I'm going to start you with some fun stuff — questions from our readers. The first question is, "Can you ask him how the recording and mix process has changed for him over the years and why he's made the choices he has?"
Yeah, is that saying I'm doing something wrong?
It also says, "How did his ear evolve and what did he not hear when he started that he hears now and vice versa?"
That's a good one. I can answer that. For the first question, I can date it all the way back to starting on 4-track cassette, which I did obsessively for ten years. That's all I did. It was literally in my closet. I remember the big day when ADATs came out and then I had 8- track and that was an amazing luxury. Then computers came along and I resigned as my own recording engineer. I could probably still make a pretty nice sounding thing on an ADAT if I went back to that but I don't even know how to turn the computer on. At that point I decided to say, "All right. You're just going to be the artist and let someone who knows what they're doing run the computer." It's nice because it freed me up to just pay attention to one side of things instead of trying to do all the jobs myself. I still do like to go into a traditional recording studio and record on 2-inch tape whenever possible, but the best is the combination of the two, I think, when you can have some of that tape warmth, but the editing possibilities from the computer. Therein is the arc of my technological recording process.
How do you work differently now and what do you hear differently?
What I hear differently is interesting in terms of mastering. One of the things I was happy to do for these new CD collections that we just put out is re-master stuff. In the early days I didn't know what the hell I was doing in terms of mastering. I was always listening on speakers that weren't giving enough bass response. I had no idea what I was doing. As a result, a lot of our earlier records have way too much bottom.
You would tell the mastering engineer, "Give me more low end" and send it back and stuff?
Right. Over the years I slowly learned about having a neutral listening place and I finally developed a keen sense of having a more compact band sound instead of making it so bottom heavy or top heavy. I got a sense of how to make it hotter and tighter to the point where I feel like I'm kind of an expert on it, now. I'm sort of obsessive about it. Most artists, I think, spend a day or two mastering and then they're like, "Okay, that's good." Our last album — the Blinking Lights [and Other Revelations] album — took three months to finish mastering of almost constant work.
Who did the mastering on that?
It went through a couple of people but the guy who finished it ultimately was Dan Hersch [at DigiPrep] who masters a lot of the Rhino box sets and stuff like that. That's mostly what he does. I figure if he's good enough for the classics, he's good enough for me.
I was visiting him last year and he was mastering something for you that had heavy revisions.
Yeah, I've definitely put him through the paces. He actually lives a couple of houses away. He does home repairs for me, as well.
So he did the mastering on the compilations that came out? How long did that take you?
Not that long, surprisingly. I think he was scared. The re- mastering went smoothly. The music is from different eras. I think one thing we noticed, and we knew this would happen, is the process got easier as we went along because [songs were] in chronological sequence on both of these collections. The hard stuff was the early stuff, when it was really fat. At the end we didn't need to do anything to the modern stuff — that was as good as [the songs] were going to get.
That's an interesting process. Going back and listening. Did it give you revelations about how you worked differently over the years?
Yeah, mostly in that sense of, "Wow, I made everything so tubby." I've heard stories about some mastering labs using some of my records as a reference point for "this is what it should sound like." I was always aghast. Are you kidding? No! Use something tighter.
Did you hear stuff in the arrangement and recording styles that you felt you had moved on from?
Yeah, in the early stuff. I think it is a good sign if you hear stuff from your past that makes you wince a little. It means you've grown, hopefully — learned some things.
What ways do you feel you have grown in the studio as far as changes in sounds and arrangements and things like that?
I guess that's an ongoing process. You're always, hopefully, getting better. For me, if I have a gift, it's looking at the picture of what all the parts are adding up to and I think I've gotten better at that from doing it so much. That's the hard part about being the leader. The buck stops here and you always have to wade through all the individual players and parts. Everybody wants his or her spotlight and you always have to give everyone a dose of tough love and say, "I know. I understand. It's just not what's going to work in the big picture."
You seem to use a lot of contrast, say a very small, tiny drum sound and another instrument against it that's very open and full. Are you conscious of this?
Yeah. That's one of the things that makes mastering such an ordeal in my records are the certain dynamics that go on. Some of my songs are dynamic in a way that can be a little bit of a challenge — especially getting the whole album to sit right from song to song. That's where it gets complicated.
In the past you've worked with quite a few people as co-producers, like John Parish, Mike Simpson and Jon Brion [Tape Op #18].
And I'd like to work with all those people again. There are probably a bunch of other people I'd like to work with, too. I guess I like to work really fast and part of the problem is I get really inspired suddenly and the next day I want to start the album. If you want to work with some producer you really admire, they're like, "Oh, I'll pencil you in for 2012." I just can't wait. I always like the idea of working with other producers and I always want to but more often than not I end up producing them myself out of convenience. Maybe not just convenience but also out of — I usually end up feeling like I have a strong idea of what I want to do. I throw myself into these situations where I surround myself with talented people and it seems like we don't need more help than we already have.
Who do you call for engineering with the sessions that you do at home?
I have a few people. A guy named Ryan Boesch. Koool G Murder is sometimes in the band and works as an engineer often — those are my main guys these days.
You can call them up at a moment's notice and say, "Hey, can you make it down here"?
Sometimes yes and sometimes no. The problem is a lot of times these guys are working with other people and I get put on the back burner because they're too busy.
Do you have some system of 4-track or something similar you can use to throw ideas down?
I did recently plug in an ADAT for the first time in fifteen years and did some recording by myself, which was really fun and harder than I thought it was going to be — I had forgotten how it all works. It's become harder to record myself now because I'm so rusty. I did do that out of a need for a challenge.
Was that to capture something?
Yeah. I did some recording on my old 4-track cassette, too, because I had this romantic notion of man alone in the basement like it was in the old days — I'm sure I hated it back then. I realized a lot of my methods of recording myself were just dead reckoning — just twisting the knob until, "Okay, that sounds good." — but not really knowing what I was doing.
