lot of records and thought it'd be great to make my own records. So, once I realized that the Radio Shack recorder was a piece of crap, I saved up enough money and bought a 4 track, a spring reverb, a microphone, and that was that- -it was all downhill from there. After that, all the money I had I spent on recording gear.
Did you go to school for recording or anything?
I actually have a degree in computer music, but when I was doing that, I had enough experience recording music that I got to go on the road as a recording engineer with some really famous people like Yo-Yo Ma...
This was when you were in school?
Yup. And then on tour I got to do sound for the London Sinfonietta, LA Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco New Music Players, the Ensemble Moderne--a lot of major players. It was a big change of pace from all the rock that I'd been doing up to that point, and I got to hang out with all these classical engineers and musicians. I learned a lot because the techniques they were using were nothing like the techniques I was used to using for rock.
Can you give an example of something you learned that you could apply to recording rock stuff?
Lots of omni mics.
For the room?
Not necessarily. You do pick up a lot more of the room, but you also don't get proximity effect, so you can take an omni and stick it right up into the bridge of a violin, and you won't get this boomy sound. I just did a recording with Robert Fisher and the Willard Grant Conspiracy, and I put an omni about 8 to 12 inches from the bridge of David Michael Curry's viola, and it sounded great, it sounded like a viola. I picked up a lot of my kitchen also.
We'll get to your kitchen in a second, but the main thing I wanted to talk about is the Karate record. First of all, it sounds amazing.
Glad you like it.
In the interview you did with The Boston Phoenix, you mentioned some drum mic'ing techniques--care to elaborate, or are they top secret?
Well first of all, we did it at Salad Days, which unfortunately doesn't exist any more. The room there used to be a machine shop or something, so it had a tile floor, and the ceiling was really low in one area, and like a cathedral-style in another. We put the drums in the area with the low ceiling and got lots and lots of reverb from the area further away with the higher ceiling. It just sounded so good in the room, I thought, "What I need to do is use omnis--I don't want any proximity effect, I want everything to sound exactly like what I hear in this room". I have a bunch of Earthworks omnis and I set those up. I do this weird thing on snare drums, I don't mic the top or bottom, what I do is put an omni about a half inch from the body. I try to get it as close to the shell as possible, so I pick up more snare and less of everything else. So, depending on what kind of sound I want, I move it up and down. Further down, I get more of a crunchy, snarey sound, and if I move it up I get more of the punch.
Right, the attack.
For Gavin's snare, the mic was halfway between the hole and the bottom.
How about the kick?
For the kick, I took an Earthworks omni and stuck it way inside and just pulled it out further and further until I found the magic spot. When you find it, it's just the best sound in the world.
Where was the spot? Was it still inside the drum?
Actually no, it ended up being an inch in front of the hole.
I've never gotten anything good with the mic inside; it always sounds like "boing".
Yeah, like a basketball.
Just nothing like what the drum actually sounds like.
Yeah.
His kick drum sounds pretty amazing to begin with...
Yeah, yeah, one thing I should say is that Gavin is the most natural drummer in the world, he's fucking unbelievable. I mean that was probably the only session where I didn't tune the drums, he just started to play and it was great.
Yeah, he's awesome, we jammed with him a couple times at our house. I was playing guitar and I couldn't even hang. I just stopped. What did you have for overheads?
AKG 460B, a small diaphragm cardiod.
Right over the drums?
Yep. Directly over the center of the kit. Like this...I forget what it's called.
Coincident pair?
Yeah, that's it.
What did you use on Geoff's guitar?
An AKG C1000. That thing is one of the most underrated mics, it has the purest midrange of any small diaphragm condenser I can think of that's not an omni.
Yeah, his guitar is all about midrange.
Right, I wanted it to be the sweetest midrange in the world. We actually used a JoeMeek Meekbox as a mic pre for the super dry guitar solos to accentuate the mids even further.
How close to the amp was the mic?
Usually what I do, is put the mic halfway between the center of the cone and the rim, about half an inch from the grill. Then if I want more grit, I move it towards the rim, if I want more midrange I move it towards the center. And then, if it still has too much bite I move it back a little.
How loud were they playing? I'm assuming they played it all live...
Yep. We kept all the basics and just overdubbed vocals, and a little guitar and percussion. But everything was at a pretty reasonable level, if you listen to the drum tracks there's almost no bleed, and we didn't use any gobos or anything.
And what did you use on the bass?
We weren't that happy with the bass sound actually...
Really? That's one of my models of good bass tone...
Well, his speaker was breaking up and sounded like crap...
It doesn't sound like that at all on the record...
Well, the reason why is we took a DI and ran it through, I'm not 100% sure, but I think we ran it through a Neve mic pre with the input gain cranked, and the output gain all the way down.
It didn't distort like crazy?
With the Neves, when they distort they sound good. We still weren't that psyched about the bass sound though.
Damn...
I mean, it's a good sound, it just wasn't what we wanted.
Vocals?
We tried a ton of different mics, and eventually settled on two. One was an AKG C3000, the other was the same small diaphragm AKG we used for overheads.
