How did you get started?
I grew up in Cleveland in a musical family. I heard a lot of R&B, jazz, classical and hillbilly music. I was ten when the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan and from that moment on I was doomed. In the early '70s I got a hold of a Teac 3340 and started up a 4-track studio in my apartment in Cleveland. This was a tiny place — just the upstairs of a 1920's bungalow. It had a biker bar next door that had fistfights and breaking bottles and occasional gunshots. Very sketchy, but I recorded a lot of records there. When the old studio in town, where Grand Funk had recorded, relocated and was abandoned I would go in there in the middle of the night and take acoustic tile and building materials.
Any formal training?
No. But I wish I didn't flunk out of electronics in the local community college. [laughs] I'm laughing, but it's not funny. In the old days, an engineer was really an engineer, but I don't know what we are now. To say that we're engineers, for most of us, is a really generous use of the term. If John Lennon came to me and asked, "I want you to build something to make my voice go #$%@!&#, can you build me something by tomorrow?" I couldn't.
What makes Gung-Ho Studio work as a business?
The main thing is that I have a good rapport with my clients. I get involved on a musical level. Low overhead because the studio is at my home. Constant re-investing and upgrades to keep myself interested and so my repeat clients keep seeing new stuff.
I know you and the studio are always busy. What seals the deal when talking with a prospective client?
When they come over and see the studio and we talk about their music, they usually dig the place. It's rural and peaceful, but only ten minutes from Eugene. It's professional and comfortable but not intimidating, I hope.
What is the most fun piece of equipment in your studio?
[sighs and looks lost] I think that the Gates Level Devil is always an adventure. I really like it because it is a bizarre concept in a compressor. Mine is a little broken, and I am afraid to fix it because it has a harmonic distortion that is really cool. It enhances the high end... like a super-crushed 1176. I really like the Gates family of products. The SA39 is a great mono compressor if you have seven available rack spaces. When I first got it, it was just a disaster. One of those eBay purchases gone wrong. It was just a giant distortion box, so I recorded all the vocals for The White Hot Odyssey's new album through it. Then I had it fixed.
When I was here the other day I overheard a young guy asking you for an intern position. What do you look for in someone you would consider for an internship or second engineer job?
I usually don't have the budget for a second engineer. For interns, first they have to be good with people. It's good if they are a musician. They should have an affinity for the studio process, although they will mainly be making coffee and running errands. They need to be helpful, but keep a low profile. One great thing about working by myself is that the staff here never outnumbers the talent. I am very careful about changing the chemistry between myself and the artist.
Classical recording is a part of your work. How much of that do you do? How is that different from recording a rock band?
I record about 20 live concerts a year between the Eugene Symphony Orchestra, Oregon Bach Festival, and the Oregon Festival of American Music. Eighty percent of what you hear in those recordings comes from the main [Schoeps] stereo mic pair, although I may have a dozen spot mics on an orchestra. You have to be careful with the spots not to fuck up the speed of sound with the speed of light and distort the sense of depth in the image.
So, what stuff do you bring down to the concert hall for the location recordings?
I try to use really clean mics and preamps; Schoeps mics, Neumann KM84s and Millennia preamps. I wouldn't haul the Neve or Telefunken preamps or old tube mics; they are just too susceptible to problems or noise.
And you aren't doing any limiting?
No. Dynamics are intact — that's the nature of classical recording. In classical recording, the lion's share of it is happening at -14 dB, just so you have headroom for the five- second crescendo.
Are there elements of classical recording you bring into, say, an indie rock band's record?
Sure. Not just the technicalities of mic placement or room sound. It comes back to the fact that it is all music. Performance, composition, etc. You can get fantastic ideas from Beethoven and Mozart. I think about arrangements and song structure and try to make suggestions to the bands that make the song better.
What albums do you view as the pinnacle of recorded music?
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, The Beethoven Late String Quartets on Deutsche Grammophon, Revolver, Beggars Banquet, Axis: Bold As Love, Gillian Welch's Revival, Tom Waits' Mule Variations, In Utero, The Duets of Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong, Ray Charles and Betty Carter. Motown put out a string of some of the greatest music of the '60s, one song after another. This shit was done in a low ceiling basement with a dirt floor. You don't have to have a John Storyk-designed studio to make a good record. I have to say that all this stuff [points to racks of gear] is secondary. A lot of our discussion about gear is laughable, really. It's so much more important what the idea in the middle of the musical composition is.
Then, in the end, who hears all the subtle differences between 1176 and the LA-2A?
Everybody hears it. They don't know what it is or what caused it. Every time you run the music through something you're giving it a vibe. Hopefully you're making the choice because it's adding vibe in a musical way — you're not just compressing because you think you should compress. Music goes way back — we have genetic memory about music. It's really important to human beings. Our communication, expression, our need to make something beautiful, that's what all this gear we use serves. I have a wide variety of microphones and preamps and they all do a very different thing. Part of my job is to know when to use the Telefunken preamp with the [AKG] C-24 or the Neve preamp with the U-47 or vice versa, and not burden the client with that decision. I try and talk to them about the music, and keep the rest of this shit in my head.
What are common mistakes you're hearing from home recordists and young engineers?
Too much compression, done seemingly at random. There is a time and place to do something whacked out, but it seems like I hear a lot of over-engineering in a really heavy-handed way. I don't have a voice-from-on-high attitude about home recordings because there is the idiot savant stuff that kicks in where somebody does something so wrong that it's great. Or somebody just plain does it simply and directly because they don't have all the fancy tools, and you get this pure thing that is really nice.
One thing I hear a lot is too much high end. A lot of people are afraid to roll off high end like they do with extra low end.
Yeah, bad EQ-ing. Also, a little too much of the all-in-a-box digital thing gets on my nerves. There is a plastic quality that digital has. It's hard for me to define. A slight hollowness and lack of impact. There is shit going on that digital is not getting. I'm really a fan of analog, possibly because the extended frequency response. My tape machines zero out up into 30 or 40 kHz.
How do you compensate then, knowing your analog recording will end up on a CD?
I listen to the playback of the mix thru an A/D converter so I know what the conversion is doing to the signal.
How are you using Pro Tools?
