Jon Lupfer and Mike Denneen
Tell me how Q Division began.
M: We went to high school together, and we had always talked about starting a production company or something. When we got to Boston, we just decided to do it.
J: We didn't know what we were doing!
Tell me about your first location.
M: It was the 4th floor of an old building in the South End of Boston, on Albany Street. There were 16-foot ceilings, and nobody was paying much attention to the building. Young people could get in there to build a studio, and no one really noticed.
Did you have to do a lot of build-out?
M: Tons. It was an empty shell. We hired two of our friends, an ex-con and one real carpenter.
J: We're not the most talented carpenters in the world, but we got good at "guerilla wiring." We overbuilt it, which turned out to be a good thing, because we could grow into it. We got a lot of help from Michael Blackmer, who is sort of a mad genius studio designer. He's the son of David Blackmer, who started dbx [and Earthworks]. He did a really great job with it. We built a really nice control room, a good live room and it served us well for a long time. We'd swap studio time for work. We spent more time than money.
M: We were the "guerilla recording studio" then — it was basically us and Fort Apache, who started about a year and a half before we did with a similar concept of "musician guys start a studio." All the other studios were engineer-driven.
J: They were sterile, recording-is-a-science environments. We needed work all the time, but we were cheap so we had it!
M: We were $250 for an eight-hour session, and you would get either him or me. We also identified engineers and producers who worked with bands, and we offered them free time.
What was the original setup like?
J: It was a Soundtracks console that we bought from "the guitar store" in town, and a 16-track, 1-inch Tascam, both of which turned out to be much better than you might think. Our best compressor was a dbx 160x, and our best microphone was a [Neumann] U87...
M: ...that I literally dropped the first day we took it out, and the head snapped off. And we had a pair of [AKG] 414s. J: We did a lot of strange things in the early days. I would get a vocal sound with an [Electro-Voice] RE20 and a [Neumann] KM 84 combined, trying to imitate a much nicer mic. It's actually not a terrible sounding combination!
Was there a watershed moment that changed your business situation?
M: One of the first bands we recorded was called The Buddy System, who were on The Basement Tapes on MTV during the first fall we had opened! They were friends with the people in 'Til Tuesday, and that's sort of how we started to meet all these various people.
J: We got in with the synth-pop crowd. I know it's sort of hard to put yourself in that mindset now, but that was a really big crowd back then.
M: So in '87, 'Til Tuesday came in to do pre-production for their third record. They had done half their record, and were demoing the second half before they went to record in New York. They came in for three weeks, and I think that was our first high-profile thing. Then the Pixies came in to do their second record [Surfer Rosa] around Christmas of '87.
Were you able to charge a higher rate because there was a bit more money behind them?
J: No, I don't think we were that smart yet — though I remember when we told them how much it would cost they were sort of like, "What? That little?"
How did the Pixies stuff come about?
J: They had done Come On Pilgrim at Fort Apache. There was some sort of disagreement that happened with their second record, and Paul Kolderie [issue #22] told them they should go to Q Division. I was an assistant on that session, and I was very inexperienced in working with outside producers. I tried to help. I said, "Here, this is what I do with the guitars," and [engineer] Steve Albini said, "Um, you should go away now..." [laughter] I had such little experience with certain things — I wasn't able to be a great assistant.
What was he doing that was new for you?
J: I remember him spending a lot of time getting the room mics set up. Those 414s I mentioned earlier? That pair was the sound of the studio. To this day, if I hear that record I say, "He really got it." And he used a [Sennheiser] 421 for [Kim Deal's] "Gigantic" vocal. That's not what a lot of people were doing at the time.
M: He used these little Shure SM98 condenser mics on an alligator clip on a guitar cabinet, and he would move them maybe four centimeters, go into the other room and listen, then come back and move them again. And no compression.
J: No compression, no noise reduction and very low levels — he did not want to mess with the headroom. I remember thinking it was a very big sound, but that it was really quite noisy. After that I realized, "Don't worry about noise, worry about headroom." It's a much bigger problem a lot of the time, and it's rock music, so who the hell cares about a little bit of noise?
And at the time Albini didn't have the reputation he has now.
M: He was just some guy from Chicago who wore a leather jacket and tried to offend people as much as possible.
J: Then I remember Paul [Kolderie] calling me up and saying, "The Pixies are number one on CMJ," and I thought, "Oh, how cool!"
What was the next thing you guys did that really had an impact?
M: I was in a band called The Walkers. Kevin Killen [issue #67] produced that record, and that got a lot of label interest — we got signed to Atlantic. It was then that we decided we had to step it up with the equipment. We had another big project coming up and we decided to get some Neve 33609s and a pair of John Hardy [preamps, issue #15]. Then this broker...
J: ...he called us up and asked, "Hey, I hear you guys are interested in tube stuff." And this was before the big tube revival.
M: There was somebody who owed him some money and wound up paying him in old equipment. That ended up being a pair of [Neumann] U47s, a pair of U67s, an M49, three RCA 77s, two RCA 44s and a pair of Pultecs. He let us have all that for a small amount of money! It completely transformed the studio.
J:We also got a crazy deal on a new board-an Allen & Heath. People might think that Allen & Heath is not the best console manufacturer, but it was a good console. This was just a couple years after all the MIDI stuff, which was cool, but it had started to die out — those keyboard players didn't want to come into a big studio. They just wanted to work at home. So from that point on we tried to position ourselves in relation to music that you couldn't do in your house. "Wow, maybe we should buy something that won't depreciate in value."
M: We moved to the 24-track machine in 1989, and then we started buying guitar amps, Optigans, Mellotrons, a Chamberlin and things like that — the Jon Brion [issue #18] phase... He and Aimee Mann were around a lot for four or five years, and they were into weird keyboard stuff. We did a bunch of stuff together, and some of it ended up on Aimee's first solo record [Whatever].
J: During this time — '90 or '91 — we were recording a lot of things that weren't getting released. You could do some stuff at home, but you couldn't make your own CDs yet, and the labels were kind of confused about these changes. The concept of going into a studio and doing demos was gone, because people were making these demos [at home] for cheap, then they'd go to make their high-end record and it wouldn't be as good.
Can you paint a picture of the Boston music scene at that time?
M: It was sort of the heyday of Fort Apache, Dinosaur Jr., Juliana Hatfield [issue #55], Morphine, Blake Babies, Buffalo Tom... there was a lot of good stuff going on.
J: The South End was a great musician area at the time. It was very lofty, there were a lot of weird after-hours parties and we were working a lot.
M: Work has always come from word-of-mouth, from people who liked some record that we recorded. Then in '92, I did the first Gigolo Aunts record. They ended up being picked up by RCA, and that was a really big boost for the studio.
J: I also did the Cavedogs record right around then, and they got signed by Capitol.
So now your work is starting to get picked up by these major labels, and you're still relatively new to this. What was your learning curve like?
M: Mark Sandman used to call the studio a "caste system" where you would go work in some studio in New York and make coffee. But we didn't do that — we'd wait for some producer or freelance engineer to come in and we'd just hang out and watch them. They appreciated that we had a "vibe" to our place, and that even though everything wasn't perfect it was a really creative environment.
J: It wasn't like major labels were sending work our way — it was the beginning of the indie explosion, and that stuff would bubble up through our studio. There was a change in the mindset of the industry where the tracks didn't have to be re-done. They said, "You know what? We like this. We don't need to remix this."
So was it around then that you got the Neve?
M: In 1993 a broker said, "My brother just saw a couple of those old Neve boards down in Sao Paulo. You guys like those old boards, right?"
J: The Neve thing wasn't in full swing yet. You look at what they cost now and we should have snatched up five of them!
M: The deal was very reasonable. We got our choice of frame and 32 modules. It took maybe 10 months until it was installed in April of '94. I had never heard one before, so we put some of the stuff we had done through it, and it just sounded completely different — it had a dimension to it that was there before, but you just hadn't been able to hear it.
J: I wanted to try tracking something just to see if everything was working, and it was the best guitar sound I had ever gotten. It made me realize some things — my knowledge just about tripled. I had learned you should never add high end EQ — I thought that was just a rule about EQ. But it turned out to be a rule about bad EQ. It was like magic.
M: So we bought a bit more gear in '94, and we could now make a "real" record without apology. By '95 the whole scene had moved over to Cambridge — it was a ghost town! Then in '96 we did a development deal with Columbia. We had a farm team concept, where they'd give us enough money to make and market a record, and then if Columbia was interested they had an option to pick it up. So there was no pressure to put these records out — we had total autonomy. They signed Expanding Man and Talking to Animals, but then the two guys we had signed with got fired. When our names came up Columbia was like, "Who?" But we got a Studer A827 out of it, and some other stuff.
So what have you learned about gear? What makes for a good investment?
M: Things that are old sound better than things that are new. [laughter] Studer A80s sound better than Studer A827s, sadly. But the A827 was such a pleasure to punch on, because with the A80 you almost had to announce that you were going to punch, and then there would be this gap — it was really nerve wracking.
J: There are these skills we learned that are now completely irrelevant, like learning to punch 300 milliseconds ahead of the time that you actually wanted the punch to happen.
M: Or like tape editing and crossfading.
You don't splice tape any more?
M: There's just no reason to. Why do people do Civil War reenactments? I don't know!
So are you tracking to tape, going to Pro Tools for editing and then flying it back to tape?
M: I did that for a while, but I wouldn't bother with that now. Whenever practical, I still record drums and bass to tape, and sometimes vocals.
J: My recent experience has been, "If it's the kind of thing that can stay on tape, I'll leave it."
I love tape, but I'm learning that once I get the bottom end recorded, I just want to move faster.
J: There are a lot of workflow issues with tape. I remember shuffling everybody out of the room so I could do a tape edit, and first there's a practice edit on 1/2-inch, so I'd ask them to come back in three hours.
There's a dynamic that happens with digital where the guitarist starts and messes up. "Hold on, let me start again. Nope, again. Nope, one more time." With tape, there's a nice breath while you rewind.
M: That's the responsibility of the engineer or producer. You want to keep it moving, but you also want that breath, so you learn to wait until it feels right. "Hang on. Okay, we're rolling."
So now we're in the digital era...
M: Almost. First there was the ADAT period. The draw with ADAT was that it was better and cheaper than cassette 4-tracks, which everybody had. Then they came out with 8-track, which sounded fine, and there was a box you could use to sync it up to 2-inch, and we loved that.
J: It was a new era. We could use ADATs to sneak extra tracks in.
M: I remember in '97, I mixed a record that Adam Schlesinger [issue #37] from Fountains of Wayne produced, and he sent me some ADATs of extra percussion and background vocals.
J: I worked on a Brian Stevens record. We sent off a bunch of the roughs to Dave Gregory in England on ADAT...
M: Of course now you can send anything online, but the ADATs were great because you could send off something as a reference.
Did you feel like you were losing something with the ADATs or Pro Tools?
M: With the ADATs, definitely. I resisted going full Pro Tools until HD came out. I can hear the pre-HD stuff pinching in the top end, the lack of high-end clarity, but I have no real issues with the sound of HD. But in '96 I did a record where I dumped the drums into Pro Tools, edited takes together and spit them back out — that was pretty great.
But it was 16-bit...
M: So there was a price to pay.
So you guys have seen all these changes in gear, techniques and in sound quality. What have you seen with the casual listener?
M: People listen on worse systems every year. Cassettes were really bad, but the speakers of the '70s and '80s and the CDs of the '80s were much better than what people are using now. There was no surround stereo button on their boom box that gets rid of everything in the middle — there were no crappy ear buds or computer speakers. It's part of why everything is so compressed now, and I'm just as guilty of it as everybody else.
J: I'm a bit shocked that people don't care more about Auto-Tune. I hear it and say, "How could you let that go?" But obviously that's not how other people hear it.
When did you guys first start noticing the loudness wars?
M: I first noticed it when [record companies] kept hiring other people to re-do my mixes in the mid-'90s. They were mixing things so that it already sounded like it was on the radio. It would be brightened and slammed before it even got to the A&R guy. And these days you're above digital zero most of the time! The first piece of gear that contributed to all of this was the TC Electronic Finalizer — people could crank the level up before they burned the CD. Then what cemented it all was the shuffle mode on the iPod. No band wants their song to sound quiet when it comes up on the party mix. It doesn't matter what I want — the band wants it loud. But I mix to the [Alesis] MasterLink, Pro Tools, and 1/2-inch, all at 0 VU.
J: I like to give the mastering engineer something to do. People become obsessed with signal-to-noise and feel that if they don't get the levels going to the DAW just below the red that they are "wasting" bits in the recording device. I'll give them back their extra bits by not blowing up the input above every fader.
How did you end up in your new location?
M: In the late '90s the scene had moved to Cambridge, and we felt like it might be better for us to be here [in Somerville]. Jon found this building, and we decided we'd move over here and expand a little bit.
J: And having two rooms now helps so much, because we can weed out the rough cuts [and overdubs]. M: And we also have a third room — a small editing room.
There's a lot of commercial stuff, jingles and things that get done there?
