With Armored Saint you've recorded tracks separately. Why does that work for you? Also, would you consider recording the basic tracks live for the next studio album?
Well, technically we do record the tracks all at once. It's just that we end up only keeping the drum tracks when we do that. There are two schools of thought. One school of thought is, set everybody up, get good sounds and then just record the band and get the live vibe with everybody together and have that be the basic tracks. The other school of thought is, set everybody up, but really only worry about the drum tracks and then from there build it up, and have guys build their guitar parts and bass parts over it. For Armored Saint's style of making music, we prefer building it from the ground up. To be quite honest, we're a bit of a loose band. If you've ever seen us live we're not like a super tight (at least not in my eyes anyway) group. We have a sense of a loose live thing that we've always had. So in the studio that really, really shows. As they say, the tape doesn't lie. So, if somebody is not quite in the groove with the drums, or somebody is ahead or a little bit sloppy here or there, it really is noticeable. For our style of music it works best for us to do the drums [first]. We record as a band. We all play together in the same room with headphones. We really concentrate on getting a good drum track. From there, we do the bass, guitar... actually that's not really true. This last time with Revelation, which is what we recorded in 2000, we did the guitars first and I did the bass last.
Oh really! Why?
Well, for me it was more of a way to find my place in the mix. When you record loud Marshall [amps] they can tend to take up a lot of room. They can go way down around 100 Hz and all the way up to 6 kHz, or something like that. They can cover such a broad spectrum that for me it was better to wait until the guitars were recorded so that I could dial in a better bass sound and let it be able to find its own place to reside in the frequency spectrum. When you do it the other way, you have no reference. You're just playing with the drums and maybe a couple of scratch guitar tracks. I've done it so many times that way and that's sort of the traditional way. Do drums first, then you do bass, then you do guitars. You can get a killer bass sound when it's just you and the drummer, but then the guitar players show up and they got all this low end coming out of their guitars, and they're covering up this nice mid-range that you'd like to have. It's really hard to make the bass poke out after that. I've actually been trying to do that lately on a lot of sessions that I play on. If I can, I'll ask to be one of the last ones to record. I sometimes get it and I sometimes don't.
You've had some interesting percussion on Armored Saint's last two albums, Symbol of Salvation and Revelation, as well as on your new solo album, A Chinese Fire Drill. You don't see many metal bands incorporate percussion at all. It seems like you have an ear for it. Is that a dumbek on the intro to A Chinese Fire Drill's "Automatic Fantasy?" Also, did you play the percussion parts on your solo album?
I played some of it. What you were talking about is actually a tabla part. The drummer that I hired — this guy Greg Studgio — he's the one that played the majority of the other stuff, like shakers and bells. He [also] played some stuff with the tablas. I don't know where it comes from other than having a liking for a lot of different kinds of styles of music. For me, it's just having a pretty wide spectrum of stuff that I can draw upon.
I can totally visualize that because that's the type of bass player you are.
Well, no one knows of me as being that kind of a bass player. Most people think of me as a metal bass player and sort of one dimensional, but they don't know that I have deep roots in jazz fusion, funk, pop music and R&B. They don't know that about me. And I love improvisation. Once someone gets to play with me and we get to shoot back and forth on stuff, then they see a whole other side.
You've got a deep, solid groove.
I am a closet drummer, kind of going back to your question about playing percussion and where is that coming from. My wife Tracey said it to me recently, "You really want to be a drummer!" I thought about it and I said, "You know what? You're right. I do want to be a drummer."
Let's talk about mic'ing percussion. What kind of mics do you use and does it matter what type of instrument it is?
I think it matters what the instrument is. Something like a tabla or a dumbek you can get away with just using a [Shure SM]57. I don't have an arsenal of microphones. If I'm just using what I have here, I'll just use a 57. I have a couple of condensers that I could use. If it was something more like a shaker or a tambourine I might use something more like a condenser mic.
Will you rent something for a session if you don't have a particular type of mic? It depends how critical I think it is. If we're singing a ballad and we don't have a mic that has really nice detail I might go rent one. But if it's something where we're playing metal music I'll just use either a dynamic mic that I have or even — I've done a lot of things with John Bush [Armored Saint/Anthrax] where we just sing it through a [Shure SM]58.
I wanted to ask you about that because you produced and engineered the vocals for a couple of tracks on Anthrax's album, The Greater of Two Evils.
I did the vocals all here in my studio.
How did that work? What kind of mic did you use?
We used a 58. He [John Bush] stood right here in the control room and I just had the speakers blaring loud.
And so it bled through the mic? How does that work?
Well, once you have all the tracks in there playing you don't hear any bleed through because the ratio between that and the actual signal of him singing is so far apart. You don't hear the drums and the guitars in the background. I learned that trick from producer Terry Date. You know, he's done Soundgarden and a ton of stuff [i.e. Deftones, White Zombie and Pantera]. He just sets up a 58 and lets the singer just sing in the control room, loud, and you just blast it. He's not in the next room. He's not listening on headphones. It's almost like he's rockin' out in his bedroom in front of a mirror. The inhibition goes away and you get a much better performance. The sonic quality for heavy metal music, where it's loud and aggressive, is perfect. The 58 with a decent pre and some compression and you're just going to get a good vocal performance — it's going to sound fine.
It's like two qualities that you are combining here. First, it's engineering with regard to the recording concept — then the producing, where you're getting the person who is performing to feel comfortable.
You have to do that no matter what you are doing when you're working with bands. Even if you're only engineering you still have this element of making them feel comfortable and happy. What they are recording, whether it's singing or playing guitar or bass, it's got to sound familiar to them. Otherwise they don't feel comfortable. It's like they're sitting in the chair and there's a rock in the chair and they can't quite figure out why they're not comfortable. That's something I always ask someone as soon as we plug in and I get a sound that I think is sounding good. My first question to them is, "Does this sound familiar?"
It's a good question.
The person that asked me that was a producer who [I] worked with [when I recorded with] Tribe After Tribe, Jim Scott. I got that from him. He got me all set up and stuff and then turned around and said, "Does that sound familiar?" And that hit me — "It does sound familiar and I feel really comfortable." [laughs]
Speaking about producers, on some of the previous Saint albums you co- produced with Chris Minto and Dave Jerden [Tape Op #86]. What roles did you guys assume if the albums were co-produced?
