DAVE SHUMAN
Did the studio get started when you and Michael met in college?
Well actually, Michael and I went to the same music school, but we went several years apart. We didn't know each other at that point. Michael had several friends, who now are great friends of mine, and each person had a certain amount of gear that by itself wasn't anything in particular. A couple people had leftovers from PA's. Two people were in a band together and one of them had a ?" 16 track machine. Someone else had a small board and some monitors. Michael had scouted the space for the studio because he was living across the hall in an apartment which is now our B studio. When he saw the space in its raw form, he thought it would make a wonderful studio. He gathered up a couple roommates to help defray the expenses and convinced a few people to drop off their unused gear there. It got wired together just like that.
What was the first board you started out using?
The first main board was a Tascam M520. Which is a 20 x 8 Tascam board that the Mackie boards now replace these days. It was a muddy sounding thing. I barely remember. It was so many studio hours ago. We would run it with a series of sidecars, depending on what we were doing. The last installation had a Hill mixer which was configurable to either 16 by 2 or 12 by 4 by 2. And that was a really good mixer. I still have it in a rack. There was also an old Audio Arts 2k, which was another 16 by 2 mixer. There was another Tascam mixer before I was involved. But usually it was used with a monitor attached to it, along with whatever could be wired for extra inputs and was available at the time. When the studio started, it didn't have much in the way of patch bays. There were cheap patch bays and Hosa, which is horrible cheap cable. It was very noisy and hissy. Michael and I would do searches for noise every time we would come in. The old patch bays would act like antennas for whatever noise they could suck in. You'd crank up your levels for testing to see what was making the most noise and figure out how to make it quieter before you'd start working.
How much engineering experience had either one of you had at this point?
I'm not really sure exactly how much Michael had. I know he had done some work at Kramer's Noise New Jersey studio with Giant Metal Insects. In a related vein, he was booking shows at a small venue in Hartford and having to be the promoter and sometimes door-person and sound person all at the same time. He had a lot of cool bands but Hartford didn't have an audience for those bands at the time. He had various friends and people in the Hartford area that would ask him to help out with the recording, production, or some engineering. I don't think he had a solid studio background before the studio came into existence. For me it had been mostly 4 track cassette-based recording with friends. One band I was in had a very elaborate 4 track setup. Two 4 tracks were used, one as a sub-mixer for the other in a permanently wired rehearsal space for recording every rehearsal. When I was in college, I ended up doing demos for people on my own 4 track. I'd spent time screwing around in the college recording studio, which wasn't very extensive. A little bit of work in smaller 16 track studios--more as a musician than as an engineer. I had read quite a bit about what it all did and as an electric bass player, I'd used amplifiers and effects units and they're all very basically the same. I mean, there's not a lot you can do with a signal at this point. There are endless ways to combine effects, but when you think about it there are things you do with volume and things you do with tone and things you do with time. I think that's about it unless I'm forgetting something. It's just those three elements.
That's an interesting way to think about it. It's an incredibly simple view that is often overlooked.
Some of your more involved guitar amps have more complicated EQs than your basic mixing boards. The basics are there. If you understand how they work, then it's the same principles. Obviously, how you process your information and how you use it is different, but your basic building blocks are the same.
How long has it been since the studio has been open?
It's been Studio .45 since March of '93, Michael had started the studio about a year earlier. At that point I became involved as the owner of the studio and the studio got a name for the first time. About a month later, we got a 2" 24 track. I think that point was the start of the studio as most people know it today. There were some interesting releases and odds and ends recorded during that first year. I think a couple are still bouncing around and have been released on 7 inches and compilations. There have been some interesting things that have had some attention paid to them.
Who were some of the more interesting bands?
G'nu Fuzz, China Pig, a band called Freak Baby, a band from Danbury called Head that was really cool but is now defunct. Except for G'nu Fuzz, probably most of those bands aren't around anymore.
Who have you been recording lately?
The Apples In Stereo. Lilys are going to be doing a big project very soon. A few Sub Pop things here and there. We're doing a group called Holler, which is a country thing. I've been recording some interesting bands like Wampeter, a cool band from Southern Connecticut called Deep Banana Blackout, and Aboriginal Bluegrass. Late summer was kind of a dead period as it always it. Usually we're always booked but right about now we're coming into almost more sessions than we can handle. Which is interesting, because we built a second room last year to handle that demand, and almost as soon as it was finished it seemed impossible to imagine how we functioned without it beforehand. Often Michael and I will be working on two different projects on the same time. There has been interest from bands that have wanted to book the whole facility. Which would be the best way to do things because there are so many different sounds, not only in gear but in rooms as well. That's probably one of our most important assets here, the sounds of the big rooms here in the former Colt Firearms factory.
MICHAEL DEMING
Would you like to clear the air about your oscilloscope and the role it plays in recording?
We use the oscilloscopes for numbers of different things. It's used for everything from setting up the tape machine to looking at the phase correlation between left and right sides. It's just a piece of test equipment used for looking at any audio signal and measuring voltage. You certainly need it to be able to set the tape machine up so that you can check that the azimuth and zenith are correct and that the phase between the outer tracks is correct. In other words, you cannot be without an oscilloscope in the studio.
In the Lilys song "Shovel into Spade Kit" there's a section that features an orchestra. I want to know how you found that piece.
We had many de Wolff records sitting around the studio. They are samplers of orchestral passages in different styles. I listened through them all and was able to find solo bits of instruments that I wanted to use in that passage. Trumpet, bass clarinet and clarinet. Those are the three instruments you hear in that passage.
No oboe?
No oboe, just trumpet, bass clarinet and clarinet. I was able to transfer that material from vinyl to half inch two track and then Varispeed the parts by using the Ampex ATR102. I would Varispeed the segments into the song the way I wanted them to appear in the piece.
Explain the Varispeed to me.
The Varispeed is the device that lets you speed up and slow down the capstan motor. So I could get the segments to come up at the right pitch and the right rhythm. It allows me to speed the tape up to match what I needed to serve my purposes. One thing that was interesting in doing that, was that I was using an old Ampex ATR102, and the Varispeed is kind of unruly so it would take a couple tries sometimes to get it exactly right. I didn't have very fine control over pitch; it was a very coarse control.
And it was all done by sound?
By ear, yeah. But it would have been easier with a more modern tape machine, with more fine control over a capstan motor.
Couldn't you have just sampled it more easily?
But the sound quality would suffer. If I used the best sampler, I would have had to sample it in real time and it would have lost a lot of sound quality; I would imagine by changing the pitch. It was simpler to put it straight from vinyl to tape, all along fully preserving the analog signal path. In the making of that record we used no digital devices at all at any time. There probably are hardly any records made these days in which there isn't one digital device. The worst thing about the record is that when it did end up going into the digital domain to be put onto a 16-bit CD for the consumer, mastering was horribly ruined. It was just handled very carelessly. A Pro-Tools sequenced version was just transferred to 1630 and used as a master and that's wrong. And that's something that none of us had any control over really. We were over budget and there was no budget to master properly. I was forced into a position where I had to sequence the record on a really crappy sounding Pro-tools system, because of monetary constraints.
What would you have done if you'd had the money to do it properly?
My half inch masters would have been taken to a real mastering house where we would have used the fanciest converter we could find to get our analog material in the digital domain. Digital compressors and EQs would have been used to make the record compete. But instead, everybody got a version that basically sounds like it has suffered from a generation loss. There's a huge difference between the sound of my two track analog masters which were mixed at 30 ips on an Ampex ATR 102, and the sound of the retail product. It's like night and day. That received a non-aggressive mastering so the CD pro doesn't sound any louder than the mix. Overall it's program material that I feel people have been afraid to handle in an aggressive manner. For instance, the other day I was putting a demo reel together for somebody, and I used a cut off of Better Can't Make Your Life Better. I was able to get my hands on a copy which had never been 'Pro-Toolsed'. It was just my half inch master through a good 20 bit A to D converter to DAT and that had been transferred digitally to CDR. Pro-Tools ruins any stereo program, because it sounds like two mono sound files; it doesn't do stereo very well. So it destroys the stereo image. The music sounds like it's coming from the speakers; all that stuff that used to sound like it was coming from outside the speakers is now stuffed back in, and that goes for the center too. Things that might be mixed up center don't have that front to back depth anymore--it gets lost. So I took this CDR copy which had never been put into Pro-Tools, took it into a good mastering house and edited it on a Studer Diaxis. With some good Valley Dynamap compression, a T.C. Electronics compressor, I was able to master that song the way it should have been mastered the first time. You know, the things that we heard come out of it were incredible. It should have been mastered with very aggressive compression and aggressive EQ. And it sounds beautiful.
The Apples (in stereo) are known for their extensive usage of home recording for their records. How did they get hooked up with Studio .45?
Robert heard the Lilys record and liked it. That had a lot to do with why I wound up working with him. As time went on Robert started to realize the limitations of his set-up and realized that what he really wanted to hear wasn't always achievable all of the time. If he had 50 overdubs, it was going to become increasingly difficult to submix all of that material and have it still sound clear.
Especially if he's doing all of the engineering.
There's a huge difference between a ?" 8-track and Brian Wilson making Pet Sounds on an 8-track. There's a huge difference and people have to realize that.
Everybody references the recording of Sgt. Pepper's on a four track, and forgets that the Beatles weren't using a Porta One.
Yeah. The four track was probably a Scully or a Studer and it was probably a half inch four track that was aligned every minute of the day by engineers who really knew what they were doing. They treated the tape machines like we treat them here. We line them up every day. Every day an MRL is put on the machines. The entire calibration procedure is gone through every single day. I know of big commercial studios where that isn't even done these days. People use these new Studer A 827s and they align themselves. They are supposedly auto-aligning and auto-biasing and I don't particularly trust them. To me, there's too much electronics in there to have to accomplish all that. I'd rather have an old MCI machine like we have that might be a little bit harder to handle. It might be a pain to keep calibrated all the time but the sound is certainly worth the effort.
What's an MRL?
MRL is just the term used to refer to the calibration tape, but MRL is actually the company's name, Magnetic Reference Laboratory. It's a test tone tape. Everything needs a reference. We have to know that +4 is the same for everybody. We all have these calibration tapes so that everybody is on the same page as far as their calibration.
When The Apples were here recording, Robert took some of the tapes back home with him to record more overdubs on his eight track. What'd you do?
