This building is great. How did you end up here?
In the late '90s I was at Boston Scientific as a biomedical engineer. I was working on endovascular stent grafts and vena cava filters while moonlighting doing recording. I was getting really busy, recording bands from all over the country and some international stuff. Those bands would come to record with me, but we couldn't start until 5 or 6 p.m. since my studio was in an industrial park. I had to work the next day, so I couldn't record all night. In 2001, the project I was working on at my day job was cancelled. I was given the option of finding another job in the company or taking a really nice severance package. Converge had released Jane Doe that week and we felt like it was light years ahead of what we had done before. We were ready to go out on tour, to go be a real band for the first time. So I took the severance package. Right away I started looking for new places to move my studio. After a year of searching, I found this building. I bought it and gutted it. It almost ruined me financially, but I was able to build a studio here. I had Wes Lachot, who I heard about through Tape Op, do the design work. Wes and I did most of the framing together, then I did the drywall, floors and wiring and contracted the air conditioning. Then Wes came back for the finish carpentry and acoustical treatments.
Were you working during that time?
I went for a period of about eight months where I didn't record at all — no money coming in and a lot of money going out. A lot of loans and credit card debt. When I finally opened for business, I was really hurting. It was ramen noodles and dodging calls from creditors. Things have been getting better here ever since. There's been a lot of gear renovation. The client base has been radically improving.
Do you do any advertising?
No, I never have. It's been all word of mouth and I've been pretty happy with how that's treated me.
Does most of that word of mouth involve Converge?
I record a lot of people that are aware of Converge, and they know me through touring and whatnot. But I rarely solicit bands we're playing with. The solicitation of bands has always left a bad taste in my mouth when I've seen other people do it, so I just hope that people that are writing good music want to come to me.
I like the idea of that kind of engineer. You, Alex Newport, Matt Bayles — people who have spent a lot of time in the trenches in bands.
People want to record with someone they feel some kind of connection to, someone who shares their taste in music and has shared the lifestyle they live. From a communicative standpoint, I don't know how I would record a band not being a musician. I'm not a great drummer, but I know how drums are played. I know that if this drummer is struggling because he's trying to do two right-hand hits in a row, maybe if he used the bass drum instead of the last floor tom, he'd be able to get the snare and cymbal on one together. I don't think a non-musician would be able to decipher that stuff. Or I can look at someone playing a guitar part and say "You're struggling because you're fingering it that way. What if you finger it this way?" I can grab my guitar and play the part.
You haven't spent much time in other studios, right? To me, working with or being recorded by other engineers is the fastest way to learn.
That's totally correct and I would love to do more of that. But with my band, it's tough to justify giving someone else your money to do something you can do yourself. And having learned on my own, I feel like I've developed a style of my own. It's more important to me to make unique records than good sounding records.
Your room configuration is unusual — multiple small, high-end analog mixers, the [Otari] MTR-100, racks of nice outboard and a Pro Tools rig at the center of everything. What's your basic workflow?
Sometimes I track basics to the 2" 24-track, sometimes to 1" 8-track and sometimes to digital. Even when I'm doing basics to tape, I'm monitoring through Pro Tools. It's going mic pres, tape, Pro Tools, console.
Because that's what you're going to hear in the end?
Yeah. I'm hearing the conversion right when I start getting sounds. Headphone mixes all go through Pro Tools... everything. That also means that I'm ready to transfer at any time. So I can use rental reels of tape — I don't have to cut tape to do edits. We record sections of the song, I dump them and do edits in Pro Tools.
And if the band wants to take a break and you want to start working on vocals for a song...
Yeah, it's there. I rarely switch gears during drum mode to go to something else. But once drums are done, I often like to get guitars, bass and vocals set up at the same time. No one wants to sing for 10 hours a day, and you probably don't want to play guitar or bass for 10 hours, so you need to be able to bounce between people. Overdubs are almost always in Pro Tools. I don't ever want to record vocals on tape ever again for the rest of my life. Especially with hardcore, singers are usually the friend of the band that's not the musician. That means they don't have a great sense of timing, so I'm doing a lot of punching and a lot of editing with vocals. When it comes to mixing, the Pro Tools tracks are sent out individual outputs and mixed on a console. There are things that are grouped together... a lot of times if I have four or five guitar tracks — those will go in a stereo pair and there may be some group compression. I really like the Massey [L2007 plug-in] limiter on a guitar subgroup. I'll do some parallel compression on the snare drum in Pro Tools.
So you run some inserts in the box.
Yeah. I've got one [physical] fader here for snare. But in the computer — this session [Converge] I've got three mics on the snare. One mic is duped inside Pro Tools and heavily gated and compressed, and one mic is lightly compressed inside Pro Tools. They're all mixed together, then there's a little compression outside the box as well.
But it's not just summing out here for you, right? You're doing a lot of EQ and running outboard...
Oh yeah. The Tonelux EQs are awesome. I do very little EQ and compression in Pro Tools. If I'm summing something in the box and one element of the subgroup needs to be EQ'd or compressed, I do that in the box.
It sounds like you have a lot of your mix happening during tracking.
Yeah, I'm pretty heavy-handed in tracking and I agonize over getting sounds. That's probably why I mix fairly quickly. I need like two days to get the sound of the mix, and then after that I can start going song by song and making adjustments. I can mix an EP in two days and an album in three. I'm writing automation stuff as I'm tracking, and in Pro Tools I tend to have everything in the same Pro Tools session. I don't like to have a session per song.
Really? You literally run all your mixes from a single Pro Tools session?
The music I'm recording is sonically pretty consistent from song to song. When I'm recording a band that's not like that, I'll do different sessions per song. Of course I want to pay attention to each song and give each song its own treatment, and if the guitars are in different keys then yeah, you want to EQ things differently. But most of the stuff I record is not in different keys, and not in wildly different tempos. Usually a little bit of automation is enough to give each song its own character. I don't want to spend hours copying plug-in settings and changing I/O assignments. For this Converge record I'm working on, there's nine songs in one session and four songs that have their own sessions.
How do you deal with recalls?
I don't. I don't recall.
It stays up until it's done and then it's done?
Yeah. It's done. I'll make stems if time permits, but the time to make and do recalls — it's too much analog gear here. I don't want to spend hours making recall sheets. I don't have an assistant engineer and I don't want one. Once I a get a sound I'm happy with, I tend to leave it out here and do song-by-song tweaks in the computer. So during the time span of the session, everything is recallable. Two weeks later if they want to redo a song, that's a whole new mix. But if we're working on the fourth song and we want to go back to the first, it's still there because I've done all my changes in the computer.
Since you have three small mixers, you have your choice of where digital tracks end up going.
Right — there's a little bit of auditioning at the beginning of any mix. Actually, I mixed the newest Doomriders record twice. I mixed everything with drums on the Tonelux, bass on the Opamp Labs, and guitars and vocals on the [Thermionic Culture] Fat Bustard. The Bustard is the greatest guitar tracking device to sum multiple mics onto one track. Then I said, "For shits and giggles, I'm going to go the other way around." I re-patched everything and reversed it, although I kept all the EQs and stuff. I ended up liking the second version better. The way this [Bustard] distorts — when it gets a little warm fuzz it's cool, but when you get on that cusp of real distortion, it starts to get crackly. I didn't like the way the guitar sounded when driven that hard, but the drums were tracked digitally and I liked the slightly warmer sound of the drums on the Bustard.
I was surprised to hear how often you track with scratch guitars. I expected more bands to track live basics.
It's partially a sonic thing and partially a performance thing. A lot of what I'm recording is fast and technical and I'm not always recording great, trained musicians. So being able to focus on one person's performance at a time is good. From a drummer's standpoint the music tends to be really physically demanding. For a drummer to have to redo a take because the guitar player messed up is a pain in the ass.
I assume you're trying to minimize bleed too. You mentioned live guitar hampering your ability to get drum sounds later.
Yeah, room mic'ing in the context of loud guitars means that you're room mic'ing the guitars, not the drum set. If you like your overheads, cool. If you want a drier drum sound, it works. But if you want a wetter drum sound, it doesn't work here because I need to put room mics in my iso booths and leave the doors open to get a big room sound. And that leaves me with no place to isolate guitar amps.
Any drum wisdom to share?
Everything I do with regard to a drum sound keeps in mind reducing cymbals or cymbal bleed. Oftentimes there's this foam-filled flowerpot thing that I'll put over the hi-hats to suck up some of the hi-hat leakage and get it out of the room mics and overheads. Sometimes I de-ess the snare with an [Empirical Labs] Lil FrEQ. I almost always top and bottom mic toms. I group a top and bottom mic track and manually gate them with editing, then ungroup them and elongate all the fade outs on the bottom mic so it has more sustain. Then I'll duplicate the edited top mic and create my own crossover in Pro Tools with the EQ III plug-in doing a high pass on one track and a low pass on the other track. The EQs are both at the same frequency and use a 6db/octave slope. I'll elongate all the tails of the fadeouts on the one that's low-passed so you have some resonance from the tom, but not any of the brash cymbal decay in there.
Do you use triggers much?
I'll use triggers here and there, but I don't rely on them — certainly not for tone, but almost as a surrogate for compression. I hate triggers on toms though. They almost always sound like shit. If you're blending mics, [trigger] timing is off no matter what you use. apTrigga, Drumagog, MIDI, SoundReplacer... all that stuff is never accurate. The only way I've found to do it accurately is the tab-transient feature in Pro Tools, and cutting up the thing and replacing every single hit. It's a pain in the ass and I hate doing it. Actually you know what I used to do, and if the ddrum triggers didn't suck and break all the time, I would still be doing? On snare I used to record the raw signal coming off the trigger and blend the audio in with the mic. On its own it sounds like a click, but blended it adds this little bit of attack.
A lot of your records are pretty gnarly as far as mix distortion goes.
It's the cumulative effect of a lot of things. It's the sound of the instruments themselves, a little bit of the mic pre, the compressor and driving things hard in the mix. Sometimes it's compression on the mix, sometimes it's going to tape too hot. It also happens in mastering, but I feel like it sounds more natural when it happens at a lot of small stages.
So it's no accident, and it's not a volume wars thing.
My stereo has a volume knob. I know how to turn it up. But my stereo doesn't have a distortion knob. There's a certain cohesion that happens to an aggressive mix when there's a little bit of unnatural distortion happening to the entire thing. In a lot of cases it evokes the feeling of the sort of shows that we grew up going to.
Your head is caving in.
Yeah, when you're watching a hardcore band in someone's basement you're not getting a clear image of what things sound like. Your ears are overdriving. And even if you were deaf — visually, there's melee and chaos all around you. Your eyes will lead you to hear an excitement that might not fully exist sonically. On a clean recording you can't invoke that feeling. The last record I did, this band Black Breath, I was watching the meters of the mixes and they weren't really moving. [laughs] It's the most slammed mix I've ever made, but I'm kind of liking it. I'm finding that I like mastering less and less as I get better at recording. Also, if I don't compress at the mix stage then things change too much in mastering. The balances change too much.
The drums vanish.
When in doubt I push the drums a little harder than I think they should be because I know that you can limit it a little harder and they'll go away. If I'm pushing really hard, time permitting, I'll also provide the mastering guy with an uncompressed version of the mix. If he's able to get to that same result in a better way than I'm able to, then it might ultimately make for a better record, but I'm basing my mix decisions on the compressed mix.
Listening to the records you've done — Young Widows, Kruger, Torche, Converge, Doomriders, Disfear — there is no "signature sound". You wouldn't know they were recorded by the same guy.
For me it's always been important to never do the same thing twice, to make sure that each thing I do is unique — but also, doing stuff differently every time forces you to always be using your ears rather than using muscle memory. When I start a mix I try to have a pre mix conversation with the band and ask them, "What are you looking for? Can you name a few records that you like the sound of?" — not to tell me what I should be duplicating, but just some range- finding to know what you think sounds good.
Is that before the mix starts, or before you even start placing microphones?
