Before the Hotel2Tango studio existed in its present incarnation with the three of you, you [Efrim] and Thierry worked primarily in an 8-track studio environment with your own gear, and Howard, you had your own studio. What kind of gear were you all working with at the time, and was this an entry into learning about the recording and engineering process?
Thierry: Actually we worked on a Teac 1/4" 4-track before getting the Tascam 8-track. The first Molasses record was done here at the Hotel on the Teac 4-track with a Tascam board and Dynaco speakers, and that was it.
Efrim: We did a lot of tinkering on borrowed 4-track machines for a lot of years, headphones as microphones and obsessive track bouncing. Recorded a pile of little things on 4-track when Thierry and me still lived at the Hotel. Later on we bought a Tascam 8-track and an Allen & Heath 24- channel board from Carter, Labradford's keyboard player. Labradford and godspeed were touring together and Carter had the tape machine and board laying idle in his apartment and offered to sell it to us. We recorded the first Silver Mt. Zion record on that gear, eight tracks feeling like so many sprawling, luxuriant acres at the time.
Howard: I had a 16-track studio in Old Montreal called Mom & Pop Sounds. I had majored in sound in university before that, although I knew how to record bands already. I just enrolled to use the studios for free. They had an 8-track 1/2" studio with lots of beautiful AKG mics. In 2000, when I was looking for a new space, Thierry and Efrim were looking to buy some new gear, so we just brought my gear over here to the hotel.
What kind of console and tape machine does the Hotel use now?
H: Because Molasses electrocuted our MTR 90II, we're now using an MX-80 24-track 2" machine and a Neotek Series II board. Our mixdown deck is an Otari MTR-10 1/4".
People who record bands often differ wildly on the use of compression. I was wondering if you could talk about your take on compression and the different situations where compression can be hindrance or help.
H: I think what makes a recording exciting is dynamic range, and when you over use compression you're getting rid of that dynamic range. I think a lot of people use compression on drums by default... like somehow that's what you are 'supposed' to do. I mean, drums sounds don't come from boxes, they come from players. The best drum sounds I've ever heard are by great players, like Michel Langevin from Voivod who played on Elizabeth Anka Vajagic's record. You don't need to compress those drums because they already sound great.
T: I try to avoid it actually. I mean, it can be useful if you want something to sit in the mix properly, but to me you either use it transparently or you use it creatively. I'm just starting to appreciate compressors for creative means.
H: It's interesting to just run a signal through the compressor, without actually compressing it. It changes things sometimes in a really nice way. The difference between the 1178 and the LA5 and the DBX are like night and day in that regard.
What compressors do you guys have here at the Hotel?
H: Well, there's the two UREI LA5s, two DBX 163Xs, a Langevin Photo-Optical compressor, a UREI 1178, a bunch of Valley-People dynamites, and the RNC 1773 which is really quite versatile — does subtle well and over-the-top really well too.
Do you all tend to record in 15 ips or 30 ips, and aside from the obvious, how do they differ for each of you?
H: Both. There's a pretty huge difference between 15 and 30 ips, in particular how the transients sound. For things like drums, you don't need to EQ in mixdown as much when you record at 30 ips. Having said that, at 30 ips you lose the low end a bit. The flip side to that is that it doesn't get muddy down there, and the lack of 20-40 Hz actually makes things like kick drums and acoustic bass sound much better to my ears. Normally people's beef with 15 ips is that it's noisy or hissy. Our workaround to that is that when we record at 15 ips we don't use the NAB standard. We add 2 dB more HF pre- emphasis with the record EQ, and then take away in playback with the Repro EQ, so 15 ips is a bit quieter than it normally would be... kinda like a hybrid of NAB and CCIR. Recording that way actually compresses the high end to tape a little sooner too, which is nice. When we mix to 1/4" we do it at 15ips CCIR.
T: Efrim and I were doing rough mixes for the new Hannah Marcus record, recorded at 30 ips. We made a lot of judicious mic choices. She's got great gear and great instruments, and she's a great musician. We just put up the mixes and we ended up not having to really do any EQ-ing.
E: The first Hannah Marcus record, Desert Farmers, was done at 15 ips and we had to EQ a lot, although I don't know how much of that ratty EQ-ing was a product of recording at low speed.
There's a certain immediacy to the H2T recordings that's missing from more slick productions. It seems that much care is taken to preserve a chair's creak, a tube amp's hum or a foot engaging a pedal on a piano. Why is that and what does it add to the overall recording?
T: We've been in situations where we've actually had to remove that stuff, and I think there are times when people want that creaking chair or that foot on a piano pedal. I think it's beautiful all the time, myself. But it's something that's there by choice.
H: I'm reading this Neil Young book in which he subscribes to something called Audio Verité, similar to Cinema Verité — you just capture what's there. It was inspiring to read that because it flies in the face of how most people make records today where it's not really "verité" at all, it's predominantly artificial. So if there's a chair squeak, or an out of tune note or amp hum, to me... it just warms my heart.
E: I think musicians can get insecure about things they hear during playback the same way people get insecure about the size of their noses. So when people get this weird insecurity about pitch or whether the recording is sounding slick enough, you can feel like you're saying to someone you love, "No, you're really beautiful." But instead you're saying, "No, that was a really fucking excellent vocal take," or, "Goddamn, I love the way that song is coming together." It always breaks your heart a bit when you lose those debates and some tiny perfect moment gets undone.
What are your thoughts on the use of computer editing gear like Pro Tools as opposed to working exclusively in an environment of analog gear and recording to tape?
E: I think that stuff is dangerous. It can be like carving a piece of wood until there's nothing left and I think you hear that on recordings more and more often — those bland, seamless vistas. I think it's also troubling that people's understanding of frequencies of instruments is becoming totally fucked. Like people's understanding of how an electric bass or kick drum sounds. People's ears get [acclimated] to this sub-bass thing and I worry about that. Also, I think there's something to be said for recording with limitations, whether it's time constraints or track constraints or gear constraints. Again, I think musicians are mostly insecure, worried creatures, and 133 hours spent on unnecessary "point and click" tweaking doesn't make you Brian Wilson, hey?
H: Computer recording is doing to musicianship what the word processor has done to penmanship. You know when you find a postcard that someone wrote to someone else in the '30s... how beautiful it is, just to read their handwriting, and see how they used language back then. The computer has killed all that. Somehow I can't see people 70 years from now getting so sentimental about our e-mails. But more to the point, as computer recording becomes more popular, I'm finding that more and more young musicians — like in their early twenties — can't get through a song from top to bottom. And sometimes it gets frustrating. And I find that people who have solely recorded on computer sometimes just get lazy or scatter- brained. I think it's a fallacy that computer recording saves time — I think it just makes people not commit. I personally like the limitations of tape because it makes you focus on the end from the beginning.
T: Last year I went to do some overdubs on a Shalabi Effect record, I don't know what they were using, but they had 36 tracks and up to five or seven takes per track. I mean, they made an amazing record and they were great to work with, but can you imagine having to take the time to weed through all that... "Which take one goes best with that take seven? Which do we all agree should be the keeper?" And then you have to repeat that process.
Howard, do you have a prerequisite list of mics you generally use on the drums, or does the type of band usually dictate mic choice and placement?
H: I'll gladly tell you about all the mics I've used on every single session, but the danger of going down this road is that someone reading this might get the impression that, if they buy this or that kind of mic, they will accomplish the same thing. Testament to that is, all three of us have recorded records here with the same mics, cables, board, and outboard effects, and those records sound completely different. So it's almost irrelevant. But if you want to talk specifics, generally I'll start with an AKG D12e inside the kick, a condenser — usually a Rode NT2 — outside the kick drum. Snare is usually a Beyerdynamic 201 or an SM57, maybe an SM57 on the bottom, but less so recently. For overheads, either a pair of Oktava MC012s or AKG 451s with the CK5 capsule. On the toms, Sennheiser 421s, and room mics are usually a pair of Oktavas as boundary mics off the floor.
I appreciate the laundry list, but having heard the first part of your answer it seems probably more pertinent and a really valid point.
H: Well, when I started buying equipment, I'd read reviews about pieces of equipment and I'd look at them like the Holy Grail. So I'd save up money and buy the new condenser mic that everyone was talking about. I'd bring it home and go, "Eh," [shrugs] "it kinda just sounds like any other mic." I've found that how you use the mics you have, where you put them, is going to make a bigger difference than buying something new. Move a mic three inches back from where you normally put it, and it's a brand new mic. Having said that, I do love buying mics!
E: Can we all agree, however, that the Rode NT2 is an excellent mic?
H: Yeah, and can we all agree that the price on eBay just went up by $100?! [laughs all around] We put the Rode side by side with a U87 that someone brought in to record with.
A Neumann U87?
H: Right, so basically a mic costing about four times the price of the NT2.
T: Yeah, and we tested them for about an hour with different voices.
E: I mean, A/B-ing it, you could hear the mute switch, but otherwise you couldn't tell the difference. Mute switch notwithstanding, the difference was inaudible.
