How'd you get your start?
I went to school, and then I went to both Chung King and Skyline Studios. I figured out that you have to bust your ass. One of my first sessions was with Jack Douglas and Jay Messina [Tape Op #90]. They were making a Local H record and they had a lot of shit going on. At night I would take really close notes, use all the gear, then make sure everything was perfect. The next day when they came in, they didn't know — they'd just start mixing. I'm like, "I just spent all night long with your gear. I'm gonna go pass out now." If I heard my name I'd just pop up and do stuff.
You came to Sear Sound with Steely Dan?
They would come in to do some work at Sear Sound. I was an assistant at Skyline and they had invited me over. Walter hired me the next day as an engineer. It was November 2001.
Can you tell me about the transition from being an assistant on Wilco's A Ghost Is Born to being the engineer on their Sky Blue Sky?
When they started Sky Blue Sky, I was in the middle of something with John Agnello [Tape Op #14], and Wilco wanted me for two days. I wasn't really nervous because [I thought] it was a demo recording, or a rehearsal. It was an easy transition. We were friends and we would hang out and barbecue on the weekends.
Sky Blue Sky was tracked live. There's just the right amount of room sound.
There were a lot of [Shure SM]57s on almost everything. We had a [Neumann] U87 but it didn't sound good anywhere, so I left it in the corner. With the SM57s, there was a little bit of bleed in everything. I was monitoring with Shure [SE 420] isolation headphones and I could walk around them and be in the process. I'd solo everything — I would go out to the drums and move the mic to where it sounded perfect. It took a couple of days to move all the close mics around to just the right spots. We spent a lot more time changing guitars. I remember on one song, John Stirratt's bass didn't sound quite right. I was moving things and it was getting louder as opposed to me finding out what sounded right. John said, "I need to change my bass," and he changes his bass and sure enough that was it. I didn't even have to touch a single knob.
What was the signal chain for the bass?
The bass was a DI and an amp. A [Shure] Beta 52 into an API 512 [preamp]. The DI went to a 512, and then into an [Empirical Labs] Distressor.
So you were actually compressing to tape?
Everything had a little bit of compression on it, but just a little bit. [Universal Audio] LA-3s, [dbx] 160s, [Manley] Vari-Mu on the organ and a [Universal Audio] 1176 on the piano. I would just compress stuff a tiny bit, because it would glue things to tape much better.
Was it mostly API preamps on that record?
There were a ton of APIs that covered the drums and the bass. There were two Daking [Mic-Pre/EQ]s, which were on Jeff [Tweedy] and Nels [Cline]'s guitars. Vocals were John Hardy's [M-1 Mic Preamps], maybe? It was all direct patches — there was no bussing involved.
Walter Sear [Sear Sound's owner] seems like he's got a pretty strict paradigm for the way he works. Do you take that "Sear Ethic" with you wherever you go?
To an extent. Even when I'm at Sear Sound I'm able to loosen up. When I first started here he came in, in the middle of a tracking session. The Fairchild [compressor] was way up and he said, "You can't do that." But a year later, I had one [Fairchild] going into the next, then into the next and into the next, and he said, "That sounds good!" He taught me and he wanted me to learn things right, because he does have a lot of ethics. And even when I would go work somewhere else, he would remind me of what I represent.
The Stephen Malkmus record [Real Emotional Trash] was done at SnowGhost Music [Whitefish, Montana]? What was that like?
That was a weird studio. The setup there was really, really problematic — I got hives. We're in this kid's house — it was basically his living room. He had TV projectors throughout the whole studio. He had lighting scenes — you'd hit a button, and the whole scene would change. To change the room temperature, you had to go online, to an FTP! I couldn't get anything to work right! On this long song ["Real Emotional Trash"] the tape was shedding. We're recording it and the tape is pulling — RMG [International] tape from Holland. We had to use acetone to clean the heads.
That's a ten-minute song!
I know! I think that's when my first hives popped up. The problem was the RMG — it wasn't even the tape machine. I remember at one point thinking, "The azimuth is out." They were cleaning [the heads] like crazy, so I'm thinking, "Well, that could knock the azimuth out." We got everything into Pro Tools, and returned all the reels to RMG. After that disaster in Montana I was so lonely, you know? I didn't know where to go, who to call or what to do. It was hot and I'd gotten a brand new itch, which I'd never known before. [laughter]
That album kind of sounds like that. Like a fun, chaotic mess.
It was pretty confusing. But it wasn't an all-bad experience. We had a really good time. We met in Chicago — me, Joanna [Bolme] and Steve [Malkmus]. We got really focused there doing overdubs. There was this one song, "Out Of Reaches," and her bass sounded so great but we wanted to do a fix on it. We were making this fix and all of a sudden the levels were off. This was the third machine we were on and I'm like, "What is going on?" I'm checking her pedals and I'm turning the knobs, everything is exactly as it was marked, so we must have screwed up with one of the punches. So we were like, "Okay, we'll just re-do the whole track later." So that was a bummer, because we were patching holes into holes. In Montana we'd been creating these holes, so later on, down the road, we're thinking, "Well, that's why that part's weird. We did it on tape, and it did that thing that it had been doing." We could have done the whole album here [at Sear Sound], with the right gear, in the right studio, in a way shorter amount of time and it probably would have been more what they wanted.
What's your Jim O'Rourke connection? Is there anything in particular that you've learned from him?
I met him on Wilco's A Ghost is Born record. That was the first time I had met those guys — I was really excited to be working with them. I had just gotten off a nine month D'Angelo session. Jim came in one day and I was assisting — we became friends. We moved the Wilco record to Sear, recorded some things and spent quite a bit of time mixing it. We worked around the clock.
Has he been a mentor to you?
He has. He and a couple of other people: Walter Sear, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, John Agnello and Alan Moulder [Tape Op #102]. I liked some of Alan's records so much when I was a kid that when I finally met him I took the chance to really chew his ear off. I must have annoyed him!
Is there anything in particular you've learned from Jim?
He mixes differently than a lot of people. He doesn't EQ it a lot. He'll make things work with only faders, which is really amazing. The little red bar [the board's automation RAM display] is totally maxed out, because the faders are moving so much. The EQ will barely be on, maybe a filter and that's it. I think it's just how he hears music.
He must be getting the right sound at the source?
I think that's why he's worked at Sear so much, because everything was recorded right. You don't have any creative outlet if you're fixing things in the mix all the time. I'm pretty sure that's why he liked me, on top of the humor, is that I recorded things the way he wanted them. He didn't have to touch anything. Like the Beth Orton record [Comfort of Strangers], he didn't have to do anything to mix it except move the faders a lot. We didn't have to EQ anything.
The bass guitar on the Beth Orton record is fantastic! It really has its own identity throughout the whole album.
It's an [Electro-Voice] RE20, through one of the Neves and then into the Teletronix [LA-2A], with probably a dB [of compression]. No fader involved. And Jim probably had the [bass's] tone knob turned all the way down.
It is kind of the "Jim O'Rourke" bass sound.
A lot of that magic had to do with him playing and mixing it — knowing exactly where to move the fader.
Comfort of Strangers sounds like a Jim O'Rourke record with her voice.
Totally! Well, that's what it was all about: her voice and the take. Her vocals were live on every track. Jim was sitting [right outside the control room], and then [drummer] Tim [Barnes] was facing her, the usual setup. On one song, maybe "Shopping Trolley", she left the door open and the drums were blasting into the room and into her mic. There was a huge amount of drum bleed and it got semi-distorted from the acoustics of the room — it sounded great. I was thinking we would have to redo it with the door closed, but everyone liked it. Everything was about her vocals that on that record.
Every instrument on that record has a very defined presence, and it all just blends together so seamlessly.
Some things on that had no EQ and no compression. They actually mastered it with no EQ. The sound of that record is great — that's as realistic and hi-fi as you could get. A lot of that was into the mic pre to tape. It was a simple set up and they just played. I think the three of them had rehearsed a couple of times. Jim mixed it and it didn't take him long. That's a pretty great record — I've gotten more compliments on that than anything I've ever done. We all had a really good time on that one.
