How did you get into recording and being an engineer? Did you go to school?
No I didn't. I was intrigued with electric guitars... we're talking mid to late 50's... and I was wanting guitar amplifiers and things like that. One of my friends in grammar school used to work at a hi-fi repair shop. The guy was just a genius in terms of putting stuff together. I had an old tape recorder and he helped me rig it so I could play the guitar into it and actually use the tape recorder and the speaker...
As a little amp?
Exactly! I couldn't afford an amplifier, so I used the little amp in there, and that got me into fooling around with wires and stuff like that. I was in bands all the way through high school, college and afterwards. In the early to mid 70's I was in a group, and we needed to record our own demo. So I got my trusty stereo tape recorder together, which I always had around, and a crude mixer. We sort of pulled together equipment and recorded the demo. But we needed to buy a Shure mixer and a few other pieces of equipment. Once we started gathering some of that stuff, word got around and other people asked us to record their demos.
I helped out some friends of mine who were in The Look. The first time I recorded them I think it was in the basement. Then they wanted me to do a live show, in hopes of getting a better recording. If you can imagine: a Shure mixer with four microphone inputs with very, very cheap microphones. Usually, one microphone would be propped up in front of the PA speaker for the vocals, then three other microphones: one for the drums, or somewhere between the drums and the bass amp, and the other two for guitars. We put the vocals on one stereo channel and everything else on the other. At that particular show, there was a group called the Slickee Boys who were playing too, and they asked me to record them, since I was there. They were an underground band of some renown in the city. So I recorded them, and it turned out... oh I guess reasonably good. Most of the stuff from those days... if you really go back and listen hard... really sucks. But for the time, I guess it was all right. And also for the price, it was all right (laughs).
And what year was this?
About '75 or '76, maybe '77 with The Slickee Boys, I recorded a bunch of other albums, of equal fidelity, probably, and through them got to know Skip Groff, who put out a couple of their records on Limp Records. Skip was really in touch with a lot of the bands who were on the forefront of music like The Slickee Boys, Bad Brains, The Urban Verbs and a bunch of others. So, he brought a few of these bands in to record. Then he brought Minor Threat in. He thought they'd be a good try since they were so raucous and brash. And all of a sudden, I was doing a lot of this punk music recording. This was going on in the evenings. In the daytime, I was working at the National Gallery of Art in Prints and Drawings. Because, basically, my background is in art. So this [recording] is all going on as sort of a life outside my life kind of thing. Eventually, the National Gallery built a studio. This was in the early 80's. But they had problems getting the patchbay together. Since I'd been messing around with this stuff, I said, "I can help you guys connect this thing up and get it going." I think they had two two-track recorders, and that's about it. The mixing board had about four channels. But it was high-quality stuff. (It was used) for narration, mainly, for their programs on tape, audio visual shows, slide shows and things like that. So, I connected that up for them. And immediately after that was done, they didn't have an engineer to run the thing, so I said, "Heck, I wouldn't mind running the thing if you want." So I flipped over into the whole recording side of things as an actual profession. I did that for about five or six years. Then I went to manage a private studio for a while and got out of actual hands-on engineering. I didn't like it at all. I liked fooling with the dials and moving the patches all around the place. After less than a year, I quit there and started my own studio.
Was that when you moved the studio out of your house to another space?
Yes. It's in a separate building a couple miles away. It was a warehouse before, and we built it up as a studio inside. It's got two control rooms. Jay Robbins, of Jawbox, engineers in the 16-track control room. And I do the recording in the 24-track room. There's a couple of other engineers who do things in here every once in a while, too.
What kind of machine do you have in there right now?
It's an Otari MTR-90 (24-track).
And what kind of board and mics are you using most often?
We have an AMEK Angela board. It's one of the original Angelas, which I like very, very much. I have a Fostex E-22 (1/2" 2-track) to mix down to... that or a Tascam DA-30 DAT, the MKII thing. Other than that, there are bunches of outboard gear. The reason I got into recording and the reason I like electronics in general is because it's sort of an experiment, a laboratory. And that's where the fun comes in really. I build electronics myself too. I've built some compressors and some mixers. And I've built noise gates and a lot of things like that. Some of them are more successful than others. I have a (Fostex) B-16, which is now in the 16-track studio, that we modified/hot rodded. Getting something like that tweaked is very satisfying because those machines can be very mundane and pedestrian unless they're really pushed. And when they're really pushed, they can sound quite interesting. Jay's done some fantastic recording on it. My mouth has hung open a few times. And mics, I've got a pretty big collection. Boy, where do I start?
Well, what do you use frequently for snares or for guitars?
For snares, I have the Shure Beta 56, I believe it is. It's their new small one. The (Shure Beta) 57 I use. I use the EV N/D 408. Those are primary things. On kick drum, the (Shure) Beta 52 I like a lot. I use the Equitek E-100 a lot. But there a lot of different things we've played around with. I've taken the Audio Technica 4033 and laid it, literally without a stand or anything, inside the bass drum and covered it with a pillow. And it has some interesting results, not as a primary kick sound but as a nice thickener for the whole thing.
So you'd have another mic that you'd submix that with or put it onto a separate track?
We just throw it on another track. And then, if we decide that it's really bad, we just record over it. A lot of times they do turn out kind of bad. We just did a project with a group called Boom where I threw up a room mic. I think it was a (Neumann) U-87. We put a good deal of delay in, about 70 milliseconds, and had it right in the middle of the guitars and the bass and the drums. It got a good mish-mosh of the music, which sounded very blocky if you listened to it alone, but in with the mix itself, it was the perfect alternative to just listening to a lot of close mics. Instead of distance miking things, I'd rather use a separate mic that's really way out and not even connected with an instrument.
It seems with close mic recordings, instruments don't always sit well with each other in the mix. But when you capture the room sound of everything bouncing off of each other, it can tie things together really well.
Sure. It plays into the fact that your ears are hearing from one source (your stereo speakers). And your mind wants to hear it the same way. If everything is close miked, you're hearing it from a lot of different places, and it just doesn't gel quite as well. But when you have this one mic that's picking it up as one source, even if it's in the mix a little bit, it lets the mind anchor itself somewhere so that it has a view point. It really pulls it together.
So then do most of the bands that come in there record live?
I try to get them to do it live. I really don't like doing things one at a time. I guess you have to go logically into the whole thing. If you're listening to a band live and the interesting part is the way they perform, then why shouldn't recording try its best to get that side of it? I think every recording engineer knows it's the energy of a performance and the nuances that go on that really make things interesting. So I try to do it that way. And also, it probably saves the bands a lot of money too. They can get things much earlier on. It usually doesn't take a million takes because they're all looking at each other like they would in a rehearsal space, and they know instantly if something's good or bad. It gives the band a good perspective on the song. And it gives them a good perspective on the whole project too, because they know what they're playing is going to matter. It's something that's going to be there. It's not something a producer or an engineer is going to be able to press the mute switch on and take out completely. It's going to make its mark permanently!
