Of course, this shouldn't be surprising. During a recent performance on NPR's World Café, Michael agreed that he was but a reluctant performer. He said that making the records is, for him, the best part of the process. His care and craft are certainly apparent on his lateÌ album, Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947 — yet another record full of brilliant pop songs that he recorded (and mastered) at home.
My first talk with Michael, after a recent performance at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge, led to the discovery that he was a big Tape Op fan.
I later caught up with him for a phone interview.
What's your home studio like?
It's basically just a living room, which is a fairly large room, and in the living room are the drum kit and the piano. That's my main recording room. That's on one side of the house, and then on the other side is a small room that was once a tiny dining room, where I've got my Pro Tools rig and all my gear. I have my amp heads in that room with cables running down to the basement where the cabinets are.
So that's set up all the time?
Mm-hmm. Then I just run a snake into the living room, bring everything back into my patch bay and work in my little cubbyhole.
Are there any treatments in those rooms?
I was prepared to do treatments, but I did a few mixes in there and brought them to various systems and thought it sounded pretty accurate — so I counted my blessings and kept going.
Right. So when you were tracking most of the stuff for Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947, were you doing that live with the other players?
It was always tracking with guitar and drums when it's a drum song. Basically, I would go with a guitar into a third room that's a little library, and then Danny Frankel would be out in the living room. And Bruce MacFarlane helped me engineer.
So he was, for the most part, just there for just the drum song tracking?
No, he was there for more than that. We kind of engineered it together. Bruce is a very talented engineer and a pleasure to be around. He was extraordinarily helpful.
So you're using almost the whole house, then?
Yeah.
Are you finding many differences in sounds between the rooms?
There's really not much to do in any of the rooms except the living room. The living room is large enough that depending on where you place a mic, you can get different sounds. I was figuring that I was going to have to find a way to make some money to dedicate toward doing drums at a real studio, because I didn't think that I was going to get drum sounds that I liked at the house. But the room had a good sound to it. I experimented with different area mics in different places and depending upon the song, just kind of moved things in and out.
When we talked before, you mentioned using a Beyer ribbon as a supplement on the kick in addition to the standard AKG kick mic. Could you explain that a bit?
Yeah. We stuck the ribbon so that it was sort of facing outwards, so it wasn't going to get all the pressure of the kick drum head hitting it. It doesn't sound like something I would ever use on its own, but it has lots and lots of nice low-end information to help the AKG.
Are there any other mic setups that you keep coming back to?
No, not really. I didn't get too crazy about it. I knew that it was kind of going to be what it was, which is the sound of that room, and I don't have the mic selection that I would have had at a real studio. The only thing that ever really changed was the placement of the room mic, and that was song- dependent. For me the room is really all about snare length, and that has a lot to do with what the tempo of the song is, what the vibe of the song is, and really trying to find the right length of tone. Sometimes that would mean dedicating a room mic somewhere for the snare drum, keying it and gating it off the snare drum, and sometimes that would mean playing around with other options. Either, you know, Altiverb or some other thing sort of combined with a room mic to get the right length of things.
Were you switching up the room mics a lot?
Yeah, that would always change. A lot of times it was a [Neumann] U47. A lot of times it was a U67. Sometimes it was a [Studer] D19. Sometimes it was an American D22. Sometimes it was an American D44. You know, whatever sounded interesting.
And you said you have a pair of Schoeps, too?
Yeah, I have a pair of Schoeps that I use for the overheads. Snare was usually a 57. I don't have a lot of options. And then toms are usually Sennheiser 441s, and that's pretty much it.
Does the studio play much of a role in your writing?
I usually don't even start to record until I can actually sit down with a guitar or the piano and play the song top to bottom except, obviously, for things like "The Transistor" or just little tone poem things that are all about texture and some kind of sonic environment. That's a whole different thing. But in terms of the songs, I don't usually start unless I've played them at Largo a couple of times. But the studio plays a big part in arranging for me.
We also talked about your Pro Tools 24 setup and how you like the stability of that system. You would, however, like to get something so you could mix out of the box because you hear a difference there. What difference do you hear?
The difference that I hear is really just the width of the canvas that you're mixing on, and it just seems that there's a little bit more... a little bit wider stereo field and a little bit more clarity of sound placements within the stereo field when you mix out of [the box]. And I'm not sure why that is. There's something, I guess, about frequencies combining in the analog realm... Maybe I'm nuts and there is no difference. But I don't even know for sure if subbing out to eight stereo pairs is going to achieve what I want, because maybe it's a function of actually everything taken individually — but I want to at least try that. I mean, I'm always trying to find ways to expand that. I was privy to some early tests of QSound. The unfortunate part about QSound is that when it was first introduced, they were out of their fucking minds. They wanted to like, charge points on an album. But they actually let me use it for free, and I used it on the album Free-For-All a little bit. And there's a couple of little moments where if your speakers are set up right, you'll hear something coming from behind you, giving some three- dimensionality to the stereo field. It's always something that has really intrigued me, which is why I would eventually love to get my hands on a 5.1 system just to play around with it. Since people are actually buying those things for their home theaters, there's at least a moderately in-place environment for that. I just don't know how good the quality is of what most people have. In the interim, I've tried to find things that achieve a little bit of it — like on my album MP4 (Days Since A Lost Time Accident), Husky Hoskulds, who engineered it, had this old expander box, so we would have the normal stereo canvas, which would be however wide, but then every once in a while there would be some sound that we would place extreme left or extreme right. That interests me — to sort of play around with that kind of thing.
Do you remember, on Free-For-All, what parts you used QSound on?
You know, I don't remember what they are. I just remember being aware... I was aware of two things. One, that they were nuts to charge points for this, because it was the kind of thing where you had to have a stereo set up exactly right at home. It had to be laid out very specifically. If you did that, it was impressive as hell. But who's going to do that? And number two, it was the kind of thing I just knew was going to be abused. The kind of thing that people are doing with 5.1 now, where they're using it as a fucking space age effect box and sending sounds soaring over your head or something, as opposed to trying to create some kind of subtle environment with it — which is something that could be really interesting.
I really love the electric guitar parts on all your records. They're so well- placed and fit each song really well. I was wondering if you've used a similar rig across all your records, or if you kind of mix that up each time.
I would like to mix it up more — I just don't have that many amps. I bounce between the following amps usually — it's either a fairly new Fender Pro Junior, a vintage [Vox] AC30, a Matchless 30 watt or an Ampeg V2. Then occasionally, I'll use a Danelectro Silvertone that has a crazy reverb in it.
When you mic those, are you sticking pretty much with the traditional approaches or are you moving stuff around a lot?
I usually move stuff around a lot, but the limitations of this particular record usually made it so that I required the isolation of the basement, and there was already a cabinet down there. So I would run either the V2 head or the Matchless head through the cabinet and just mic it up with a 57.
In addition to the guitar parts, you also have consistently interesting back- ground vocals. The parts are creative and they're recorded in really cool ways. I was wondering if that's something you are conscious of going for when you're recording?
Oh yeah. I'm pretty bold in carving out stuff. I'm not shy with filtering stuff. And background vocals, to me, they don't have to sound like hi-fi vocals. They can fit into a mix like an instrument. They can fit into a mix like a horn part or a guitar part or whatever. That's one of the reasons why sometimes I'll use an old RCA ribbon mic, because that's almost like putting it through a band filter. It already just puts it in a place other than where the lead vocal is. It's different if it's a part that's like a two-part or a harmony part to the lead vocal. But if it's a background part, that can serve as color just like an instrument can.
That sort of leads to another thing I notice across all your records. There is a lot going on in your arrangements, but they're never cluttered — just full of really cool ideas that come in without ever detracting from the song. Do you have any hints on how to carve out those spaces and make sure that sounds aren't stepping all over the song?
You know, a lot of it with me is instinct, and there are a lot of things I wind up doing fairly consistently — but I always have to re-remember them. It's almost like once I get my hands on the mix I find I'm doing something that I've done before to achieve a certain result — and I never remember them between records. I just always go, "Why don't I fucking write this down so I don't have to search to find this idea again?" And I never do. And that would be, for me, something helpful to read in a magazine. Write it down. Write the idea down. Because I spend too much time rediscovering some of these things. I can tell you one thing that I do a lot is find and commit to a place within the stereo mix for a sound, and then assign a reverb to it that is right for the mix. But the reverb is mono panned in exactly the same place as that sound. So, you basically have a sound with a room behind it. But it's in a defined place within the stereo field. I think of mixes like a grid. In fact, when I did my first album, I gave Bob Clearmountain these diagrams that I had drawn, where it was basically a perspective stage of left and right and then front and back. And the further something was back meant the wetter it was, and then it would indicate whether the wetness was stereo room or mono room behind it.
How did he react to those diagrams?
He loved it, I think. I did them on my Mac SE in HyperCard. Remember HyperCard? God, I loved HyperCard. Bill Atkinson designed a program that taught you everything about computers without letting you know that that's what it was doing. Anyway, I made little icons representing each instrument, placed them on a 3D grid and then printed them out. Maybe he was just bemused, but he seemed really into it. While I don't know Bob well, I find him to be a very, very nice guy, so it's entirely possible that he was humoring me.
