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How did you end up with this job?
I was in a band called Orangutang and we signed to Imago Records, which was sort of a failed major label experiment. We toured — we were big in Boston. Don Zientara did our first record, Sean [Slade] and Paul [Kolderie] mixed it. Sean and Paul produced our second record.
Classic!
When I was 22 I was wondering who was going to produce our record. We were listening to Fugazi and we were like, "We're going to Inner Ear!" [laughter] Anyway, the band broke up and the label was crappy. I knew I had to figure out what to do. I had been in a bunch of bands, but that was the best one by far that I had been in. I knew I had to figure out how to be more in control of my destiny. So, I started producing records.
How do you just start producing records?
Right out of college I worked at a place called Anything Audio, which was Dave Malekpour's pro audio business before Pro Audio Design. I was a horrible, horrible employee. I didn't sell anything! [laughter] One day I just stopped going to work, but I worked there long enough to know how to put a studio together from the vendor's perspective. I worked on a few projects brokering studio gear. I'd taken a couple of audio classes in college — I was always interested in recording. When we were making records I was always very interested in the process. When the band I was in after Orangutang, Jocobono decided to do a record in Boston, we did it at a studio called New Alliance. Do you know Mudrock [Andrew "Mudrock" Murdock]? It was his studio and Billy [O'Malley, the singer from Jocobono] helped him out with building some stuff. He handed us the keys and said to come in when no one was around and finish our record. Billy and I would go in at 2 a.m. and wait for people to leave. We'd drink a bunch of vodka and then figure things out.
You could sit there for hours trying to figure out how to get a headphone sound. [laughter]
Yeah. Andrew helped us out a lot. He was a mentor. He put the studio together himself and he knew how to do everything. By the time that was finished I felt like I could make a record — even though we did everything wrong! [laughter] I started working at New Alliance as an engineer. Andrew made a Godsmack record, and he went out to L.A. and started doing the heavy-duty thing out there. He still owned half of the business, but his partner helped run things. I was the engineer there for a while. Then I left and Andrew Schneider [Tape Op #89] took over engineering at New Alliance. I started playing drums for Blue Man Group. After playing in Blue Man Group for a while and being in Boston and my bands drying up, I figured that I wanted to move to New York. I told the guys that had founded the show that I could help them make a record. They had made a couple of attempts to make records before and it hadn't worked out. I came to New York and I helped them do a couple of projects. One was directing sound, designing things — they liked it and said, "Okay, you're going to move to New York next week and you are going to produce the record." I packed my bags and was there the next week. We built the original studio at Third Street to make the first record, Audio. That's when I finally got Dave Malekpour back — I bought the gear from him. [laughter]
It all comes around!
I called Carl Plaster, the drum master, to come down from Boston and help tune the drums — there are so many drums! Andrew Schneider from New Alliance engineered the record. It was the first time the founders of the show focused on music and recording — really concentrated for that period of time. When it was over I became the Music Director. And from there on out, because there was a studio there was need — more material for the shows, we needed to record songs for the commercials, we needed sound design. When I got Pro Tools, Blue Man flew me to L.A. so that Mudrock could teach me how to use it. I worked on Pro Tools for two years and then hired an intern, Matt Werden, from Berklee. Immediately he knew way more than I did! And now he has so much experience engineering and mixing such a wide variety of things here that he has fast become one of the best and most versatile engineers I've worked with. I'm lucky to have the engineering staff that's here — these guys are great. We were on top of each other in the old space — the composers, the different recording projects — Blue Man is always doing so many things. At the other facility right now, an engineer is working on translating the "How to Be a Megastar Tour 2.0" into Korean. She already did it in French. I've got a guy making an opera song on the mezzanine [upstairs]. It's amazing. I'm so psyched to have a facility that's working.
Could you run a tie line to the room up above us?
We could probably go down to the basement and then come back up here. The long-term plan is to put the SSL up there and use that as a mix room — also we would track on the SSL from that room also. This has always been my favorite studio. I recorded bands here a few years ago. Anytime we needed a piano I would do it here. If we were overbooked at the old place, we'd buy time over here. It's really close to the Third Street space, so for the Orlando show [at the Universal Orlando Resort] we trained the musicians over here. It's a great vibe in here — really old school.
How long have you had the building?
We've only been in here for a month or so. We really just moved in last Monday.
Upstairs I saw three editing stations in a row. There are another two studio spaces set up down the hall from that...
Yep. Jeff Turlik and Chris Dyas have Pro Tools composition rooms upstairs.
The scope is bigger than anyone would imagine, just the amount of work that has to be done.
There are things for gigs. Because there are ten Blue Man shows all over the world, there are different needs for different places. We have a show that opened in Tokyo in December and that show needed full translation — voice-overs in Japanese and there were new pieces. There was a new video piece that went to Tokyo that needed sound design and music. We do a gig where we play with an orchestra in Japan, so we need a demo of it — every kind of detail.
There are a lot of unusual instruments here, like the PVC-tuned percussion things...
Now we have an upstairs room dedicated to the weird things. Chris Wink, one of the founders of Blue Man — that's his playroom. He gets to go and play the PVC and the cimbalom — the gigantic Hungarian dulcimer-thing. There's a shop in Brooklyn that's making two new instruments that Chris has [envisioned]. The Tubulum, 4-inch PVC pipe that has a deep, rich tone with reeds. The Drumulum is a new design — it will be built just for that room upstairs. It's eight tubes that collect around two floor toms. You play the toms and you record the mics at the end of the tubes. You get a drum sound, but it's making a note depicted by the length of the tube. But it's not a live instrument — because every note is recorded and every mic is on. You have to mute the mics for the notes you're not using. It's an interesting thing about Chris, Matt [Goldman] and Phil [Stanton] — the Blue Man founders — it might be a lot of work to get to this one precious thing, but it's a unique thing.
You've got to take that path to get there.
Live they're really impossible. They're microphonic instruments. They basically amplify all of the sound that's around them. You've got three of these instruments. Each instrument has four mics on it — behind them there's four drummers playing as hard as they can. A guy I knew from Boston who was my band's first tour manager and live sound guy, Ross Humphrey, was the first guy to manage to get the instruments to sing out without feeding back. There was a small period of time when live sound was in my jurisdiction and I knew I had to leave it to the professionals. [laughter]
What work do you have left to do on this place?
Today we were wiring up so that we can track Blue Man instruments in the upstairs room. They're bringing all the new instruments in next week that I mentioned. So, that's got to be ready for tracking. It's a temp situation until we move the mixing studio. We literally just today put some more foam up in one of the booths to make it a little more dead.
For a voice-over booth?
Yeah, it was a pretty live booth. I imagine they did a lot of vocals out in that main room when this was a music studio. They probably had a lot of instruments back there.
I like cutting the music vocals out in a room and having more of a halo around it, but when you're doing the voice-over...
It's got to be dead, totally dead. So we're filling the room with foam. It's great because we've got another booth and an iso-booth that's upstairs also.
It's looks like it's all totally live in that booth.
The whole thing is pretty elaborate. We ran out of money. I'm selling gear to pay back for some of the studio purchase.
In order to get the gear?
In order to get the gear for all this great stuff, they really wanted to get rid of everything. There was no money for it. I had to promise to sell (of the stuff that was here) a big enough of chunk for a third of what we paid for the gear.
The corporation's not going to let you just keep piling it up? [laughter]
